tech
aardvarchaeology | March 30, 2012Junior's been through an extended period of various lighter ailments that have affected his school attendance record (but not his grades) considerably. I believe this may be partly due to his sedentary lifestyle. He's thin as a rake, like his old man, but also like his old man he's not exactly spending his free time on a rugby court. I need to take him cycling.
My wife worries about the amount of time Junior likes to spend on the computer. I think it's more a question of him not exercising rather than what he does specifically while not exercising. And I've realised that he actually does…
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2012Above-ground atomic explosions and reactor leaks during the past century have produced a pretty funny atmosphere full of exotic heavy isotopes. In radiocarbon calibration this error source is called "bomb radiocarbon". A few years ago it was suggested that a person's age might be determined through looking at the amount of various isotopes in some bodily tissue (was it the eye's lens?) and cross-referencing it with the historic data on spikes and troughs in the abundance of various isotopes.
Now the always readworthy Chris Catling tells the readers of Current Archaeology #265 (April) of…
aardvarchaeology | January 22, 2012Car question. When I turn on my windshield wipers, the energy for those two step motors comes from the battery. And it comes to the battery from the gas tank via the alternator. This means that if I drive with my wipers on, I will run out of gas sooner. But doesn't the alternator constantly attempt to charge the battery? Where is the "switch" that allows the alternator to suck less energy out of the tank when I turn off my wipers? I imagine something like a bicycle dynamo that can be either on the wheel, imposing drag, or off the wheel.
stoat | January 17, 2012
"Learn more" is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more: SOPA and PIPA are just indicators of a much broader problem. We are already seeing big media calling us names. In many jurisdictions around the world, we're seeing the development of legislation that prioritizes overly-broad copyright enforcement laws, laws promoted by power players, over the preservation of individual civil liberties. We want the Internet to be free and open, everywhere, for everyone.
Refs
* Google
* Beeb
* Wikipedia blackout forces students to copy from printed 'hardcopy websites'
aardvarchaeology | January 1, 2012The Swedish Skeptics, of whom I am the chairman, have just announced their annual awards for 2011 [a - b].
The Swedish public TV show Hjärnkontoret receives the Enlightener of the Year award,
"...for their excellent science coverage directed towards children. Hjärnkontoret has aired for 16 years and thus contributed to the upbringing of the entire current generation of students and young scientists at Swedish universities. Thanks to its welcoming format and accessible time slot on public television, Hjärnkontoret reaches out to children of all backgrounds, thus widening and democratising…
aardvarchaeology | December 17, 2011
The Dear Reader may remember that I recently reported from the hibernation grounds of the local yachting club. Here's a photograph from the same site, taken by my dad. It demonstrates why you might want to weigh the winter cover for your boat down with water tanks like everybody except this one member has.
aardvarchaeology | December 14, 2011
As an archaeologist I often need to plot coordinates on maps and plans. At every scale, really: from individual finds on the plan of an excavation trench to the distribution of something across Europe. Just dots of varying shapes and colours on various background maps. Most often, it's GPS data from field walking and metal detecting. My colleagues in contract archaeology and academe use ArcInfo for these things, but I've never had incentive or opportunity to learn to use it. Also, once you know the software, you still need a map to plot stuff on, and those are expensive. So I've been…
aardvarchaeology | November 2, 2011
Yesterday my dad had his boat lifted out of the water like he does every autumn to keep the ice from damaging it. I hadn't seen the lift they used before: it's a remote-controlled motorised thing, fast and nifty. Note the yellow control box.
This reminded me of a fairly common motif in Bronze Age rock art, the boat carrier. Boats are extremely common, and sometimes you'll find a guy lifting the boat, crew and all. I think this is probably a depiction of the Sea God. But it may also be a human lifting a wooden ship model. We have a few bronze figurines that look like they may have adorned…
aardvarchaeology | October 13, 2011Steve Jobs is dead, an unfortunate victim of cancer and quackery. I never paid him much attention while he lived. Nor did I ever care much about Apple's products. "Aha", I hear you say, "this is one of those 'PC is better than Mac' screeds". Not so. Because I have been an off-and-on Mac user since the mid 80s. But I don't care about Macs. Nor about PCs. I could go so far as to say that I'm a bit annoyed with recent versions of Windows. But it's no big deal to me. These things all work well enough.
In '84, my cousins' first Mac introduced me to the mouse and the window environment. We drew in…
aardvarchaeology | September 12, 2011
Rode a funny plane to Visby: an ATR 72-500. It's a 1997 version of a French 1988 design with two propellers whose six blades curve rearwards. The rear undercarriage sits in bulky pods on the fuselage, right below the wings. Makes the plane look like it's got a beer gut. And its cargo bay is right behind the cockpit! Pleasant ride though.
stoat | September 4, 2011I've just tried to turn on registration, to deal with spam. It is probably doomed. Please try to leave a comment on this post letting me know how it worked. If it just totally f*cks up, then email me (wmconnolley (at) gmail.com). If just-post fails, try previewing first.
