Microsoft WorldWide Telescope in Action

Witness the power of the fully operational Microsoft WorldWide Telescope, as Roy Gould and Curtis Wong walks the audience at TED through this stunning software effort. Some experts say that the WorldWide Telescope, which puts together terabytes of information from telescopes all over the world to make a seamless rendition of the entire known Universe, will change the way we—the normal humans—understand the cosmos. After seeing it in action, I agree:

[From Microsoft WorldWide Telescope; Gizmodo]

The Gruesome Origins of 5 Popular Fairy Tales

Over at cracked.com they’re discussing the origins of 5 popular fairy tales – weird as hell; the original authors of these tales were not happy people!

The Gruesome Origins of 5 Popular Fairy Tales

New Comments Policy

In order to avoid having random trolling on this site and promote intelligent discussions and conversation I am implementing initial comment moderation on this blog.  It’s all too easy for unpleasant people to troll around randomly and be abusive for no good reason other than they clearly have issues and they can.

I had a run in with a bunch of real idiots recently who have mastered the art of character assassination and revolting verbal abuse where it really wasn’t called for; I have subsequently deleted their trash. 

Please understand this is not any form of censorship – I find that concept abhorrent so feel free to have your say and leave your differing opinion and let’s debate differing opinions;  abuse and stupidity will no longer be tolerated though, there are chat rooms and places where stupid trolls can congregate and this is not one of them.

Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope

Several days ago we wrote about something extraordinary that Robert Scoble said was coming from Microsoft and it was going to be announced on February 27th. When he saw a live demo of it at a recent visit to Redmond, he said it was enough to make his eyes well up with tears. TechCrunch is now speculating that this extraordinary something from Microsoft is a WorldWide Telescope. The desktop software would be available for Windows users and would allow them, as Michael Arrington says, to “pan around the nighttime sky and zoom as far in to any one area as the data will allow.  Microsoft is said to be tapping the Hubble Telescope as well as ten or so earthbound telescopes around the world for data. When you find an area you like, you can switch to a number of different views such as infrared and non-visible light.”

This would be wonderful for people who are interested in astronomy but don’t necessarily have the time or the access to the real thing.  I will be very interested to see how this stacks up against Google Sky or other desktop software like Stellerium.

A Funny Take on Windows Vista

So, soooo bad!

U of MI Produces Strongest Laser Ever

I wonder if you can attach these to sharks?

eldavojohn writes “Weighing in at a mere 20 billion trillion watts per square centimeter and containing a measly 300 terawatts of power, the University of Michigan has broken a record with a 1.3-micron speck wide laser. It’s about two orders of magnitude higher than any other laser in the world and can perform for 30 femtoseconds once every ten seconds — some of the researchers speculate it is the most powerful laser in the universe. ‘If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory … To achieve this beam, the research team added another amplifier to the HERCULES laser system, which previously operated at 50 terawatts. HERCULES is a titanium-sapphire laser that takes up several rooms at U-M’s Center for Ultrafast Optical Science. Light fed into it bounces like a pinball off a series of mirrors and other optical elements. It gets stretched, energized, squeezed and focused along the way.’” And … cue the evil chortling.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[From U of MI Produces Strongest Laser Ever]

Zuma may take fifth wife

Top notch guy!

Barely-educated, currently on charges of corruption, prior charges of rape and his little dance number is all about bringing him his machine gun. He really must be a nice guy; it must be my ‘European vision’ clouding my judgement (according to a previous post’s comments.) Maybe he’s collecting wives – has them in little glass display cabinets with date acquired stickers on the front – or else he could well be a Mormon.

Jacob Zuma, president of the African National Congress (ANC), may take a fifth wife, just weeks after tying the knot with a fourth, a media report said on Sunday. Zuma (65) married 33-year-old Nompumelelo Ntuli, the mother of two of his children, in early January. [From Zuma may take fifth wife]

Smokin Internet and a Move

I just signed up my home internet plan today, ADSL2+ 30 Gigabytes 200-280Mb/s transfer speeds all for the paltry sum of $59 which works pays for anyway; the bandwidth is now on the express way and I’m loving it!

We are moving this week out of the apartment work is letting me use to a lovely double story newly revamped pad in a gorgeous tree lined suburb in South-East Melbourne. The house is 1 km away from C’s school so he can walk and the train station is 700m away. I can walk take a brief stroll to the station and it’s 20min sitting listening to the iPod to the city; All in all not too shabby My wife’s a genius for organising this!

