Much kudos to Pro-Test. It’s about time that the case for animal testing was put in a robust manner. Ultimately some things have to be tested in an animal model before human trials are performed. I’m all in favour of minimising the use of animals to the bare minimum but, at the present time, their use is essential for progress in the biomedical area.
Update:
BBC news story on Pro-Test rally in Oxford
Observer story on Pro-Test
Observer leader
Times Online article
Telegraph article
Astronomers using The Hubble telescope have imaged two additional bodies in the Pluto/Charon system. All 4 bodies orbit a centre of gravity that lies just above the surface of Pluto. Interestingly the orbits of Charon, P1 and P2 (as the new moons are designated) have a 12:2:3 orbital resonance. For each 12 orbits Charon completes, P2 completes 2 orbits and P1 completes 3. This implies that the moons where formed from a collision event that ejected material that later coalesced into the bodies. The gravity in the system isn’t strong enough for captured P1 & P2 to have formed the resonant orbits in the time the Solar System has been in existence. There is more info in this weeks Nature. If you don’t have access there are many other sources on the Internet. It’ll be interesting when the New Horizons mission gets to the Pluto/Charon system in July 2015.
This story is covered in this weeks Nature Podcast as well.
BBC Radio 4 will begin a 4-part dramatisation of Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods on 28th February. Should be good. The dramatisation they did of Pratchett’s Mort a few years ago was good.
See the BBC Radio 4 programme page.
Scientific American has started a podcast. The first one is available via links at their site. First impressions are good. It’s got subdued production values and gives you information without a lot of gee-whiz bells and whistles getting in the way.
The TV show CSI gets a mild ribbing as well at the end of the podcast 🙂
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Today is Darwin Day. We celebrate the life and works of one of humanities greatest thinkers on this day, the anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth in 1809. This should be a public holiday. Let’s lobby our MP’s.
Some other Darwin Day links:
Seed Magazine has a podcast that seems good. Just recently subscribed so it’s still on probation. The Nature podcast has lived up to expectations. It’s essential listening. I don’t like the New Scientist podcast. It’s too glitzy.
A guy I know, but haven’t seen for ages, arrived at my door the other day and told me his Windows laptop was displaying ads and stuff after his kid went to some site on the Internet. I was just heading into the office so couldn’t fix it. I’ve decided I’m not going to either. I don’t need that crap in my life anymore. I’ve told him to take it to a PC shop and get it fixed.
I felt bad doing that. I’m sure it’ll get easier as I do it more and more. I’m not fixing anybody else’s PC just cause I happen to know them a bit. Or even worse, because they are a friend of a friend.
Here is the best solution.
Just what we need. Another religious person with an influence over our politicians. WTF do the interpretations of 3000 year old ramblings have to do with our actions in the 21st Century. Nothing in my opinion. Humanity needs to let go of all this religious nonsense and move on. I fear it might be too late however. The world is slipping back into silly dogma. It wasn’t meant to be like this. 🙁
I’m off to read this again. That’s the kind of future we need.
If you are interested in astronomy, or just the night sky in general, check out Stellarium. Very nice.
Next week looks like it’ll be interesting for those of use interested in server virtualisation. Word on the street is that VMware will introduce a free mid tier product in the space they currently sell GSX Server in. Also it appears that NSI will be releasing a version of DoubleTake targeted towards replication of virtual servers. You can already use VMware and DoubleTake together but it’ll be good to have an easily configured and licensed product.
One of my reflex actions in the morning is to turn the radio from BBC Radio 4 over to Classic FM as soon as I hear The Today Programme presenters start to say “it’s 13 minutes to 8, and time for Thought for the day”. I don’t need to listen to 2 minutes of puerile drivel from some religious twerp at the start of the day.
A side benefit of this, in addition to the fact I don’t have to listen to Thought for the Day, which is benefit enough, is that occasionally there is a really good piece of music on Classic FM when I switch over. A few days ago they were playing one of the pieces from Dvorák’s Slavonic Dance suite [Op. 46: No. 8 in G Minor (presto)]. Excellent stuff. Available from the iTMS.
