If Noah’s Ark has been sitting on a mountain somewhere in the Middle East for a few millennia, a few more months of waiting are a small price to pay, at least for Randall Price.
Resources are tight everywhere, but these idiots are spending theirs looking for evidence of a bronze-age flood myth. There's no hope for some people. I hear that, when they're done in Turkey, they're off to Scandinavia to look for Valhalla.
On Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — who is believed to be linked to al Qaeda — attempted to ignite an explosive device made of pentaerythritol on a plane as it neared Detroit, and promptly had his ass kicked for him by fellow passengers.
Quick! The horse has bolted, we must shut the stable door!
There's been an unsuccessful attack on an aeroplane; let's make everyone's lives just a little less pleasant by further restricting their rights and activities when they fly. Thanks, guys. Next time, how about not letting the terrorist on the flight in the first place?
Oh yes. Got to get this, I think. Anyone else?
Rumours of an announcement at the end of January regarding Apple's Tablet abound today, helped along by CultOfMac's multiple posts on the subject. Nothing from Apple, of course, so it's all speculation, but it looks like reasonable, sensible, realistic speculation rather than fanciful, bizarre, other-worldly speculation. Or possibly not.
Dr Williams told the Telegraph: "The trouble with a lot of government initiatives about faith is that they assume it is a problem, it's an eccentricity, it's practised by oddities, foreigners and minorities."
The problem with a lot of religious people is that they assume "faith" is the solution whereas, in actual fact, the blind acceptance of unproven hypotheses (or "faith", as Dr Williams calls it) is a source of considerable conflict and suffering.
There are an awful lot of people arguing against climate change, and they make a lot of apparently sound arguments. They're bound to take the recent email leaks from the Climate Research Unit of UEA as evidence that the scientists are just making stuff up to justify their grants (the Saudis have already made comments to this end - link) but it's all rubbish. Global warming science may have it's critics and detractors, but the basic science is sound.
What are the arguments advanced by sceptics? You can find a list of them here along with the counter-arguments. If you're still not convinced that global warming is real and man-made, more evidence will follow.
So far we've had one international source (the IPCC) and one UK resource (the Science Museum). Now it is time for a US resource, and they don't get much bigger or more impressive than NASA. There website contains a lot of information, well presented. It's worth a look.
If you haven't yet been convinced, even after reviewing data from all these sources, I'll be back later (or tomorrow) with more information (although, to be honest, it probably won't be new, it'll just be presented differently) and new places to find it. Sooner or later we should be able to find a source that appeals.
If you'd like a taste of the evidence, here's a chunk from NASA (source page):
Certain facts about Earths climate are not in dispute:
- The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases was demonstrated in the mid-19th century. Their ability to affect the transfer of infrared energy through the atmosphere is the scientific basis of many JPL-designed instruments, such as AIRS. Increased levels of greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response.
- Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth’s climate responds to changes in solar output, in the Earth’s orbit, and in greenhouse gas levels. They also show that in the past, large changes in climate have happened very quickly, geologically-speaking: in tens of years, not in millions or even thousands.
There's a load more like that, and it gets progressively more depressing the more you dig into it. Have fun.
Ok, so if you haven't yet managed to sift through the mountains of evidence from the IPCC site (see yesterday's post), you can find a rather less technical explanation of the evidence for climate change here at the website of the Science Museum (London). If you think that climate change is a conspiracy consisting of scientists paid to lie to support a secret Government agenda to force us to comply with their Machiavellian plans, ask yourself why so many scientists would falsify data, concoct nonsense theories and risk ridicule and disgrace (when the conspiracy was eventually, and unavoidably, exposed) rather than simply getting on with their lives and doing some real research. Here's a hint; it isn't a conspiracy.
You may or may not be convinced that global warming is real, and you may or may not choose to believe that such warming is caused by human activity, but if you're going to deny human-induced climate change the least you can do is have a look at the evidence, as presented here. Once you've read through this lot you'll be familiar with the basic science, know enough to ask sensible questions and be able to dig deeper into the evidence and arguments. If you still don't believe, at least you'll be able to base your disbelief on rational argument. Go on, you know you want to.
It's been a while, but I have at last published another (Brasserie Blanc, Portsmouth) in my occasional series of 500 word reviews. I'm not convinced that making the number of words in the post the defining feature was a good idea, but it's done now and I'll stick with it for a while yet; after all, given the frequency of posts, it's hardly a great problem.
Report by Commission of Investigation into the handling by Church and State authorities of allegations and suspicions of child abuse against clerics of the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin.