No Pristine Oceans Left, New Map Shows

A new study has mapped the effects of human behavior on the world’s oceans, finding that 40 percent of the area has been strongly affected and no regions remain untouched.

No Pristine Oceans Left, New Map Shows
Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I guess this goes towards the comments on my last posting.  It isn’t easy to build a big fence around a marine environment and protect the bits on the inside.  Marine environments are complex inter-dependant ecosystems; anyone who’s owned a marine tank will testify to how hard it is to keep everything running happily.

World’s Largest Marine Reserve Declared

Halfway between Hawaii and Fiji, the California-sized ocean wilderness includes pristine reefs and eight coral atolls teeming with fish and birds.

World’s Largest Marine Reserve Declared

Now how to prevent the crap and waste from outside the marine reserve from getting in … nice to be seeing more marine preservation efforts though.

40 most Inappropriate Kiddies Book Covers

Courtesy of Cracked.Com

R200m statue of King Shaka for KwaZulu-Natal

R200m statue of King Shaka for KwaZulu-Natal: “A 106m statue of King Shaka Zulu ka Senzangakhona will be built on the banks of Thukela River north of Durban, the Weekender newspaper reported on Saturday. The statue would cost R200-million to build and was expected to be 13m higher than the Statue of Liberty in New York. KwaZulu-Natal premier Sbu Ndebele suggested that the statue would become a tourist destination like the Statue of Liberty.”

(Via Mail & Guardian Online.)

You’d think that in a country with hugely pressing issues – like crushing poverty, social inequality, outrageously low pay for teachers, the police and other basic services and massive looming infrastructure disasters with the supply of clean water and electricity – that the government [any sane person or organisation; ed. 19/02] wouldn’t waste money of stuff like this.

‘Friendly’ Worms Could Spread Software Fixes

‘Friendly’ Worms Could Spread Software Fixes: “An anonymous reader writes ‘Microsoft researchers are working out the perfect strategies for worms to spread through networks. Their goal is to distribute software patches and other friendly information via virus, reducing load on servers. This raises the prospect of worm races — deploying a whitehat worm to spread a fix faster than a new attacking worm can reach vulnerable machines.’

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just what we need! As if things like automatic Windows updates weren’t intrusive or inherently unpredictable enough Microsoft thinks friendly viruses are the way to patch systems.

Govt to speed up land redistribution

Govt to speed up land redistribution: “The government intends acquiring five million hectares of land next year in an effort to have 30% of agricultural land in the hands of black farmers by 2014, Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Lulu Xingwana said in Cape Town on Thursday. Currently, black farmers own 4,7% of farm land, she told a press briefing.”

(Via Mail & Guardian Online.)

Indiana Jones 4: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

The official trailer of the new Indy movie, damn I love these films!

For some reason WordPress is not allowing me to embed this video so here is the link instead
http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/indianajones.html?showVideo=1

Crouching Leopard, Hidden Vista – What’s wrong with the Penguin?

I’ve been tinkering with Linux distributions for many years, since the install hell days of Redhat 4 many years ago but I’ve never settled on Linux as a base operating system.  As time goes by and I find the inner geek demanding less and less attention I spend less time with Linux and today’s article on Download Squad entitled ‘How to enable DVD playback on uBuntu’ made me wonder why.

Most Linux distros up and running are really good; they have slick graphic effects to rival any crouching leopard or hidden vista, come with many useful out of the box tools and are generally easy to install these days … so what’s the problem?  Why would my wife (J) never ever run Linux?

At the end of the day I think it boils down to ease of use, ease of setup and what comes out of the box.  J loves the Macbook period. One minute post-install and she can play with her photos, watch a movie, connect effortlessly to the Internet, check her email and chat to friends with the built in camera.  Applications are a simple drag-and-drop-to-your-Applications-folder for her, there is no need to teach her command line apt-get or worry because she has library dependency issues that require a 400Meg download to resolve first.  She doesn’t have to hack a new system to include Microsoft codecs or run a host of command line options to enable standard DVD playback when our little boy wants to watch a movie.  Upgrades are a single click affair and she doesn’t run the risk of her entire system crashing or worse her Gnome or KDE unable to start after an upgrade leaving her with a black screen and a blinking cursor.