I was changing log file settings earlier and managed to completely break this site. Obviously it’s back now 🙂 This post is just to really see if I can post new entries to the reconfigured installation of WordPress.
What do you do when an octopus gets way too inquisitive about your submersible? Why turn on your thrusters of course and scare it away. Technique outlined in this video just in case you ever find yourself in this situation!
I was planning on getting my 1993 Guild BHM Signature Pro guitar rewired and having new pickups fitted as it was very noisy when you turned the volume or tone controls. So as insurance, in case it went pear-shaped, I picked up one of the current Korean made Brian May guitars (formally marketed by Burns). After ordering it I was able to clean out the pots on the Guild so that the noise problem has gone away. So I probably don’t need the new one. Having said that it’s really nice to play. If anything I like the action better than the Guild. The finger board is slicker and the frets are prouder (it is new after all). It’s much easier to do string bends on the new one. Sound wise they are almost identical. So I might keep it! And maybe sell the Guild.
I’m crap at directions. Even in a place as small as Northern Ireland! So I decided to get some electronic help and, after some research and a recommendation from a few VMware employees I was out and about with last week, bought a TomTom GO 700. I went for the 700 as it was the only one with Northern Ireland maps as standard. Actually you get all of western Europe as standard on this model. The 500 and 300 only come with the GB part of the UK as standard. It has a 2.5Gb hard disk for storage. When you plug it into a Mac via USB2 cable it mounts as a hard disk (works on Windows as well). Mine has 1.4 Gb used and just over 1Gb free.
I’ve only used it in anger around Belfast to see what it is like. Bloody marvellous is the answer! The verbal instructions are very clear. You get plenty of prior notice about turns etc., both verbally and via the map display. It is very accurate as to where you are at any time. For example, the car location marker is drawn on a roundabout as you go round said roundabout. To navigate to a destination you can enter a postcode and it’ll calculate the route you need to follow. If you miss a turning it’ll recalculate the route based on your current position. Sometimes it’ll tell you to “Turn around at the earliest opportunity” for a while then calculate a new route based on the direction you are heading. If you don’t know the postcode you can enter road names (e.g. A20) or street names.
As a test one of my work colleagues gave me a postcode that is out in the back end of nowhere in the west of Northern Ireland. This place really is in the boondocks. It is 20 odd miles from anywhere even reasonably big. We entered the postcode and set the unit to demo route mode (another nice feature) and analysed what it came up with. My colleague, who makes the trip to this place regularly, was impressed with the route taken but also with the fact that it was able to navigate to the location at all. It even had a new mini-roundabout that was added recently in a town the route passed through.
I’m well impressed with it. The fact that it mounts as a hard disk under MacOS X means it’ll be easy to drag new and updated maps on to it as they are released as well. It also works as a Bluetooth handsfree kit for phones put I haven’t set that up. You can also subscribe to a service that will update you to traffic info and stuff via GPRS phones. I haven’t set that up either. I just want to get directions! It has multiple voices and multiple languages, both for the verbal instructions and for the menus. You can buy a John Cleese (it is actually him) voice as well. The interface is very easy to use as well. It comes with a suction cup wind screen mounting kit that is pretty unobtrusive.
I like it. More info and demos at the TomTom site.
Jenny Wilson did a version of List of Demands by Saul Wilson with Robyn Carlsson. The video is not longer availabe.
The first single, Silent Shout, of their forthcoming album can be previewed online at the Rabid Records MP3 site. That uses an interesting method to stop people copying the tracks. It plays them in about 30 second segments that fade out at the end. Nice idea.
You can also buy Jenny Wilson’s album from that site.
Lots of people are raving about the José Gonzàles song that is featured in the Sony Bravia advertisement that’s on TV and in cinemas. The song in question is called Heartbeats. His version is good, I bought it myself from iTMS. But lets not forget the original version by the inestimable Swedish duo, The Knife. It can be purchased on iTMS as well.