I've read a little of this report and I don't really want to read any more. I was going to write something critical of the Catholic Church but it all seems rather pointless since the allegations in this report are about as serious as they can get and they don't seem to be affecting the Pope or his senior management team one little bit.
What would we do to any other nation that behaved in this way? Sanctions, travel restrictions and asset-freezes, I think, until the accused were extradited and the organisation's behaviour was modified. Libya paid compensation to the victims of its crimes; when will the Vatican admit responsibility and pay up?
I am not a big fan of impulse buying - I like to consider things, weigh the benefits against the costs, investigate alternatives and, eventually, reach a balanced decision. Upgrading my home computer has, therefore, taken quite a while.
The options I considered and rejected include:
Unfortunately, none of these options really gave me what I wanted - a reasonable amount of quad-core power with decent future upgrade options without a wallet-rotting price - so I settled on my tried and tested solution; buy the components from Novatech and assemble them myself. Risky, maybe, and probably more expensive than a vanilla off-the-shelf setup, but pretty much guaranteed to give me everything I wanted.
So how did it go? Well, I bought most of the stuff on Thursday afternoon and, after a quick return to Novatech to change the memory (their website mistakenly said the motherboard required DDR2 instead of DDR3) I stuck it all together on Thursday evening and that's it, job done. There were a couple of dodgy moments, of course, like when I first turned it on and it did absolutely nothing (one power connector less than wholly connected) or when I accidentally activated ACHI (or some similar acronym) and suddenly found that Windows couldn't be found (a quick reinstall of Windows fixed this problem).
Apart from that it was fairly straightforward. Admittedly, confusion over the display cabling led me to spend an hour and a half trying to work out why the outer inch of the display wasn't being used (changing to DVI from HDMI fixed that, no problem) and I have an ongoing issue with the DVD drive (it's IDE so I can only connect one IDE hard-drive instead of two, and the power supply doesn't have a connector for the SATA DVD drive so I can't change to that yet and ditch the IDE one) but, all in all, it's been easy and trouble-free.
Performance? It's pretty good, let down only by the cheap graphics card but as I don't play games I don't really care (and, once the price of DirectX 11 cards has fallen a little more, an upgrade is easy). Windows 7 Home Premium works really well, the quad core AMD processor seems to be sufficiently quick and, so far, I haven't been able to make it misbehave, slow down or stumble, which is a very big improvement over the previous incumbent.
Carved from a single piece of aluminium it may be, but bus-proof it is not. This unfortunate MacBook Air probably won't quality for warranty repair but at least it still works. Mostly.
Researchers have demonstrated a prototype device that can rid hands, feet, or even underarms of bacteria, including the hospital superbug MRSA.
Apparently it works by Quantum and Plasma and other weird physics stuff which I don't really know anything about, but it looks impressive, especially the battery-powered version. Very neat.
This crippling disease is now endemic in just four countries - India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.
I haven't the faintest idea who Konnie Huq is, but I like the idea of trying to eliminate Polio. With any luck, it'll go the way of the dodo and smallpox in a couple of years. If we can persuade the anti-vaccination idiots to quieten down, maybe we can get rid of measles as well (I'm not holding my breath).
The BBC have a load of video on their website (like this one, for sharks: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/species/Great_white_shark#p0036vd6) from various nature programs. The Crocodiles are worth hunting out as well.
Your iPhone could unlock your car, pick up e-coupons at the local mall, and pay for all your supermarket groceries just by laying it on top of the checkout.
I like my iPhone. And I like gadgets, especially if they make life easier. Getting rid of cash would make my life easier, and if my phone could handle Tube payments, airline tickets and conference calls then I'd probably marry it (figuratively speaking, of course).
I can't imagine anyone but a web developer wanting eight monitors on their desk, but maybe there are people who have always dreamed of panoramic minesweeper. This graphics card is for them.
They're sitting ducks, really. Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchins seriously outclass their opponents in this debate on "The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world" (link). The debate has been broadcast on BBC World News but is also available on various video-sharing sites (link - thanks Nick, link). My favourite bit is from Stephen Fry, responding to Ann Widdecombe's frankly pathetic attempts to justify the Church's stance on child-abuse:
And what is the point of the Catholic Church if it says "Oh, well we couldn't know better because nobody else did". Then what are you for?
At the start of the debate, there were 678 For the motion, 1102 Against and 346 Undecided. After the debate the numbers had changed to 268 For, 1876 Against and 34 Undecideds; a rout and a humiliation for the Catholics.
