gregladen | November 23, 2007
I have had this experience. I've traveled literally hundreds of kilometers by foot together with Efe (Pygmy) hunters in the Ituri Forest. We see very few animals. The few we do see are attacked, killed, and eaten. Well, a lot of them actually get away, but that is the idea.
But I've also traveled many kilometers (not as many) alone. I would see many animals, and yes, they would run (or climb or whatever) away, but not as desperately. They knew I was not really one of the hunters, although I tried my best to look tough and hungry.
Of course, when I use the word "animal" here I mean…
gregladen | November 23, 2007Bored with your computer? No need to be. As you probably know, there is a whole culture, perhaps even cult, surrounding tricking out your computer. There is even a journal devoted to the topic (the name of which escapes me at the moment). My favorite example (from that journal) is the "PC in a Fridge" concept, where you build your PC inside a refrigerator or freezer. This lets you "clock up" your processor speed considerably, and keep beer handy at the same time.
Or, you could do a number of other things, such as....
First, get one of these:
Then get one of these...
This is the Optimus…
gregladen | November 23, 2007Your are typing some text into your FIrefox 2.0 Browser, and you spell something terribly wrong. Like this:
I am so glad I upgreaded to Firefox 2.0, because it has a built in spell checker.
You see the error where you meant to type "upgraded." So you right click on it to pick the correct spelling, and accidentally hit the "Add to Dictionary" menu choice, which is annoyingly placed right next to the correctly spelled word.
From now on, you can never be sure if your text will be correct. Bummer.
There is a way to fix this.
In Linux, go to a terminal window.
Change the directory to where…
gregladen | November 23, 2007
Oh, wait, don't stop don't stop! Please tell us about the religion bit!
gregladen | November 22, 2007This is the seventh in a series of reposts from gregladen.com on global warming.
This installment is about sea level rise and fall, in the past. Sea level change that results from the formation and melting of glaciers not only has an enormous impact on the physical nature of the landscape, but it also would not have gone unnoticed by people living ever pretty far from the sea!
With large amounts of the world's water trapped in glaciers (mainly continental glaciers), the sea level drops. When that ice melts, the sea level rises.
As you know, the earth is covered by two kinds of surface:…
gregladen | November 22, 2007Hey, wanna know some cool stuff you can do in a Linux terminal?
First, three keyboard tricks you probably already know.
The up arrow is a "history" key. After you've entered some commands, you can retrieve them with the up arrow. Most terminals will store the last several hundred commands. You can, obviously, edit these (like if the first time you entered the command it did not work because you typed it wrong).
The TAB is an auto completion key.
Many terminals do NOT use ctrl-c for copy and ctrl-v for paste, for historical reasons. But if you go to Preferences --> Shortcuts or in some…
gregladen | November 22, 2007
[hat tip: Geekology]
I've actually done this. It was part of our shop class in Jr. High. We didn't make pencil holders, but rather, some kind of candle holder thingie.
My friend Karl and I supplied the bottles. Hedrick's quarts. (four for a dollar!)
gregladen | November 22, 2007Natural Selection is the key creative force in evolution. Natural selection, together with specific histories of populations (species) and adaptations, is responsible for the design of organisms. Most people have some idea of what Natural Selection is. However, it is easy to make conceptual errors when thinking about this important force of nature. One way to improve how we think about a concept like this is to carefully exam its formal definition.
In this post, we will do the following:
Discuss historical and contextual aspects of the term "Natural Selection" in order to make clear…
gregladen | November 21, 2007This is the sixth in a series of reposts from gregladen.com on global warming.
In the last post in this series I talked about two aspects of large scale climate change: Milankovitch orbital geometry and the cycles of glaciation this effect causes, and the role of plate tectonics and related changes in altering sea and air currents, which in turn determine a great deal about climate change as well.
Now I want to have a quick look at a single glacial cycle (the most recent one of many), and one way in which the cycle is observed in the ancient record, identified, measured, and described.
As…
gregladen | November 21, 2007The male and female human brains are different. Some of the better documented differences are similar to differences seen in other mammals. They are hard to find, very small, and may or may not be of great significance. Obviously, some are very important because they probably relate to such things as the ability ... or lack thereof ... to bear offspring. But this is hardly ever considered in the parodies we see of these differences.
[Repost from Gregladen.com]
You have all seen the sometimes funny, sometimes not cartoon depictions of these differences, for example this one:
Obviously,…
gregladen | November 21, 2007Last night, before going to bed, I was reading the latest story on King Research's survey of IT professionals regarding their stand on Vista. Ninety percent of the 961 surveyed claim to have serious concerns about migration to Vista, and over half have no plans to make the migration at all. I started to think, as I dozed off, that we are observing the process of niche differentiation happing at an accelerated pace facilitated, in part, by cross-platform software.. But boy, was I sleepy. I had the strangest dream....
.... "The concerns about Vista specified by participants were…
gregladen | November 21, 2007A form field is one of those boxes on a web page (or elsewhere) that you can fill in with information. Your web browser may try to "auto complete" an entry that you are trying to type in.
For example, when I try to type my name into a box that that I've visited before, when I type the first letter ... "G" ... my browser suggests several different options, remembering the various pseudonyms I use, giving me a list like this:
Greg Laden
Grog Stevenson
Greeb Miller
and so on.
That's convenient, but it can be annoying when things go wrong...
For instance, for a long time, when I started to…
gregladen | November 20, 2007My week ends in about five minutes when I pack for imminent departure to California. I'm being whisked out there (pun intended) to prepare the Thanksgiving gravy for an eccentric couple living in a cabin in a remote mountain area on Thanksgiving. And these people are a bit strange. They recently sent me a picture of the turkey they plan on putting to death and eating. (His name is John Smith.) This should be interesting.
But have no fear, the internet is everywhere. I shall continue to post more than enough for you to consume between courses of cranberry sauce and apple pie, leftovers,…