As I get older and the demands on my time increase I also want to be able to sit down and write a blog post or wizz up some wonderful photo effects in Photoshop without fighting to get the program or OS to where I want it to be; sitting for ages fixing dependency issues or compiling software for my hardware platform just no longer holds any appeal. 

Perhaps I’ve found other toys or outlets for the inner geek but I want my system to work reliably, look beautiful and be powerful enough for my needs.  Until linux distributions get closer to this ideal, realise people want to do more with their computers post-install than bang a spreadsheet together in OpenOffice and put the effort into working to overcome the geek requirements of linux and most users’ fear of ‘what if things go wrong?’, Linux will (in my opinion) never be a viable competitor to Microsoft or Apple.

South Park on the Mac vs PC war

Prachett on Pascal’s Wager

‘Vlad the Impaler’ sent me a comment reminding me of Prachett’s unique and fantastic take on Pascal’s Wager from his book Hogfather.  I distinctly remember finding this brilliant at the time but Prachett, like Seinfeld to a degree, is so full of amazing observations on human thought and behaviour that my brain can only hold so much and it slipped into the obscurity of short term memory.

This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, ‘Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it’s all true you’ll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn’t then you’ve lost nothing, right?’ When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, ‘We’re going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts . . .’

I am Disappointment

I’ve just finished watching “I am Legend”, a movie which has outstanding moments and great disappointments. Will Smith plays Robert Neville a military doctor who thinks he is the last man on earth after a virus wipes out most of the Earth’s population and turns the other large percentage into mindless killing machines with a high UV problem not even extra-strength sunblock can help.  A large part of the beginning story involves his relationship with his dog and how the edges of a normal human canine interaction have become a little blurred around the edges (after he is the last human as far as he knows) and the isolation is not doing nice things with his mind. That was good, a little contrived in parts, but the slipping edges of sanity was well portrayed.

The other part I thought had great potential was when Neville realised these creatures were not stupid at all and seemed organised and had the ability to do awesome things like try and trap him the way he had trapped on of their own.

Then 3 things happened which flushed the movie down the toilet.

[****** SPOILERS BELOW *********]

1. The dog dies. WTF! Ever since fracking Bambi the animal dies in almost every movie and I think it sucks. It doesn’t add pathos or emotional weight to the movie, it’s a cheap appeal to sentimentality and it really bugs me. That being said it is my personal preference that the dog or pet should be hallowed ground and untouchable by the director – the other 2 items were what actually ruined the movie for me.

2. The end scene sees the zombies once again acting like complete savages and only hint at all the earlier build-up of these creatures having mutated into something more than mindless eating machines.  Why go to the effort of building our expectations that these creatures are something more sinister than run-of-the-mill drooling biting zombies if that’s how you’re going to portray them in the finale anyway?

3. The entire story was about a medical disaster [virus gets out of hand in the human population] and then it’s like someone lets a creationist church group with red crayons run around in the script as a warning against man’s tinkering in God’s playground. It turns into this puerile mess where the lady who saves him at one point in the story is actually on a mission from God [the Christian version] and is being sent by the big-almighty to a safe colony in Vermont.  On the way the celestial-he gets her to pop round to Will’s house for the cure for humanity; then Will gets to die to save them … what a hero! BARF! VOMIT! come on!

One of the best lines I’ve read comes from John Beifuss’ crit of the movie where he says:

In the infantile prioritizing that occurs when Hollywood wants to be ‘inspirational,’ the hero’s Everyman crisis of religious faith is supposed to be as important to audiences as his struggle to save humanity from extinction.

The damn religious stuff only came like a stinky curve-ball in the last few minutes, someone thought ‘this is a story about the trials of a man in an empty apocalyptic  world … jee that sounds like Noah or a case in need of serious religious reflection let’s be sure to throw a sprinkling of God in here somewhere.’

…… blah!

An iPhoto Letter to Apple

Dear Apple (and Steve)

Love the Mac, love the OS and am really trying to love iPhoto. It’s got some great features and effects, it’s easy to us, has a very friendly layout and it interfaces well with other Mac software. That being said may I humbly ask what the hell you have against checking for duplicate photos on import? I mean every single other snippet of photo software pushed out in the last five years can and does do this meaning the poor user (that’s us) does not need to suffer the horror of having massive bloaty photo libraries full of 30 of the same pictures of little Johnny walking his dog.

Please Steve, walk down to the developers and have a little chat – you guys know how to write software; this can’t be hard.

Many thanks
Stuart