The UK's chief drugs adviser has been sacked by Home Secretary Alan Johnson, after criticising government policies.
What's the point of hiring an expert on drugs only to fire him when he disagrees with you? That seems rather childish and pretty stupid; if the Government wanted someone to parrot back to them their own believes, why appoint an independent expert? This is another bad move from a Government determined to ignore evidence and reasoned argument in the hunt for positive tabloid headlines.
The Monoprice Backup battery pack is the simplest of devices. When your iPhone or iPod is running low on juice, just plug this battery pack into the 30 pin connector.
Nice, neat, cheap. What more could you want?
Customers will not be disappointed. Windows 7 is all its unlamented predecessor, Windows Vista, should have been. It does not hog resources anything like as much as Vista did, making it a far sprightlier performer. It will even run on diminutive netbooks that currently have to use leaner Linux or Windows XP operating systems because of Vista’s girth and weight.
Windows 7 might be worth a look. Updates to follow.
The problem (from the Catholic point of view) was that the speakers arguing for the Church as a force for good were hopelessly outclassed by two hugely popular, professional performers.
I was at this debate on Monday evening. It was entertaining; Hitchens and Fry made strong, well-presented arguments and essentially destroyed their opponents, roared on by a partisan audience that scented ecclesiastical blood.
The Telegraph's quote isn't accurate, however. The problem wasn't that the debaters were mismatched (although there was clearly an intellectual gulf between the two sides) but that the Catholics had no answer to the attacks of Hitchens and Fry, and presented no compelling counter arguments.
I think it was the child abuse scandals that finally swung the audience. The debate is due to be broadcast on 7th November; watch out for Ann Widdecombe's astonishing explanation for the Church's failure over child abuse.
An ambitious new website that will open up government data to the public will launch in beta, or pilot, form in December.
Free information? It'll be interesting to see what we get. Bring it on!
This will only be of interest if you have an iPhone, shop at Tesco and, frankly, are a bit weird. Tesco have launched an app to help you find things in their shops and it seems to work really well (although I haven't actually been to a store to check - that's beyond the call of duty). With this and the self-service checkout you can complete your weekly grocery purchase without speaking to another human being. Progress rolls relentlessly on.
Matt Latimer, former speech writer for President George W Bush, said that some members of his administration believed her books promoted sorcery.
The thing about promoting sorcery, even if you do it deliberately, persuasively and over an extended period of time, is that sorcery doesn't work in the real world, and I think that's an important lesson for anyone interested in Government. The key point is to distinguish between fiction (Harry Potter et al) and fact (the real world, where magic never works and we no longer burn witches); anyone who can't do this deserves quite a lot of sympathy and help.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has confessed that the // in a web address were actually "unnecessary".
I think I can forgive him this minor flaw; the web makes life so much easier in so many ways that I'm not inclined to grumble about such a trivial inconvenience as occasionally having to type a couple of extra characters.
And it's a big update! Well, no, actually it isn't, but it looks like it might be a useful improvement, particularly if you use the phone to make, you know, phone calls. Full details:
iPhone OS 3.1.2 Software Update
This update contains bug fixes and improvements, including the following:
I'm in Tallinn at the moment, and the website of this food outlet (I can't bring myself to call it a restaurant) is quite astonishing. It looks very much as if their translation work was handled by a drunk monkey with a faulty thesaurus and a desire to torture the English language.
It's only a rumour, of course, but the expectation is that Apple will launch new versions of the Apple TV sometime fairly soon; they've dropped the old 40Gb model and reduced the price of the 160Gb version, presumably to clear stock. How are they going to do it? I don't actually know, but the feature set of the existing Apple TV is pretty much identical to that of the iPod Touch, with the obvious exception of the form-specific elements, and maybe Apple could produce a next-gen TV product by marrying the iPhone OS to a decent CPU and a very large hard-drive.
Would they want to sell apps to customers sitting in front of their TV? I can't see why not, and if they marry this hypothetical product with a decent controller they've got a pretty neat games console and a media centre able to exploit the huge variety of apps and media available through iTunes. It's a compelling idea.
From any web browser, or from the free iPhone application supplied by Withings, you can log on and see a rich, relevant view of all of your weight data collected by your scale, with no time limitation and in total confidentiality.
I love the idea of being able to log your weight and view the trends on your phone. I'm going to get one of these things, and I'll let you know how it goes.
