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Month: August 2004
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Yoz as in Yoram
A link to Computer Jobs in Israel in this feed by a “yoz” piqued my curiosity. Google assured me that this must be infamous british Perl hacker Yoz Graham, whose real name is Yoram.
Lots of good stuff on his blog, BTW: an Excel rant (Dad: But that’s ridiculous. I don’t believe you. Everyone knows how to use Excel. You’ve got a bloody computer science degree. How can you not know how to use Excel?
), a rave about the new star in CPAN, IO::All (And it is marvellous: if Perl is the Swiss Army Chainsaw then this is the new light saber attachment – can’t do anything you couldn’t do previously but it slices through most IO jobs in one or two lines, from file slurping (one line, obviously) to creating a forking server (er, two lines). This Perl.com piece would be a great introduction if another burst of coding from Ingy hadn’t rendered it half-obsolete a mere three days later.
), and this fine Wired parody:
Pausing only to spill some famous London ale down the front of his XXL-sized rugby shirt, Barry outlined some key points in the rapidly-evolving lexicon of British desire. “So what you do, right, is you spot a nice tart over by the bar and you think, lovely, I’ll have a bit of that. And you tip her the wink, you know? And then, if she looks back at you, she’s gagging for it.”
“Just like Bluetooth signalling,” I commented as I tapped hurried notes into my Zaurus. “Ingenious!”
And now for some links to random science stories that caught my attention.
First, there’s the involved saga of a dietary neurotoxin linked to Alzheimer’s: The toxin, BMAA, is generated by blue-green algae, absorbed by cycads, concentrated in the bodies of flying foxes that feed on these Cycads, and poisons the natives of Guam, who eat the bats (and the cycads) . But it gets trickier: in the humans, the toxin actually gets incorporated into proteins, so that it can be steadily released years after they left the island, inducing a neural disease similar to Parkinson’s and Alzheimer…
Early fish hit land to be better predators – basically, the idea is that early tetrapod fish were overclocking their metabolism by basking in the Sun, so they could be faster when hunt other fish.
Strong mums more likely to bear sons is a study done in Ethiopia; there’s also evidence from Animal studies, which I can’t find the link to right now. The claim is that bearing daughters is a better reproductive strategy when times are hard, because they are much more likely to produce some grandchildren, while bearing sons is a more high-risk, high-reward strategy (they have to compete more, so reproduction isn’t guaranteed, but males can potentially have many more offspring than females). Apparently, the female reproductive system adapts to conditions, so that male children are likelier if the mother is healthy and well-nourished. But as a follow-up, this study shows that even psychological factors can skew the sex-ratio, claiming that women who believe that they will live longer are more likely to bear sons.
Apparently, people are pretty good at estimating their life-expectancy.
Finally, John G. Cramer science column for Analog, The Alternate View described an experiment by Shariar S. Afshar which apparently manages to test (and disprove!) the cannonical interpretations of what exactly happens in Quantum Mechanics, both the classic Copenhagen Interpretation and the currently fashionable
Many Worlds Interpretation (link via Kathryn Cramer).
An interesting discussion of China Mieville, Fantasy Economics and Tolkien which bounces between these two blogs: start here, detour here and here, and end up back where you started for the rebuttal.
Somewhere (perhaps in the referring blog, I lost track) I found a link to an audio interview with China Mieville at The Agony Column, which also has an interview with Peter Watts, who has just come out with a sequel to Starfish and Mealstorm, which is being published in two parts. As he explains in his author’s note (quoted in the interview): …Henceforth, books by midlist authors will not receive wide distribution if they cost too much — that is, if they weigh in at more than about 110,000 words. “Behemoth is over 150,000 words long, and was almost complete by the time this policy came into effect. Hacking away a third of it was not an option (believe me, I tried)…A two-part release was the only alternative.
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, AKA Derek and Clive:
‘Are you going to go out laughing?’ asks Dudley Moore during the sessions for Derek & Clive Come Again. ‘No,’ replies Peter Cook. ‘I’m going to go out shitting myself with fear and fucking cancer that God so kindly provided. Without that, we wouldn’t have a way to die would we? Fucking good of him not to torment us with being eternally young and being able to fuck everyone – no, he gave us this great gift of fucking cancer. I wouldn’t have thought of that if I’d been creating a universe, would you? Bung in cancer? No, I’d have left that out.’
Eighteen years later, Peter Cook did go out shitting himself with fear. According to an apocryphal event in Harry Thompson’s 1997 biography, Cook’s friend Rainbow George looked into the comic genius’ eyes and told him, as his system haemorrhaged beyond recognition, that he was going to be OK and make a full recovery. Cook paused for one beat, and simply said ‘Fuck’.
(via DPH.)