Current Scotch: Glenfiddich Solera Reserve 15 yr

Very good basic scotch. Hints of vanilla, heather, and citrus.
http://world.glenfiddich.com/enjoy/range/whisky_range/solera_res.html

Cosmic Reality Check

The probes findings have provided a few salient new notions about the nature of cosmic reality. For starters, the universe is 13.7 billion years old. Unlike previous figures, this is not a rough estimate; the margin of error is about 1 percent. In addition, the universe is flat. Forget all that mind-boggling space-time-is-curved stuff. Euclid was right all along. And the space-time pancake will expand infinitely. Theres no such thing as an end to this particular universe.Now heres the really wacky part: Everything were made of or can measure - from atoms to energy - is only 4 percent of the whole shebang. The rest is dark matter (about 23 percent) and, best of all, dark energy (73 percent).Although it has been overlooked amid the recent military ruckus, the Wilkinson probe has given the 21st century a brand-new cosmology. Such intellectual upgrades nearly always begin by debunking humans in some obscure but potent way. The Copernican revolution revealed that Earth was not the center of the cosmos. Newtonian physics proved that the planets move according to lifeless clockwork rules instead of majestic divine will. Einsteinian relativity showed us that the cosmos lacks absolute values; it all depends on how things are measured, by whom, and under what circumstances.The new cosmology is very much of that order. Everything we can see or touch, everything material and physical, is mere fat in the cosmic milk. Everything we thought was important is a tiny fraction of whats really going on.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/view.html?pg=4?tw=wn_tophead_4

New StrongBad Halloween Cartoon

http://www.homestarrunner.com/ween03.html

Enterprise Survives Mach 5

For StarTrek fans we tested the USS Enterprise in our super-orbital expansion tube - X2. A scale model was placed in the test section and the facility used to generate a high speed gas flow of around 6.6 km/s. This was passed over the Enterprise for a duration of approximately 100 microseconds. We perform similar tests on other models investigating dissociation and ionisation processes which occur during atmospheric re-entry.
http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/lp/lasdiag/enterp.shtml

The Problem With Abundance

What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?They are all problems caused by abundance in a world more attuned to scarcity. By achieving the goal of abundance, technology renders the natural checks and balances of scarcity obsolete.The automobile made it possible for individuals to travel 100 kilometres in an hour. The result is that roads and parking must potentially accommodate everyone driving downtown from an area approximately 200 Km in diameter. The speed of travel reduces the constraints of distance. When we unthinkingly increase the speed at which we can travel, we increase the distance we travel without thinking.The human body was designed to survive on scarcity, and it has served us well over the past 50,000-plus years. On those rare occasions when food was abundant it was stored as fat in advance of future scarcity. Today we are surrounded by an excess of food and the body continues to follow a proven survival strategy ? it stores energy in fat for lean days which no longer arrive.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20031007.gtdejageroct7/BNStory/Technology/

Serious CME Today

The Sun today unleashed what appears to be the third most powerful flare in recorded history, a storm of charged particles that could hit Earth mid-day Wednesday with more effect than any since 1989, when an entire Canadian province had its power knocked out.Depending on the storms magnetic orientation, it could set off a dramatic display of colorful northern lights well into mid-latitudes of the United States and Europe.Meanwhile, satellite operators and power grid managers are preparing to endure a potentially damaging event. And astronauts aboard the International Space Station have taken cover from heavier radiation sent out by the flare. They are not expected to be in any serious danger.Kicked up at 6 a.m. EST (1100 UT) today, the major solar outburst comes on the heels of four other flares late last week and over the weekend. All were considered fairly severe, but the latest eruption makes the others seem like solar sneezes.Todays blast is classified as an X17, where X denotes a major flare and larger numbers are stronger. That compares to two flare-ups over the weekend that were rated less than X2."The flare today may be the third strongest X-flare on record," said Paal Brekke, deputy project scientist for the SOHO spacecraft, which first spotted the event.A slightly stronger flare on April 2, 2001 was not pointed at Earth. Todays storm is headed directly at us and could generate fantastic colorful lights in the atmosphere, known as aurora. The storm associated with the flare is called a coronal mass ejection, an expanding bubble of charged particles that race outward.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/28/1854214&mode=thread&tid=134&tid=160

Oldest Artwork Found

The human images were found in 2001 by Pietro Gaietto on an expedition through the Borzonasca district of Italy. He claims the rock has been sculpted into faces that look in opposite directions; one is bearded with what Gaietto calls an "expressive face". If this is genuine, the artist would have been an extinct human species that died out about 150,000 years ago.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3197402.stm

