Any Monty Python Fans out there?

The roots of the "Dead parrot" sketch straetch back 1600 years. Really!

http://tinyurl.com/57h2sg

What if the Matrix ran on Windows?

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1886349

Black Friday

If you're insane enough to be out shopping today, here are some special holiday gifts to keep an eye for!

Happy Thanksgiving!

If I lived in L.A. ...

I'd be dead.This would pull alongside me. I'd wet myself laughing. They'd shoot me. The end.

Now THAT's a movie review.

I use my Netflix membership to the max, and mine the darker recesses of their catalog for oddball movies I'd otherwise never have a chance to see.

Because my tastes are all over the map, the Netflix "Suggestions for you" software sometimes---well, often--- offers up movies of uncertain provenance and dubious quality.

One such recent suggestion was a German film called "80 Minutes," apparently an early entry into the now-popular category of "real time" productions, where the events on-screen unfold in the same amount of time they would if you were experiencing the events yourself, in real life.

It's an interesting and challenging film-making technique, so I looked into it further.

I read some reviews from other viewers, and found this gem:

====

I would rather have a broken glass enema than to be forced to watch this piece of garbage again. My grandfather's funeral video was more entertaining than this uninspired waste of time. After sitting through nearly 90 minutes of this foolishness -- all the while wishing for something intelligent to watch (like Jerry Springer) -- I finally got to the less-than-pulse-pounding conclusion, where the art school director thought it might be poignant to really "Shake Things Up" by stealing the ending from Michael Douglas's THE GAME. Please be warned: if ever you have the opportunity to watch 80 MINUTES, pray for a severe case of Conjunctivitis.


=====

It's a little hard to figure out, but I'm guessing he didn't like the movie....

Simply amazing

Watch a first-generation small autonomous quadruped robot as it learns to walk, and then see the second generation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBSK7LYpg9w

Mommy, can I have one, Pleeeeeeeze?

Another brainiac

If the image below is too small to read, even when you click for a larger size, here's the gist:

This person thinks the current Australian drought is being caused by the "extra" hour of daylight in daylight savings time.






I am sooooo glad it's not an American letter.

When a network file-save goes "poof!"

It's Thursday, so there's a new "LangaList Plus" column posted at WindowsSecrets.Com. this week, it covers:

When a network file-save goes "poof!" Windows "Delayed Write" errors can mean immediate data loss.They're rare, but "Delayed Write Failures" are never good. And they can be tough to sort out. Here are the best resources I know of.

A different kind of network file failure: A reader asked: "Today I tried to copy some files from my desktop to my laptop using the network. I'm sure I've done this before, but today I got an error message about 'Not enough server storage is available to process this command.' Are they talking about disk storage on the remote computer? 61 GB isn't enough? Sigh." Fortunately, the answer is easy--- but not obvious.

Vista trouble: When things don't work quite right after a Vista upgrade....

Access to these items is almost free: You pay only whatever you think the content is worth (there's no set fee); your one-time payment gets you access for an entire year.

More info: https://windowssecrets.com/ Your support there helps me keep the lights lit here. :-)

Beyond SETI--- way, way beyond

Scientists are turning hard-core research tasks into fun, playable games as a way to get people to help tackle problems too large for even the most powerful computers:

One site offering such pleasurable participation is called Games With A Purpose. "Forget Tetris or Solitaire, join one of these science projects and put your free time to good use GAMES WITH A PURPOSE (GWAP). Help train computer vision and artificial intelligence systems.
http://www.gwap.com/gwap/

Others:

GOOGLE IMAGE LABELER: A spin-off from GWAP, play with an anonymous partner to label objects as quickly as possible and help improve this image search engine. www.images.google.com/imagelabeler

FOLDIT: Puzzle your way through folding or designing protein structures and help biologists design the next generation of drugs. www.fold.it

GALAXY ZOO: Classify images of a million different galaxies to help answer some of the biggest questions in cosmology. www.galaxyzoo.org


Full article:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026811.700

Curious programming on ShowTime

President NanObama

No, it's not an image of John McCain's nightmares:



"The image shows the tiniest representation of the new US president yet. Each face is built from roughly 150 million carbon nanotubes. As the artist/mechanical engineer that made them, John Hart, puts it "that's about how many Americans voted on November 4". Although, of course, only about 53% of those nanotubes actually voted Obama. For more images, and to see how they are made visit Hart's site.

