A great physics quote courtesy of New Scientist:
Despite the fact that the SQUID supports a macroscopically measurable current, it may in fact be a small cat
Perhaps a huge SQUID of a chaotic nature could be called a Cthulhu ?
Author Archives: Chris Samuel
RIP Kurt Vonnegut – 1922 to 2007
So it goes.. 🙁
American literary idol Kurt Vonnegut, best known for such classic novels as Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle, has died on Tuesday in Manhattan at age 84, The New York Times has reported. Longtime family friend, Morgan Entrekin, who reported Vonnegut’s death, said the writer had suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, the newspaper reported.
Man Arrested for Feeding Homeless People
The ABC is reporting that a man has been arrested in Orlando, Florida, for feeding “30 unidentified persons food from a large pot utilising a ladle” (according to the arrest warrant).
The Orlando law, which is supported by local business owners who say the homeless drive away customers, has been challenged in court by civil rights groups. It allows charities to feed more than 25 people at a time within 3.2 kilometres of the Orlando City Hall only if they have a special permit. They are able to receive two permits a year.
Police mounted a surveillance operation to catch him and even took a sample of the food to use as evidence against him in court.
The sort of prejudice against homeless people that seems to have lead to this law getting passed is pretty typical, there was an interesting story in New Scientist recently talking about the neural side of prejudice, and a surprising way of breaking the freezing out of such people in the mind:
Psychologist Susan Fiske from Princeton University and colleagues got students to view photos of individuals from a range of social groups, while using functional MRI to monitor activity in their medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a brain region known to light up in response to socially significant stimuli. The researchers were shocked to discover that photos of people belonging to “extreme” out-groups, such as drug addicts, stimulated no activity in this region at all, suggesting that the viewers considered them to be less than human. “It is just what you see with homeless people or beggars in the street,” says Fiske, “people treat them like piles of garbage.” In new experiments, however, she was able to reverse this response. After replicating the earlier results, the researchers asked simple, personal questions about the people in the pictures, such as, “What kind of vegetable do you think this beggar would like?” Just one such question was enough to significantly raise activity in the mPFC. “The question has the effect of making the person back into a person,” says Fiske, “and the prejudiced response is much weaker.”
You will need to be a subscriber to New Scientist to be able to read the whole thing online.
VPAC publishes RFP’s for a new Linux cluster and additional storage
Well I’m happy to say that today I got the Request For Proposals (RFPs) out of the door for the proposed replacement of VPACs ageing Linux cluster Brecca (180 cores of 2.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 Xeon) and a significant amount of additional storage. Needless to say the new cluster must run Linux!
Please see the announcement on the VPAC systems blog for more information and copies of the RFPs.
This has been keeping my very busy recently and so I’m looking forward to a nice quiet break over Easter!
SCO Move Against Groklaw
If you thought SCO couldn’t stoop any lower, think again. They have filed a motion in SCO versus IBM saying they wish to depose PJ, the creator of Groklaw.
I can say this: SCO in its wisdom has just guaranteed that the judges in SCO v. IBM and SCO v. Novell will have to read Groklaw. So, welcome Judge Kimball. Welcome, Judge Wells. We’ve enjoyed very much learning about the law by watching you at work. SCO told you something that isn’t true. No one tried to serve me that I knew about. No one informed me of any deposition date. That is true. It doesn’t feel so nice to be smeared like this, I can tell you that, and to have to pay a lawyer to deal with this harassment. I view it as such, as a kind of SLAPP suit, a vendetta to pay me back for blowing the whistle, and to shut Groklaw up. SCO wants to put a pin on a map and point to it and say, “Here’s PJ.” Then someone drops by and shoots me, I suppose. I certainly have nothing to tell them that is relevant to this litigation.
Basically SCO have gotten so fed up with PJ and the various other Groklaw contributors poking huge holes in the farcical SCO law suit that they have convinced themselves that the site is a front for IBM and that PJ doesn’t exist and now want to prove it. Sadly for them their fear-induced paranoia can’t change fact into fiction and so, as usual, they’ll loose eventually but they want to make life as painful as possible for anyone who dares to laugh at the emperors new clothes.