Ultimate MAME Box

A few years ago I had this sudden desire to start collecting the arcade games I remember from my childhood in the 80s. Im not completely certain why this notion suddenly took hold of me seemingly out of the blue. Maybe it was the nearly mint Pac-Man machine I kept walking by at the Bistro at Sweet Briar College where I work. It wasnt getting a lot of play there in the late nineties where it had lived a fairly sheltered existance for nearly 20 years.To some extent Im certain I had the sudden realization that it might be possible to actually own an arcade game now. I was older and had an income higher than I did when I was ten years old and had to think twice about spending a whole quarter in such a fleeting manner. As a child in the 80s the thought of owning an actual arcade game was somewhat akin to the likelihood that I could take a ride on the space shuttle just by asking nicely. This was a time when the height of excitement was a gradeschool friend having a birthday party that included a set number of FREE tokens for the gameroom at the local Chuck E. Cheese knockoff. The choices and spending power in that couple of hours was overwhelming.Maybe it was the fact that I grew up immersed in computers and did play a lot games on the Atari 2600, my Commodore 64 or a friends ColecoVision. This was the era when finding a console version that came close to the real game was a challenge that made the genuine arcades a luxury for their graphical prowess if not the big screen and the neat lighted marquees. There was a certain ambience to an 80s gameroom filled with noisy arcades that added a lot to the experience.
http://sparhawk.sbc.edu/mame/

RIAA Sequentially Repeating Edisons Mistakes

After watching the RIAAs public Dance of Death closely for only about a year, everything they do is so predictable that Im beginning to wonder if they even have any control over their own destiny. For some inexplicable reason, they seem compelled to follow through until the final scene, perhaps unaware that theres been a rewrite in the ending over the last 90 years.While suggested reading is the series I did earlier on Thomas Edison, here is a synopsis of how Edisons approach to running an entertainment industry so closely parallels what the RIAA is trying to do. After all, the goal is the same -- to maintain a monopoly.
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2003/mistakes.html

Why We Sleep

In a finding that backs up motherly advice to get a good nights sleep, scientists have found that peaceful slumber apparently restores memories that were lost during a hectic day.Its not just a matter of physical recharge. Researchers say sleep can rescue memories in a biological process of storing and consolidating them deep in the brains complex circuitry.The finding is one of several conclusions made in a pair of studies that appear in Thursdays issue of the journal Nature that look at how sleep affects the memory-recording processes, and perhaps safeguards them.
http://www.rednova.com/news/stories/2/2003/10/08/story006.html

How Does My iPod Wheel Work?

Contrary to what you may have read they do not work by pressure. They work by using a principle called coupling capacitance. The touchwheel and buttons contain two layers of electrodes. The top layer is composed of vertical electrode strips, and the bottom has horizontal strips. These two layers form the coupling. An integrated circuit underneath them measures the capacitance from each of the horizontal electrodes to each of the vertical ones.
http://www.ipodlounge.com/faqs_more.php?id=1410_0_10_0_C

Ever Want To Know What The Useless Keys Are For?

In some cases oddball keys were put on the PC keyboard (or to be more precise, included in the ASCII character set, most of which found its way onto the PC keyboard) because the developers figured theyd come in handy for something, and on the whole they have--programmers and developers have been able find a use for nearly every key on the keyboard, even if that use isnt obvious to the general computing public. Witness the tilde <~>, which, whatever use it may have as a diacritical mark in some languages, now can mean "home directory" or "text omitted," among other things.
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mscrolllock.html

Being Smart Isnt Always Smart

Being smart isnt always successful in the evolutionary race. Swiss researchers wondered why, if intelligence is such an asset, we havent evolved to the point where everyone is super smart. Since this hasnt happened, there must be some good reasons to be dumb. Scottish researchers have discovered that it pays to be smart if youre poor, but if youre rich, it doesnt make any difference.
http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=3186

Finally .... New StrongBad Email

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail86.html

Bigfoot Proof?

The creatures are real enough to those who say they have spotted them - but most scientists remain sceptical about their existence. Investigator Jimmy Chilcutt of the Conroe Police Department in Texas, who specialises in finger and footprints, has said he believes he is certain around six footprints found - claimed to have been made by Bigfoot - are genuine. He added that one 42 cm (18-inch) print found in Washington in 1987 has convinced him. "The unique thing about this cast is that it has dermal ridges - and the flow and texture matches the ridge flow texture of one from California," Mr Chilcutt told BBC World Services Discovery programme. "The ridges are about twice as thick as in a human being."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3152468.stm

Negroponte: Tough Times? Go Crazy

The MIT labs are facing funding problems. But their backers don?t want another set of traditional research labs, Negroponte insists. "They don?t need us to do those things," he said. "They need us to be on the lunatic fringe -- a very interesting place to be, but you can go over the edge very quickly. It?s a very delicate line." He described Media Lab as a corporate "demilitarized zone" where companies that often compete in the real world can instead collaborate on ideas and intuitions. But the effervescent research labs, known for producing wearable computers, whole menageries of robots, digitized shoes and funky computerized musical instruments -- including a hypercello specially built for musician Yo-Yo Ma -- definitely are facing tough times, he said.
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,60643,00.html