OK, it is totally f*ck*d. Thanks for your emails. I'll turn it all off now. My apologies.
I seem to have left approve-all-comments turned on. I'm going to leave that, for at least a bit.
Note that according to the settings, any "authenticated" commenter doesn't need approving.
[Most amusing failure email: "For some reason it…
stoat | July 17, 2011There is an excellent article from Light Blue Touchpaper about securing information (just in case you don't get the delicate joke: Cambridge's colour is light blue, as opposed to Oxford's true blue; and of course "light the blue touch paper" is on the instructions of fireworks).
Part of it is just the obvious problems - people no changing their default PINs - and part more disturbing - the lack of ethics amongst a section of journalism, and more importantly the corruption of the police. And I could rant about how rubbish banks etc. are about their ridiculous phone "security". But the more…
aardvarchaeology | July 17, 2011Neal Stephenson is an unusually inventive writer of historical and futuristic fiction. I have previously reviewed his 2008 novel Anathem here. And somehow I have now come to think of one of his weirdest ideas: the subterranean orgy computer in The Diamond Age.
This 1995 book bursts with far-out motifs and ideas, to the extent that I can't say I really understood everything very well when reading it back then. I found the ending confusing and dissatisfying, possibly because I wasn't entirely clued in to what happened or what it meant. But I did get this about the subterranean Drummer…
aardvarchaeology | May 30, 2011Here's just short note to tell you, Dear Reader, that the Great Firewall of China is fucking annoying. I am unable to access Twitter, Facebook, any Blogspot blog and often most of Google's services including Gmail.
Meanwhile, the Chinese populace is so closely keyed in to what's happening in the West that girls in remote Qingtian are wearing exactly the same ultrashort denim shorts as their contemporaries in Stockholm this spring. But I guess the Great Firewall is intended to keep domestic dissidents from reaching an audience as much as or more than to keep the Chinese from learning about the…
stoat | March 17, 2011ScienceBlogs say they've upgraded their Rackspace package in a hyper-whizzy way, which is supposed to have fixed all the problems with IP blocking.
If you're still having trouble, err, and can't read this message, err... ahem, or perhaps you have a friend, yes that's right, or maybe you can read this from work or not from home, anyway, please mail the failing IP to webmaster@scienceblogs.com.
Apologies for all the inconvenience. When/if I ever work out exactly what was going wrong, I'll let you know.
[Update: I'm pleased to say that I at least can now read / write SB from home.]
Refs
* My…
aardvarchaeology | March 9, 2011Dear Bloggers,
We have been forwarding reports from bloggers and users to our hosting service, Rackspace, over the past few days. After monitoring our traffic and these reports, Rackspace has determined that ScienceBlogs is experiencing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and has blocked a range of IP addresses involved. While this means that ScienceBlogs is now loading correctly for most users, the attack is still ongoing and other users may still encounter sporadic loading problems, or be blocked entirely if they were incorrectly included in these preventative measures.
We're…
aardvarchaeology | February 10, 2011Here's something Leif Häggström sent me on Facebook, originally apparently written by one Abby Smith.
Have you noticed that you are only seeing updates in your newsfeed from the same people lately? Have you also noticed that when you post things like status messages, photos and links, the same circle of people are commenting and everyone else seems to be ignoring you?
Don't worry, everyone still loves you and nobody has intentionally blocked you. The problem is that a large chunk of your friend/fan list can't see anything you post and here's why:
The "New Facebook" has a newsfeed setting…
aardvarchaeology | January 18, 2011
The current issue of Vanity Fair (#606, February 2011) has an interesting piece on the collaboration between Wikileaks, the Guardian and other old media. On page 110 we're told that Wikileaks is "partly hosted on a server in Sweden that is lodged in a former nuclear bunker drilled deep inside the White Mountains". This confused me for a moment, since there is no mountain range of that name in Sweden. Then I realised the journalist's error and laughed.
The server plant alluded to in the article is indeed in an area known as Vita bergen, "the white mountains". But it's not a mountain range. It…
aardvarchaeology | December 20, 2010
I'm eager to start reading more e-books. I rarely re-read books (except for work), and my friends rarely borrow paper ones from me, so I have little reason to hang on to paper books. E-books would be just the thing. But the prices aren't any good. I either have to pay more for an e-book than what it costs me to order a paperback from England, or I can get it for free through illegal file sharing. It's amazingly easy: just try googling a book's title, your preferred file format and the name of a file sharing service like Hotfile or Megaupload.
I am well aware that I wouldn't be supporting the…
aardvarchaeology | November 6, 2010
Last week I rode some planes: Stockholm - Brussels - East Midlands Airport - Brussels - Stockholm - Oslo - Stockholm. Two of the engines involved were kind of fun because of their small size. The movements of EU bureaucrats has created a market for short plane hops anchored in Brussels, and so the cheapest way for the rest of us to move about by air in Western Europe is often to join the briefcase carriers and change planes in Belgium. These were the machines:
Avro RJ 100 (British, production start 1992, being an upgraded version of a 1983 model)
Embraer ERJ 135 (French Brazilian,…