No not THAT Hall and Oates!!
(And just to be safe, it wasn't that Police either...)
Mash down here for the strange but true story of Hall and Oates giving whole new meaning to "Maneater".
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Friday, December 14, 2012
"Jedi Knight" now 7th most popular religion in UK
First it was Darth Vader joining the Lutheran Church in Iceland...
...and now the "ancient religion" of the Jedi is the seventh most practiced faith in the United Kingdom! Nearly 180,000 people in Great Britain and Wales put their religion as "Jedi Knight" during that country's most recent census.
The warrior-monk creed from the Star Wars saga came in after Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism and Buddhism.
Ehhhhh, Star Wars ubergeek though I be, this would be going too far in my book.
But then again, Star Wars mixing it up with religious practices can have some pretty fun results...
(Please forgive me Jeff, but I've been wanting to use that pic for a long long time... :-P )
First photo of DNA in all its twisted glory!
Nearly sixty years ago, James Watson and Francis Crick figured out what DNA - that mega-long molecule containing the blueprints of organic life - looked like. All they had at the time was deduction through observation and x-ray crystallography (don't worry, it took me awhile to learn how that worked, too!) to figure out the double-helix arrangement. But they had no way of actually seeing the darned thing.
Now for the first time, scientists have been able to visually image DNA using a novel technique with electron microscopy and a teeny tiny "bed of nails". Hit the above link for more about how Enzo di Fabrizio and his fellow boffins at Italian Institute of Technology pulled it off.
As for the first real picture of DNA, behold:
WOW! It's the double-helix determined by Watson and Crick... but look at how tightly packed that thing is!! Doesn't look as spacious as those colorful twisty ladders we all saw in our high school biology labs, does it?
Amazing, that that much information about the design of you, me, every person on the planet and all other known forms of life on Earth, takes up so tiny an amount of space within the nucleus of a cell. I heard years ago that if you took all the DNA of your body and strung the individual molecules end-on-end, that it would reach from the Earth to the Sun.
Looking at that picture, I'm finally believing it.
Now for the first time, scientists have been able to visually image DNA using a novel technique with electron microscopy and a teeny tiny "bed of nails". Hit the above link for more about how Enzo di Fabrizio and his fellow boffins at Italian Institute of Technology pulled it off.
As for the first real picture of DNA, behold:
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| Photo credit: Enzo di Fabrizio/Italian Institute of Technology |
Amazing, that that much information about the design of you, me, every person on the planet and all other known forms of life on Earth, takes up so tiny an amount of space within the nucleus of a cell. I heard years ago that if you took all the DNA of your body and strung the individual molecules end-on-end, that it would reach from the Earth to the Sun.
Looking at that picture, I'm finally believing it.
The high school student who unleashed the very first computer virus
It wouldn't be at all surprising if trillions of dollars have been spent in the name of combating computer viruses, to say nothing of the countless hours of lost productivity and technical havoc that those malevolent digital prions have wrought.
And it all started thirty years ago this year, with a high school student's innocent practical joke.
The Register has a fascinating in-depth interview with Rich Skrenta: the creator of Elk Cloner: now recognized as the first-ever computer virus. Skrenta, then fifteen years old in 1982, got a little more interested in the Apple II than might have been healthy for anyone, but it started benignly enough: writing his own text-based adventures and learning advanced coding. Then inspired by a string of "hysterically funny" pranks with disks he would loan to friends, he came up with Elk Cloner. It was his attempt to alter a floppy disk's contents without actually touching it. Elk Cloner would run in the background of the Apple II and "hop" to floppy after floppy...
It soon got beyond Skrenta's control.
And it all started thirty years ago this year, with a high school student's innocent practical joke.
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| Rich Skrenta in 1989: Blame HIM for having to buy all that anti-virus software. |
The Register has a fascinating in-depth interview with Rich Skrenta: the creator of Elk Cloner: now recognized as the first-ever computer virus. Skrenta, then fifteen years old in 1982, got a little more interested in the Apple II than might have been healthy for anyone, but it started benignly enough: writing his own text-based adventures and learning advanced coding. Then inspired by a string of "hysterically funny" pranks with disks he would loan to friends, he came up with Elk Cloner. It was his attempt to alter a floppy disk's contents without actually touching it. Elk Cloner would run in the background of the Apple II and "hop" to floppy after floppy...
It soon got beyond Skrenta's control.
The boot sector virus was written for Apple II systems, the dominant home computers of the time, and infected floppy discs.It's hard not to admire the young Skrenta's technical prowess, in a perverse sort of fashion. He inadvertently became forever a part of technological history, after all!If an Apple II booted from an infected floppy disk, Elk Cloner became resident in the computer’s memory. Uninfected discs inserted into the same computer were given a dose of the malware just as soon as a user keyed in the command catalog for a list of files.
Infected computers would display a short poem, also written by Skrenta, on every fiftieth boot from an infected disk:
Elk Cloner: The program with a personality
It will get on all your disks It will infiltrate your chips Yes it's Cloner!
It will stick to you like glue It will modify ram too Send in the Cloner!Elk Cloner, which played other, more subtle tricks every five boots, caused no real harm but managed to spread widely. Computer viruses had been created before, but Skrenta’s prank app was the first to spread in the wild, outside the computer system or network on which it was created.
The worst school massacre in American history
38 children and six adults killed. Several dozen wounded. The assailant killed himself.
That was the toll from the Bath Township Consolidated School Massacre in Bath Township, Michigan. On May 18, 1927...
You can read more about it here.
Incidentally, not a single firearm was used in the worst school massacre in the nation's history.
It is not what is in the hand so much as what is in the heart.
Thoughts and prayers going out to the people of Newtown, Connecticut this afternoon.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
"Far over the Misty Mountains rise..."
I held off on listening to anything from Howard Shore's score for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey until my grubby lil' paws had hold of the soundtrack CD when it was released on Tuesday. I went for the collector's edition, which has extra tracks, lots of nifty pictures and a bunch of liner notes about Shore's return to the music of Middle-Earth.
So all the cool kids knew about this song already (it was released on the Intertubes a few weeks ago) but the track I've playing like crazy over and over again from this score is "Song of the Lonely Mountain", performed by Neil Finn.
This is what'll presumably be playing when the end credits roll on the first part of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy.
"Beautiful" doesn't begin to do it justice. Now I loved the songs that played over the credits of each of The Lord of the Rings films (I've remarked a few times over the years - maybe a bit seriously - that the perfect song to have played at my eventual funeral should be "Into the West" by Annie Lennox from The Return of the King). But "Song of the Lonely Mountain" more than any other that has been produced for Jackson's Tolkien-ish movies... this seems even more appropriate in tone for the story at hand. It's exactly what I imagined Bilbo was feeling, when I first read The Hobbit many years ago, when he listened to the dwarves singing about heading off to reclaim their rightful kingdom from terrible Smaug. Hearing their words, finding one's self listing off to far away mountains and forests and treasures... and adventure.
No wonder Bilbo went running off into the wild. Heck, after listening to a song like this, I would too! If there were any more wild to run off into... sigh.
And the rest of the soundtrack is awesome too! "Blunt the Knives" is the sort of song that I would sing if I were drunk. Which I'm not a drinking man anyway. But If I were I would sing "Blunt the Knives". Anyhoo...
So looking forward to seeing this movie!! That won't come until Saturday. In the meantime, this album is gonna be spinnin' away like mad on my stereo!
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Seeing red
It's "POYN-set-EE-uh" dammit!! NOT "POYN-set-uh".
Dammit don't you people recognize a syllable when you see one?!?!?
Dammit don't you people recognize a syllable when you see one?!?!?
