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gregladen | March 13, 2009A recent report has revealed that France's national police force has saved an estimated 50 million euros since 2004 by adopting open source software and migrating a portion of the organization's workstations to Ubuntu Linux. They plan to roll out the Linux distro to all 90,000 of their workstations by 2015.
ars
gregladen | March 13, 2009I live in a state where the governer, in order to maintain his moral and ethical high ground, must refuse any stimulus package money whatsoever.
I also live in a state that just accepted piles of stimulus money to start up a number of shovel-ready projects. If my calculations are correct, this money will tranlate into about 3,000 over the next six months to a year. (Very very rough guess.)
Mark Sanford is the Republican governor of South Carolina. That governor almost got away with misusing the stimulus funds. But ....
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gregladen | March 13, 2009Today, the last witness for the Franken campaign made it through the weather and testified. Franken's side rested! The special side case of the Nauen petition "count my votes" appeared to finish. However finishing does still seem to be a problem, because apparently the rebuttals and cross-examinations of rebuttals can go on a long time. Arguments on provisionally accepted evidence are still waiting to be heard. So if we are lucky, we will have a one hour close by each side tomorrow after remaining business gets finished --- that is if remaining business is finished.
Details
And don't forget…
gregladen | March 13, 2009You probably know by now that the travelling exhibit featuring the bones o Al-288-1, known to most as "Lucy," has been drawing small crowds, and the museums that are hosting it are losing money. Why?
I have guess.
You may remember that when the news first got around that Lucy would be on tour, there was a fair amount of discussion regarding the possibility that this was a bad idea. The fossils are delicate, and there is a good argument that they should not be moved for this purpose.
I may be wrong about this, but I think the palaeoanthropology community is sort of divided on this issue,…
gregladen | March 13, 2009Rachel Maddow on the Thwarted Dirty Bomb Attack that didn't happen. And the one that did. (As an extension of the Palin/McCain incitement of violence.)
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I hope she gets off.
gregladen | March 13, 2009Dr. Erik Klemetti is
... a geologist who spends most of his professional time thinking about magma. Looking for info on the latest eruption? You've found the place.
You can't have too many geologists. Welcome Eric!
ERUPTIONS
gregladen | March 13, 2009An interesting example of natural selection. If these organisms were humans, someone would be asking "Has evolution stopped for these jellyfish, I mean, humans?" And the answer is no.
gregladen | March 13, 2009The crew of the international space station had a close call with a spent satellite engine in Earth orbit Thursday, forcing the crew to take shelter aboard its return capsule before the object passed harmlessly, NASA said.
cnn
Well, as George Carlin would say, "That was not a near miss. It was a near hit."
gregladen | March 13, 2009Coleman, that is.
Stephanie Zvan kicks Norm Coleman's ass all the way from here to Bognor Regis.
Read it here.
gregladen | March 13, 2009A 24-year-old ski lift operator who fatally shot the general manager of the Eldora ski area was determined to kill co-workers who weren't Christian, according to court records obtained Thursday.
Ed's got this covered.
gregladen | March 13, 2009March 12, 2009 (Computerworld) WASHINGTON -- While new federal CIO Vivek Kundra gave a speech here this morning on his vision for the U.S. government's use of technology, the FBI conducted a search of the District of Columbia's IT offices -- where Kundra worked until last week -- and arrested an employee and another person who works for an outsourcing vendor, according to published reports.
There was no indication that Kundra was connected in any way to the FBI's raid,
details here
gregladen | March 12, 2009And his name is Charley Brown. Chapter one of a novel set in bustling Pembina North Dakota is here, at Quiche Moraine.
gregladen | March 12, 2009Yes, it is the Mendel's Garden Frankenpeople edition, at Biofortified. This is a web carnival all about genetics and stuff. Enjoy it here.
gregladen | March 12, 2009A colleague and grad student of mine, Rob, just sent me the following question, slightly edited here:
A student in my intro class asked me a good question the other day to which I had no answer. When did smiling cease to be a threat gesture? I have a couple of ideas. One is that with reduced canines, smiling became a way to say "look, I have small canines, I am not a threat to you." The other is that smiling is based more on a "fear-grin" than a threat. Under this idea, smiling might have been a way of showing deference to others. If everyone shows deference, it would be egalitarian, until…
gregladen | March 12, 2009The FBI "raided" the Washington DC (city) office of Vivek Kundra, who is just finishing his term as Chief of Technology for the district. Kundra had been asked to to to the Federal Government to be the federal chief information officer.
Later in the day, the FBI agents arrested two people, a DC worker, Yusef Acar, and an employee of Advanced Integrated Technologies Corp, Sushil Bansal.
Reasons for the raid and the arrest are not currently known but should be soon because the two arrested men will be in court momentarily.
source: Faux News.
gregladen | March 12, 2009There is new information from an older idea (from about 2000) by Paul Sherman and colleagues. The idea underlying this research is simple: Symptoms of illnesses may be adaptive. Indeed, this may be true to the extent that we should not call certain things illnesses. Like "morning sickness."
Broadly speaking, there are two different kinds of reasons that a woman may experience nausea in association with pregnancy. 1) This pregnancy thing is a complicated mess with all kinds of hormonal (and other) things going on, so you puke; or 2) a woman who is pregnant feels nauseous for good…
gregladen | March 12, 2009The phrase "genomic imprinting" has come to refer the turning off of a gene (a particular instance of a gene on a particular chromosome duplicated across the cells in a body) so that the gene is not expressed at all, with the turning off of the gene not caused in the body in question, but rather, during the previous generation by a process happening in the soma of one of the parents. A maternally imprinted gene is passed on to junior, but will not be expressed in junior. a paternally imprinted gene is passed on to junior, but will not be expressed in junior. Typically (as far as we know) a…
gregladen | March 12, 2009Federal agents this morning are searching the Judiciary Square office of Washington, D.C.'s Chief Technology Officer.
The search is part of "an ongoing investigation," said a spokeswoman for the FBI's D.C. Field Office, Lindsay Gotwin, said. She declined to comment further.
The outgoing Chief Technology Officer, Vivek Kundra, was appointed last week Chief Information Officer by the Obama administration. His last day at the city government office was February 4, a spokeswoman for D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, Leslie Kershaw, said.
"We know the FBI is over there but that's all we know," said a…
cortex | March 12, 2009A reader asks:
What's the hardest question you've gotten about the new book? Is there one you were totally unprepared to answer?
This is a slightly embarrassing confession, but one of the most difficult questions I've been asked is also one of the most obvious. It goes something like this:
"What practical knowledge have we gained by looking at decision-making in the brain that we didn't already have, either through introspection or behavioral studies?"
When I was first asked this question, I think I muttered something about the virtue of curiosity, breaking open the black box and fulfilling…