I do hope that this motion doesn’t succeed, but I feel that SCO will find it rather painful for their reality if it does.
Did the Australian Government Commit a War Crime ?
In 1995 the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was written into Australian Law, and section 268.76 of the Australian Criminal Code 1995 defines “War crime – denying a fair trial“, where:
(1) A person (the perpetrator) commits an offence if: (a) the perpetrator deprives one or more persons of a fair and regular trial by denying to the person any of the judicial guarantees referred to in paragraph (b); and (b) the judicial guarantees are those defined in articles 84, 99 and 105 of the Third Geneva Convention and articles 66 and 71 of the Fourth Geneva Convention; and (c) the person or persons are protected under one or more of the Geneva Conventions or under Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions; and (d) the perpetrator knows of, or is reckless as to, the factual circumstances that establish that the person or persons are so protected; and (e) the perpetrator’s conduct takes place in the context of, and is associated with, an international armed conflict.
The penalty for such a war crime is 10 years imprisonment.
In November 2006 a panel of lawyers (( The accompanying press release says “The Opinion has been signed by The Hon Alastair Nicholson AO RFD QC (Former Judge Advocate General of the ADF, Honorary Professorial Fellow, Department of Criminology, University of Melbourne); Peter Vickery QC (Special Rapporteur, International Commission of Jurists, Victoria); Professor Hilary Charlesworth (Professor of International Law and Human Rights, ANU); Professor Andrew Byrnes (Professor of International Law, Faculty of Law, UNSW); and Gavan Griffith AO QC (Solicitor-General of Australia 1984 – 97); and Professor Tim McCormack (Australian Red Cross Professor of International Humanitarian Law, University of Melbourne).” )) wrote a 30 page legal opinion (there is also a four page summary) titled “David Hicks – Military Commissions Act 2006 – Compliance with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the Hamdan Decision and Australian Law” on the first and second military tribunals created by the US government and concluded:
Further, the Replacement Military Commission will contravene the standards for a fair trial under Australian law provided for in the Australian Criminal Code, and counselling or urging a trial to take place before any such Military Commission with the requisite knowledge and intention would constitute a war crime under Division 268 of the Code.
This opinion was delivered by the Law Council of Australia to the Attorney General, Philip Ruddock, to inform him of the nature of the crime that was being committed by the government. To date no action to rectify this appears to have been taken.
Thanks to Tim for the pointer to the letter to the editor of The Age newspaper from one of the reports authors, the Hon Alastair Nicholson AO RFD QC, former Chief Justice of the Family Court of Australia and former Judge Advocate General of the Australian Defence Force.
EMI+Apple to sell “premium” tracks without DRM
A very interesting development courtesy of the BBC:
EMI said every song in its catalogue will be available in the “premium” format. It said the tracks without locks will cost more and be of higher quality than those it offers now.
These DRM free tracks will cost 99 pence on iTunes, but apparently that’s only for single tracks, you will be able to buy an entire album DRM free for the same cost as one with DRM. Steve Jobs said:
The right thing to do is to tear down walls that precluded interoperability by going DRM-free and that starts here today.
Solomon Islands Earthquake Activity
According to the USGS maps for the Solomons and PNG there have been 22 quakes greater than mag 4.8 in the 15 hours or so since the mag 8.0, here’s a quick graph of magnitude versus time after the first quake (click for a larger version)..
This graph was brought to you by cat, awk, tac and OpenOffice.org Calc and Draw.
A Nice Cup of Tea
Lapsang Souchong, the tea equivalent of a fine single malt whisky.
Lovely..
XmdS – eXtensible multi-dimensional Simulator
XmdS looks like an interesting package:
XMDS is a code generator that integrates equations. You write them down in human readable form in an XML file, and it goes away and writes and compiles a C++ program that integrates those equations as fast as it can possibly be done in your architecture.
Personally I thought it might be drawing a long bow to call XML “human readable”, but some of the examples aren’t too bad at all.