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gregladen | June 19, 2010A former Rwandan army chief of staff, Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, has been shot in South Africa and taken to hospital in a critical condition.
His wife told the BBC the couple had been returning from shopping when a gunman opened fire on the car.
She said it was an assassination attempt as there had been no demand for money or goods.
Lt Gen Nyamwasa, an outspoken critic of President Paul Kagame, fled from Kigali in February.
Details.
gregladen | June 19, 2010
In theory, zebras use their stripes in combination with their herding and flight behavior to confuse predators. The confusion probably makes it harder for the predator (e.g., a lion) to be able to avoid a damaging kick because the stripes make it difficult to tell where one zebra starts and the other ends.
Here is a dramatization of how this might work. Or not.
And then there's this:
I couldn't watch it to the end. How do things turn out?
stoat | June 19, 2010A post about "Engineering the Software for Understanding Climate Change" by Steve M. Easterbrook and Timbo "Not the Dark Lord" Johns (thanks Eli). For the sake of a pic to make things more interesting, here is one:
It is their fig 2, except I've annotated it a bit. Can you tell where? Yes that's right, I added the red bits. I've circled vn4.5, as that was the version I mostly used (a big step up from vn4.0, which was horrible. Anecdote:it was portablised Cray Fortran, which had automatic arrays, but real fortran didn't. So there was an auto-generated C wrapper around each subroutine passed…
grrlscientist | June 19, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The most recent issue of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People); "Scientia Pro Publica 32: Biology Overload" was published by Philip at his blog, The Dichotomous Trekkie 2.0. This was Philip's first ever blog carnival, and he did an excellent job! So go there, leave some warm fuzzies for Philip, then read the linked essays and be sure to leave your comments on at least one of those essays, either telling those authors what they did well, or making…
gregladen | June 18, 2010Despite protestations to the contrary, The Vatican, the Church, and various and sundry governments and prosecutors and state attorneys, with the press watching and rarely complaining, continuously believe and occasionally assert, and always, always act as thought it is true, that the church has a special status that allows it to circumvent the law, and where necessary, blame victims.
From a BBC piece in reference to charges being brought against yet another Catholic priest:
The Roman Catholic Church in Italy has admitted that about 100 cases of paedophile priests have been reported to…
stoat | June 18, 2010Via mt I find
too much of our scientific code base lacks solid numerical software engineering foundations. That potential weakness puts the correctness and performance of code at risk when major renovation of the code is required, such as the disruptive effect of multicore nodes, or very large degrees of parallelism on upcoming supercomputers [1]
The only code I knew even vaguely well was HadCM3. It wasn't amateurish, though it was written largely by "software amateurs". In the present state of the world, this is inevitable and bad (I'm sure I've said this before). However, the quote above is…
cortex | June 18, 2010Over at the Barnes and Noble Review, I have a short review of Cognitive Surplus, the new book by Clay Shirky:
Cognitive Surplus, the new book by internet guru Clay Shirky, begins with a brilliant analogy. He starts with a description of London in the 1720s, when the city was in the midst of a gin binge. A flood of new arrivals from the countryside meant the metropolis was crowded, filthy, and violent. As a result, people sought out the anesthesia of alcohol as they tried to collectively forget the early days of the Industrial Revolution.
For Shirky, the gin craze of 18th-century London is an…
gregladen | June 18, 2010Truer words have never been spoken. In an effort to improve, I've taken a few sample photos, including some of the same plant that got me in trouble the first time. They are below the fold, because some will load slowly:
These are images that are 500 pixels wide to fit on this narrow blog.
The first two are just for fun: I stood on the dock and tracked a swallow that was flying circles around me. I shot about 15, and these are the two that one can see a bird in. The images have been sharpened and otherwise enhanced:
(I should note, this is a very windy day, so all the flowers are…
grrlscientist | June 18, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The most recent issue of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People); "Scientia Pro Publica 32: Biology Overload" was published by Philip at his blog, The Dichotomous Trekkie 2.0. This was Philip's first ever blog carnival, and he did an excellent job! So go there, leave some warm fuzzies for Philip, then read the linked essays and be sure to leave your comments on at least one of those essays, either telling those authors what they did well, or making…
mspringer | June 18, 2010On a web forum I frequent, a person asked if it would be possible to extract energy from the Earth's magnetic field. He was told no - static magnetic fields can't transfer energy. For all practical purposes this is true, but in fact we also know that the earth's magnetic field isn't static. It changes from day to day and from year to year - and even second to second. The changes are small over small timescales, but in fact the magnetic poles do drift around and the solar wind does perturb the fields and so forth.
Wikipedia gives a reference saying that typical local variations in the magnetic…
cwilcox | June 17, 2010You simply must read these. Though, I wouldn't recommend reading them at work. Of if you're underage. These are definitely not PG-13 rated blog posts.
From the ever wonderful Scicurious: Friday Weird Science: a tote for your scrote, a recepticle for your testicle
and the fantastic Jason Goldman: A Cup for your Pup: Friday Weird Science Companion Post
(and, if you're in the mood to laugh hysterically, I recommend you take a look at Sci's Twitter Feed... you'll see what I mean)
gregladen | June 17, 2010And not everyone lived through it. Here's my weather blog entry, for what it's worth.
We skirted behind the front, and arrived at the intact cabin (as far as we can tell, it's dark out!) safe and sound.
Wadena was flattened, and two people were killed at two other locations in the state.
esiegel | June 17, 2010"We are all captives of the pictures in our head -- our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists." -Walter Lippmann
For a long time, humans have wondered about life on other worlds, and about worlds around other stars. Until the 1990s, this was mostly speculation and hope. But shortly thereafter, some clues started rolling in. In 1992, the first planet outside of our Solar System was detected, and three years later, the first planet around a solar-like star was found.
Only, something was awfully weird about this planet. You see, in our Solar System, Mercury…
gregladen | June 17, 2010Who said: 'Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.'
Click here to find out and read a whole bunch of other famous programming quotes.
While you're geeking out, have a look at The Top 10 Ways to get screwed by the "C" programming language
... and finally, A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages