500 kV line repairs

Interesting video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tzga6qAaBA
(Embedding disabled, so just the link)

The Future...

Not sure if this really is a joke or not...and now from our sponsors...


New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users' Ears

...trouble is, I'm partially responsible for this in a small way....don't say I didn't warn you!

Formal Methods for Children...

London 2012 Mascots

Wenlock and Mandeville....the Daily Mash has the best report so far:

THE MASCOT NIGHTMARES BEGIN

MILLIONS of children are waking up this morning drenched in sweat and urine following the unveiling of the London 2012 Olympic mascots. They smell of whisky and feast on tongues Wenlock and Mandeville were greeted with a chorus of blood-curdling screams as onlookers trampled each other in a desperate bid to escape. The best bit however of this article is the description of said Wenlock and Mandeville: "What we've got here is two giant, damaged teeth, each with a massive, psychotic eye and razor sharp claws. And the blue one seems to be using bright, friendly colours to draw attention to his genital area. "So these things - designed specifically for children - are basically lobster-clawed pervert monsters that remind them of the dentist. Bravo."

Artificial Life...

"First artifical life?", here's the news from J Craig Venter Laboratories:

FIRST SELF-REPLICATING SYNTHETIC BACTERIAL CELL

...
Now, this scientific team headed by Drs. Craig Venter, Hamilton Smith and Clyde Hutchison have achieved the final step in their quest to create the first synthetic bacterial cell. In a publication in Science magazine, Daniel Gibson, Ph.D. and a team of 23 additional researchers outline the steps to synthesize a 1.08 million base pair Mycoplasma mycoides genome, constructed from four bottles of chemicals that make up DNA. This synthetic genome has been "booted up" in a cell to create the first cell controlled completely by a synthetic genome.
...

NB: Above summary truncated for space reasons (see original)

And the news from the BBC:

'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists
By Victoria Gill, Science reporter, BBC News

Scientists in the US have succeeded in developing the first living cell to be controlled entirely by synthetic DNA. The researchers constructed a bacterium's "genetic software" and transplanted it into a host cell. The resulting microbe then looked and behaved like the species "dictated" by the synthetic DNA.

and the reference in Science:

Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome

20 May 2010 DOI: 10.1126/science.1190719

Daniel G. Gibson, John I. Glass, Carole Lartigue, Vladimir N. Noskov, Ray-Yuan Chuang, Mikkel A. Algire, Gwynedd A. Benders, Michael G. Montague, Li Ma, Monzia M. Moodie, Chuck Merryman, Sanjay Vashee, Radha Krishnakumar, Nacyra Assad- Garcia, Cynthia Andrews-Pfannkoch, Evgeniya A. Denisova, Lei Young, Zhi-Qing Qi, Thomas H. Segall-Shapiro, Christopher H. Calvey, Prashanth P. Parmar, Clyde A. Hutchison III, Hamilton O. Smith, J. Craig Venter

BBC World Service radio has a very good interview with Dr.Venter (Wikipedia entry here). Unfortunately this hasn't really stopped the accompanying hysteria. BBC World Service's Newshour ( 14h05, 21 May 2010 UK Time: link - which may work in the future ) has a superb interview with Prof Steve Jones, Dept. of Generics, UCL which discusses what has actually happened in clear, precise, scientific terms in a way that is readily understandable to the general public.

However, for most media outlets, Newsbiscuit has a rather more accurate take on the reporting of this and regrettably anything related to science usually:

Journalists create world’s first artificial news story


Journalists in the UK have succeeded in creating the world’s first synthetic news story about artificial DNA.The hacks developed the outline of a normal piece of reporting about a tentative, abstruse scientific discovery, and transplanted into it some organic tripe about an unprecedented scientific breakthrough which will change the world and possibly wipe out all human life

Frighteningly Newsbiscuit's report probably has more accurate, scientific comment than most mainstream media.

Usenet...RIP

Admittedly it has been years since using Usenet, but back in '92 it really was quite something - many many wonderful groups such as alt.lang.ml and the official (I was part of that!) comp.lang.ml ...

Now Duke is shutting down its Usenet server...

A Piece of Internet History

Duke to shut Usenet server, home to the first electronic newsgroups

By Cara Bonnett

Monday, May 17, 2010

Durham, NC -- This week marks the end of an era for one of the earliest pieces of Internet history, which got its start at Duke more than 30 years ago.
On May 20, Duke will shut down its Usenet server, which provides access to a worldwide electronic discussion network of newsgroups started in 1979 by two Duke graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis.

Free Software and a Movie

This is impressive - an "free/open source" produced movie -



all produced using Blender - read more at the Sintel pages. Move over Pixar!

Happy Birthday

Been nearly a month since the last post...anyway, here are some birthday wishes for a piece of "blue-sky" research which almost accidentally became one of the most ubiquitous technologies we know*

• The first laser
  Charles H. Townes
  from A Century of Nature: Twenty-One Discoveries that Changed Science and the World
  Laura Garwin and Tim Lincoln, editors
• Happy 50th birthday to the laser (CNN)

*manager, accountants and lawyers take note!