Steve Jobs said people don't read any more. But Apple is in talks with several media companies rooted in print, negotiating content for a "new device." And they're not just going for e-books and mags. They're aiming to redefine print.
I've been highly sceptical about the rumoured Apple iPad (or iTablet), mainly because I just can't see a use for it that wouldn't be better satisfied by either a laptop or a phone. If this report is anything to go by, Apple have long recognised this as a problem for the product and are seriously trying to address it.
Would I be interested in multi-media news and information access device? Maybe, but I think I'd want 3G/Wifi access and/or some sort of auto-download feature so that I could use it on the train without having to worry about internet access or bandwidth constraints. It will be interesting to see what they come up with, and at what price.
Vodafone has reached an agreement to sell the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS in the U.K. and Ireland, an announcement that came just a day after Orange revealed it would also sell the handset.
This isn't really news any more, but with Orange and Vodafone selling the iPhone I'm hoping that O2 will drop their prices or improve their 3G coverage in order to hold on to their existing customers. I have no plans to switch from O2, but that might change if Vodafone or Orange could offer a decent 3G connection along my route home.
GOOGLE IS TO BEGIN invitation-only trials of its Wave collaboration tool, which has been available as a closed developer test since its introduction in May.
You're not familiar with Wave? It's worth looking at; very neat, potentially very useful.
What do you get when you mix the old-style pedometer with the Wii and our modern obsession with health? The answer: the fitbit, a tiny wearable motion-detector providing you with a window into just how healthy (or not) are your days and nights.
I'm a sucker for gadgets, especially if they produce allegedly interesting statistics in a simple, straightforward way. This looks like a really neat idea, a bit like the Nike+ thing on speed. Worth a little investigation, I think.
Chip designer ARM announced this week new dual core Cortex-A9 processors capable of breaking the 2GHz barrier, perhaps foreshadowing the muscle behind Apple's future mobile devices.
A 2GHz multi-core chip in a phone? I'm pretty sure that was on my wish-list for the super phone of the future. If they can squeeze this beast into an iPhone case without roasting the hands of its user then things could get quite interesting.
How neat is this? A very nice piece of design work.
There is "no danger" of mass power cuts in the UK during the next decade, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has said.
The energy shortage has been averted, praise be, much relief all round. Except that the Governments own energy adviser seems to be concerned. And The Economist's analysis (http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14167834) makes pretty grim reading.
So who do we believe? I think I'd like the Government to make a more convincing case; list the power stations being built, their capacities and their completion dates. On the same page, list the current power stations, their capacities and their decommisioning dates. Graph electricity consumption predictions, publish the underlying data and methods of calculation, and explain exactly why Miliband is so confident.
From outside Government, it looks like Miliband is complacent because he knows it won't be his problem for much longer, but that's no comfort to the rest of us.
The government's new energy adviser says the UK could face blackouts by 2016 because green energy is not coming on stream fast enough.
More good news on the energy front. I wonder if now might be a good time to invest in the companies that build nuclear power plants and wind turbines? It's either that or turn off the lights and move to France.
So for me, the big news from Apple's Rock and Roll event today is the release of OS 3.1 for the iPhone. The release notes in full:
I've just logged on and opened iTunes, and what should I find but a iTunes 9.0 and an iPhone Configuration Utility:
iPhone Configuration Utility lets you easily create, maintain, encrypt, and install configuration profiles, track and install provisioning profiles and authorized applications, and capture device information including console logs.
Downloading now.
Statoil has constructed the world's first full-scale floating wind turbine a couple of hours by catamaran from the oil town Stavanger, in the hope that one day vast wind farms could be constructed far offshore in water depths of up to 700m.
One of the problems with the plan to build loads of offshore wind turbines is that there are very few ships capable of building the towers upon which they sit. Statoil have addressed this shortage (and the fact that seabed mounting is difficult and expensive) by developing a floating wind turbine. Interesting stuff, and very neat.
The creationist "museum" in Portsmouth isn't new (they've been going at least a couple of years) but I've ignored them, partly because I don't want to fund their faith by visiting their "museum", and partly because I think they're a bit strange. Nothing has really changed, except that I followed a link to their website from a blog I was reading and I couldn't help sniggering on the train.
There site includes a few strange things, like:
Greeting the visitors in the entrance hall is "Boris", a giant 20 ft. long model of a dinosaur.
"Boris", to judge from the photos, is a weird-looking dinosaur, reminiscent of Barney, the purple children's TV character; I think this is deliberate and says a lot about the curator's knowledge of paleontology.