"Hart's creation is the latest in a tradition of nanoscale engineers making tiny structures for artistic or self-promotional reasons. Read our previous blog post rounding up some of the best, from adverts placed on bees' knees to a nanoguitar you can actually play."

Weird Online Medical Sites

A recent issue of New Scientist had an article on the high effectiveness and low per-patient cost of online medical self-help sites.

That's interesting in itself, but I also was amazed at some the sites cited in the article--- sites I never knew existed. (And maybe never wanted to know existed...)

Examples:

U Can Poop Too (not much explanation needed for that one, except to note it's for kids)
http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/bmc/ucp2/flash/login.html

MoodGym (cognitive therapy for depression)
http://moodgym.anu.edu.au/welcome

Shuti (ie "shut eye" for insomniacs)
http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/news/archives07/SHUTi.cfm

eTherapy (delivery of directive treatment-oriented therapeutic material for specific clinical disorders via internet)
http://www.swinburne.edu.au/lss/swinpsyche/etherapy/index.html

BGatHOME (blood glucose awareness)
http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/bmc/bgathome/flash/index.htm

Beating the Blues (computerised cognitive behavioural therapy (CCBT) programme for depression and anxiety)
http://www.ultrasis.com/products/product.jsp?product_id=1

It's an interesting world out there, eh?

Yummm. The other white meat.

No, it doesn't

New column posted

It's Thursday, so there's a new "LangaList Plus" column posted at WindowsSecrets.Com. this week, it covers:

• Undetectable Keyloggers: Keyloggers quietly keep a record of every keystroke you make on your PC. There are a few above-board and totally legitimate reasons to use keyloggers. There's also a world full of illicit and unethical reasons for doing so. Here's how keyloggers work (including keyloggers that are totally invisible to normal security software!), and what to look for.
  
  
• Getting started with backups: Free tools make it easy.
  
  
• Explorers out the wazoo: More on tracking down bogus/Trojan "explorer.exe" files.
  
  
• Night of the undead software: What to do when a software setup fails, leaving you with a half-finished installation that's neither alive nor dead--- and that won't go away.

Access is almost free: You pay only what you think the content is worth (there's no set fee); whatever you pay once gets you access for an entire year.

Want to have a question answered in that column? Use the "contact" info at the end of the column to send in questions you might like me to try answering. And you can also rate the content to let me know how I'm doing.

More info: https://windowssecrets.com/

Your support there helps me keep the lights lit here. :-)

Remote Personality Analysis

http://www.typealyzer.com/index.php?lang=en is a site where you can enter the URL of a blog, and the software will analyze the writing in said blog to do a rough personality profile of the author, including which parts of the author's brain were most used in creating the analyzed text.

Hmmmm.

Feeding in this blog (ulp!) produces this report about me:

======================================================

The analysis indicates that the author of
http://fredlanga.blogspot.com
is of the type:

ESTP - The Doers

The active and playful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

Analysis

This show what parts of the brain that were dominant during writing.

=================================================

OK, it's me again.

And again, hmmmmm.

I've checked some friend's blogs--- people I know--- and the software is usually pretty accurate in a general way.

Of course, one's writing persona is usually different from one's in-person self: "author" is a role a writer plays, if you will. There are exceptions where the author becomes indistinguishable from their writing persona, or vice versa (Hunter Thompson leaps to mind), but I believe that most people only reveal a portion of themselves through their writing. One's writing voice is certainly a reflection of at least part of the author's personality, but almost never the whole story.