Paxman, Plaid Cymru, Arian, yr Economi, yr Etholiad,...a ble mae Llundain?

Yr Etholiad ym Mhridain 2010... Paxman a Phlaid Cymru (a = versws, yn bosib?)



Plaid Cymru 1 - 0 Paxman

Beauty at the LHC

Somehow this is so much cooler than writing specs in Alloy*...from El Reg, that bastion of scientific journalism and hats off the the scientists at LHC:

Beauty with antimatter bottom' created out of pure energy
By Lewis Page • 23rd April 2010 13:41 GMT

Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle punisher ever assembled by the human race, say that experiments there are going well. In particular, they have managed to create out of pure energy a thing which they describe as a "beauty" featuring an antimatter bottom.

Comes complete with the "Standard El Reg Disclaimer on Scientific Reporting" - on the otherhand El Reg does report science far better than nearly every other magazine and newspaper - electronic or paper based...

STANDARD REG SCIENCE QUALITY WARNING: The chance that we are following this correctly is roughly equivalent to that of a man with no arms throwing a handful of jelly through a falling doughnut at fifty yards without touching the sides

Anyway, here's the link to the LHC Press Releases which contains this:

21 April 2010: First reconstructed Beauty Particle

LHCb has reconstructed its first Beauty Particle! You can see below a computer view of this event in two projections (images on the left hand side). The Beauty Particle (called B+) is composed of an anti-quark b (that has a very short lifetime of 1.5 thousandth of a nanosecond!) and a quark u. It is produced by the collision of two very high energy protons from the LHC at a location marked as "Primary vertex", together with many other particles (shown in black). The B+ decays after travelling about 2mm into two particles (called J/ψ and K+) at a place marked "B decay vertex". The J/ψ particle decays in turn immediately into two long lived particles called μ+ and μ-. The μ+ , μ- and K+ are traversing the LHCb detector where the tracking system is used to reconstruct their trajectories with such a very high precision, that it is clear they do not come from the primary vertex. The fact that the reconstructed tracks do not cross exactly in two points reflects experimental precision of computer reconstruction. The real particle tracks originate at the two vertices. The images on the right hand side show the same event when the tracks from the "Primary vertex" are forced to come from the "Primary vertex".

(C)2010 LHC

*I happen to like Alloy as a specification language and tool ... probably one of the best of the bunch!

UK Election 2010

Now it gets interesting: Election 2010: Lib Dem policies targeted by rivals

with the Liberal Democrats actually showing around 30% of the popular vote and in some polls even in first place. However, in the UK's electoral system neither the head of state nor the upper house are voted for. Then there's the lower house which works on a first past the post system which produces a very skewed result - primarily because the the vote is for a constituency rather than a party; and the winning party then rearranges the constituency boundaries to its favour.

So, what happens if the Liberal Democrats win 30% of the vote, Conservatives 30% and Labour 30% with 10% going to Plaid Cymru, SNP and the other parties? According to the BBC's vote calculator the UK gets this:

Party, Popular Vote, Seats in Government, %age of seats
Labour 30% 315 seats (~48.5% of seats)
Conservative 29.9% 206 seats (~31.5% of seats)
LibDem 30% 100 seats (~15% of seats)
Other 10% 29 seats (~4% of seats)

*NB: figures are +/- 0.5%

We Own Your Soul

The dangers of not reading terms and conditions:

GameStation: "We own your soul"
Author: Joe Martin
Published: 15th April 2010

In a bid to prove that nobody reads the T&Cs of an online sale, GameStation added a new clause of their own...GameStation has today revealed that it legally owns the souls of thousands of customers, thanks to a clause it secretly added to the online terms and conditions for the official GameStation website.


The "Immortal Soul Clause" was added as part of an attempt to highlight how few customers read the terms and conditions of an online sale. GameStation claims that 88 percent of customers did not read the clause, which gives legal ownership of the customer's soul over to the UK-based games retailer.

Interesting not because they wrote such a clause - though I'm not sure of its legality: both Richard Dawkins and the Catholic Church would have something to say about its precise details, but rather the fact that we habitually agree to terms and conditions of software, eg: Windows 7, Windows XP without understanding the ramifications upon our personal privacy and rights.

Graph cohomology

Graph cohomology. Just a link for future reference (and a reminder to do a search), though this paper> looks interesting, especially the embedding graphs in Rn...

Facebook --- warning...

And the Wondermark permalinks

• http://wondermark.com/608/ 
• http://wondermark.com/603/

Finally, pornography in the original internet...

http://wondermark.com/610/     --- Morse code if you're wondering.

Pixels

Clever little movie this - quite like the 2001 touch at the very end.


PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. - Independent web videos.