One of the topics covered by the "museum's" displays is:
The impossibility of life forming from chemicals.
I imagine this relates to the origins of life, but it's hard to see what they might contribute to the debate, especially given their initial assumptions. I wonder if they know that water is a chemical? I'm tempted to drop in next time I'm in Portsmouth, but I know it would just make me angry.
This past Friday, Apple said that, in all cases, the iPhones in question were damaged by an "external force," not a faulty battery or glass screen
Ok, so Apple are denying the explosion stories, but there are quite a few of them floating around and, with several million iPhones in circulation, it would be a bit odd if some of them didn't suffer catastrophic manufacturing or component failures.
A HUNDRED years ago, summer day-trippers were lured on to London Underground’s Bakerloo line with the promise that, at a refreshing 15 degrees centigrade, its tunnels were the coolest place in the capital.
It's been a while since the underground was cool. It's fairly chic, I suppose, sometimes, but mostly it's just unpleasantly hot, humid, sweaty and crowded.
I have been waiting for Logos for Mac, the Bible research application suite, for over a year.
What? A Bible research application suite? Does anyone really need this, I wonder, except priests (who, one assumes, would already be fairly familiar with their favourite magic book) and RE teachers? And who would pay $260 for the introductory version, let alone the $1,379 for the Gold licence? Weird stuff.
Engineers say a forest of 100,000 "artificial trees" could be deployed within 10 to 20 years to help soak up the world's carbon emissions.
Fantastic idea. And I like the accompanying image, showing lines of wind turbines and 'trees' at the side of a motorway, a motorway from which lighting appears to have been removed.
Sony has launched a wireless e-reader which allows users to download electronic books on the go.
I haven't been tempted by the current crop of e-book readers; I like printed books and I don't want another electronic device to charge and carry (convergence, that's the thing I'm looking for). That said, Sony's new device does look rather neat, and they've finally implemented a touch screen rather than the rather naff mechanical buttons on earlier incarnations.
There are two remaining impediments to joining this particular technological revolution:
1) Cost. £250 buys a lot of paperbacks and the electronic books aren't much cheaper than their physical counterparts so there's little financial incentive.
2) iPhone. It isn't perfect, but I can (and do) read books on my iPhone, and I don't really want to carry another device just for reading text.
So, basically, I'm lazy and stuck in my ways, and the incentive to change (a little extra convenience) isn't great enough to overcome my objections. Yet. So what would it take? Here's my list:
1) Induction charging; I don't want to have to think about charging my 'book' - make it super-easy so that it ceases to be a problem.
2) Cost. I don't want to pay as much for ebooks as I do for paperbacks. In fact, I want to pay a lot less.
3) Weight. It needs to be forgettably light.
Would that be enough? Possibly, but probably I'll stick with my phone for the rare occasions that I want to read on the move. Also, iPhone does colour.
SiON gate technology is expected to outperform TSMC's current 40nm low-power silicon by being 50% faster or up to 50% less power consuming, and it also packs twice the circuit density.
They're right - this is geeky - but any technology that allows silicon to run 50% faster is also rather sexy, particularly if you can apply it to mobile phones and cameras. TSMC has announced Qualcomm as an early customer, so you never know what might turn up where, and with improved battery life.
At Hot Chips, AMD broke out some more details on its upcoming Magny-Cours server chip. The processor is a dual-die, single package combining two Istanbul dies under the same roof in a highly complex mesh of HT and cache links.
Actually, I'm not sure this is as interesting as I first thought. There are loads of apps, of course, that benefit from shed-loads of power, but I don't really use them. There's only so much fun to be had from watching your Excel sheets recalculate in an even smaller fraction of a second, and after that it's just about the boasting.
IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME COMING, but the wait is now over. The much-anticipated hook-up between satnav giant TomTom and Apple's iconic Iphone has finally come to fruition.
It's a fairly brief review, but The Inquirer seemed to like Tomtom for the iPhone. If I didn't have a standalone Tomtom unit I'd be tempted to splash out but, for the moment, I'll stick with my Go 520. After all, if I'm using my phone to navigate me while I drive, I can't watch TV programmes on it, and that's a sacrifice too far!
They found that "online ad campaigns with an average reach of 40 percent of their target segment successfully grew retail sales of the advertised brands by an average of 9 percent" and, we assume, also made a lot of people very hungry.
This is probably good news for anyone selling ad-serving services (www.betgenius.com, for example) but, dammit, it probably means we're all going to be subjected to ever greater numbers of online adverts.