Or maybe I'm just hoping so because the analysis shows so little right-brain stuff going on in my head! Where's my corpus callosum when I need it? Connect, dammit!

But in any case, I FEEL and BELIEVE and HOPE and IMAGINE and INTUIT that, IDEALLY, I'm a SPIRITUALLY HARMONIOUS (not to say RHYTHMIC) whole and not just a product of my right brain half. ;-)

(Parse *that*, Typealyzer software!)

RIP, Phoenix

We wrote about it a few days ago, and then the end came swiftly.
---------

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - NASA scientists said on Monday they could no longer communicate with the Phoenix Mars Lander and were calling an effective end to its five-month-plus mission on the Red Planet....

As anticipated, the seasonal decline in sunshine at the space probe's polar landing site is providing too little sunlight to recharge the lander's batteries, a situation that occurred three weeks earlier than expected because of dust storms, NASA said.

NASA said the project team would keep listening for signals from the lander over the next few weeks in hopes it manages to revive itself and "phones home," but engineers believe that is unlikely due to worsening weather on Mars....

Phoenix has since recorded snowfall, scraped up bits of ice and found that Martian dust chemically resembled seawater on Earth -- adding to evidence that liquid water capable perhaps of supporting life once flowed on the planet's surface.

The lander also returned more than 25,000 pictures from the planet.

By late October, the probe had already surpassed its expected operational lifetime by two months.

--------

Full story:
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE4A97FJ20081110

Lots more:
http://tinyurl.com/5uwr8d

Amazing Photos

"Saturn's tiny, icy moon Enceladus has recently been visited by NASA's Cassini orbiter on several very close approaches - once coming within a mere 25 kilometers (15 miles) of the surface. Scientists are learning a great deal about this curious little moon. Only about 500 kilometers wide (310 miles), it is very active, emitting internal heat, churning its surface, and - through cryovolcanism - ejecting masses of microscopic ice particles into Saturnian orbit. Cassini has been orbiting Saturn for over 4 years now, and has provided some amazing views of tiny Enceladus, some collected here."

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/10/enceladus_up_close.html

I'd like to meet this woman

Tough cookie:
-----------------

PRESCOTT, Ariz. (AP) - With a fox locked onto her arm, an Arizona jogger ran a mile to her car, where she was able to dislodge the animal, throw it into the trunk and drive to a Prescott hospital. The Yavapai County Sheriff's Office said the fox, which later attacked an animal control officer, tested positive for rabies.

The unidentified Chino Valley resident told deputies she was on a trail Monday at the base of Granite Mountain when the fox attacked, biting her foot. The woman said she grabbed it by the neck when it went for her leg and it latched onto her arm.

Thinking the fox was rabid, she wanted to make sure it didn't get away so she ran to her car, where she was able to pry open its jaws, wrap it in a sweat shirt and toss it into the trunk.

The woman is receiving rabies vaccinations, as is the animal control officer.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D948V99O3&show_article=1

Silver lining to crashing economy

Some prices are in free fall, especially for commodity goods like hard drives.

A while ago I wrote about an external 1 terabyte drive for $150, and some of you expressed interest.

Yesterday, I got a flier for an internal 1.5TB drive for the same price.
http://tinyurl.com/5ep67a

The same flier lists a 1TB internal drive for $110.
http://tinyurl.com/5bkdjv

I don't want this blog to turn into a shopping service, but prices and capacities like these are extraordinary; and these large drives were a recent topic here, so I though it'd be worth mentioning.

The economy is going to suck for a while, but it does mean there will be bargains to be had; at least a small consolation.

New column posted

It's Thursday, so there's a new "LangaList Plus" column posted at WindowsSecrets.Com. this week, it covers:

• XP's 'other' Explorer can be a CPU hog: A bad naming decision by Microsoft means you have two different "Explorers" on your XP system. Here's what to do when the lesser-known one starts causing trouble.
  
  
• Recovery Console won't load at startup: Goback, two other problems the likely cause.
  
  
• Firewall 'Allow/Deny?' prompts cause confusion: "Quiet" firewall options that don't pepper users with Allow/Deny requests.
  
  
• Change your default program for viewing images: And this same process can be used to change any file associations or "Open With" dialogs that aren't working the way you want.

Want to have a question answered in that column? Use the "contact" info at the end of the column to send in questions you might like me to try answering. And you can also rate the content to let me know how I'm doing.

Yes, the newsletter the column runs in is by subscription, but there's no set fee. You pay only what you think the content is worth; whatever you pay that one time gets you access for an entire year.

More info: https://windowssecrets.com/

Your support there helps me keep the lights lit here. :-)

Thinking about Neanderthals

Rocketmouse said of the recent post about the reconstructed face of a Neanderthal woman:

It *is* cool. What's creepy, though, is how much she looks like women I've seen...

Indeed.

We're Homo Sapiens (at least on good days); she's Homo Neanderthalis--- a different species of human, but she's still fully human.

Neanderthals--- they got their name because the first identified skeleton was found in the Neander river valley, near Duesseldorf, Germany--- were amazing. They had larger brains than we do, but their grey matter was distributed differently: more in the back of their elongated skulls, less in the front. We have more in the front, which is why we have vertical foreheads compared to Neanderthals. But their total brain volume was higher.

What this means in terms of intelligence, cognition, perception and such is anyone's guess. Maybe it's meaningless, and their brains operated just like ours. Maybe not.

Biologically, brains are "expensive." They cost a lot in terms of metabolism to build and maintain. So, it seems reasonable that Neanderthals had their big brains for a purpose.

We know they played music; archaeologists have found a Neanderthal flute made from the bone of a cave bear. They made art, such as masks and talisman figurines. (It must be incredibly difficult to pursue any art when you're in a permanent survival mode. Imagine how strongly Neanderthal artists must have had to feel to be compelled to create music or other art, no matter what.) We think Neanderthals had religion; they sometimes decorated their dead for burial, as if prepping them for a journey in an afterlife. And they probably had some kind of speech, although it wouldn't have sounded like ours because their heads, face and necks were shaped differently.

Neanderthals were people. With brains bigger than ours. Makes you think, eh?

OK: They were human. They were people. But they were different from us, too, and some of that also derived from their big-brained heads. For example, Neanderthal females had to have a somewhat different pelvis from today's ladies. Human birth is already a tough proposition on the ladies because the large head of a average human baby. Imagine giving birth to a human baby with an even larger head.

So, the big-brained, robust Neanderthal women also had wider hips with different bone angles, compared to today's women. They would have walked, run, moved, and sat differently from what we're used to seeing women do.

The men were also big-brained and robust, and although their hips weren't as wide as the women, proportionally, they were wider and angled differently from mens' hips today. We're built to cover long distances efficiently. Neanderthals were stronger, but couldn't run as fast or as far.

And here's an odd thought: Neanderthal women had unusually large birth canals compared to today's women, so imagine what the complementary equipment of an average Neanderthal male must have been like.

Years ago, the popular depiction of Neanderthals had them as sluggish brutes, dim-witted and more primitive than our ancestors who lived then. That made it easy to imagine why they died out and we didn't.

But none of that's really true. These were impressive creatures. Why did they die out?

(And it seems they did truly die out. All the genetic tests done so far indicate that our ancestors and the Neanderthals never interbred in any meaningful way.)

Some anthropologists now point to a much simpler reason:

Imagine a culture that produces stone-age Da Vincis and Einsteins at about the same rate per capita as our culture does. But imagine that in that culture, most of those great ideas and insights die with the person or within the small group that thought them.

You see, the Neanderthal people happened to be in the wrong place when the last Ice Age set in. As the snows fell and the mountains became harder to navigate, Neanderthal ranges were cut off from one another. The increasingly isolated social units became spread too thin for the easy interchange of genes and ideas.

This long isolation may be the real reason why Neanderthals used simpler tools than our ancestors did at that time. It's not that Neanderthals weren't smart enough. It's that their inventions couldn't be disseminated easily to other isolated inhabited valleys. Great ideas could be born--- a new axe, a better way to sew, a superior medicine--- but would simply die out without spreading.

By sheer luck of the draw, our stone-age Da Vincis and Einsteins lived in warmer climes where life and trade and cultural exchanges had been much easier. A good idea didn't have to die with the originator, and indeed many great ideas were passed along: ideas about farming and animal domestication, about cooking, about chemistry and metalworking ("look what I found when I heated these rocks in a hot fire..."), about weaponry, about social organization, about art and religion. All that knowledge became a package of cultural skills that our direct ancestors brought with them when they arrived in Europe, towards the end of the Ice Age.

They came in, hale and hearty; physically and mentally exactly like us. Hell, they *were* us; we *are* them. There's no difference: Pluck an infant from that day and place it with a modern family, and the child would grow up indistinguishable from the true children of today. Likewise, transport an infant from today to a tribe then, and the infant could grow up as a normal member of that tribe, no problem.

Only our cultures make any meaningful difference at all. Today, we're slowly trying to overcome the xenophobia, the racism, the intolerance that seems to be deeply-rooted in our variant of humanity. These negative traits no longer serve a purpose in today's crowded world, but it's likely they were in full flower when our ancestors stormed into Ice Age Europe.

By sheer dumb luck, they arrived there with better numbers, better weapons, better communication, better organization and better health; and almost certainly with the full measure of all the darker impulses that mark so much of our human history.

The Neanderthals didn't stand a chance.

Talk about generational change

This is the first US election in 24 years without a Bush or a Clinton heading a major party's presidential ticket.

If McCain wins, he will have headed the first successful GOP presidential ticket in 80 years that did not include someone named Bush or Nixon.

More interesting campaign trivia:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/03/election.trivia/

Time for something serious: new solar tech

"Near perfect" absorption of sunlight's energy:

http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=2507

Forensic Reconstruction of Neanderthals

One of the coolest visualization techniques to come along in recent years is the careful forensic reconstruction of likely facial features of deceased people from their bony remains, based on subtleties in bone structure and the knowledge of what each variation means, on average. Originally developed so police could put a face to unknown human remains (an application where it has been quite successful), the technique has spilled over into anthropology.

Recreating a face from the underlying bone involves painstaking work with myriad precision measurements so the muscle and skin will have the correct thickness and placement. It also involves having access to a database of enough samples so that the assigned features have a statistical likelihood of being correct. These are not wild guesses or dreamy-eyed artists impressions, but a reasonable recreation of a face that actually existed.

Here's a recent one; a Neanderthal woman:



Very cool stuff:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1058538/Meet-Wilma-The-face-Neanderthal-woman-revealed-time.html

Some jokes just write themselves

Local Cop Charged With Stealing Donuts

State police say an upstate New York college campus policeman was helping himself to free pastries at a local convenience store.

The Valero Nice N Easy offers free coffee to any police officer in uniform.

Sgt. Steve Brody of the Morrisville State College University Police stopped daily to buy a newspaper and pick up a free cup of coffee. He also routinely stuffed a pastry into his coat.

Brody is now accused of taking about $30 worth of pastries over at least 17 separate occasions.

Brody, 55, of Morrisville, was ticketed for petty larceny. Troopers say they have surveillance videos.

Brody and his defense attorney declined to comment. Brody remains an employee at Morrisville; school officials say the case is a personnel matter and refused further comment.

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Campus_Cop_Charged_With_Stealing_Donuts.html

*What* does it say?

The sign above is in English and Welsh. According to the BBC, when British sign-making officials needed a translation for the English phrases "No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only" they sent those phrases by email to a Welsh-language translation service.

When they got a reply email, the sign-makers carefully copied the Welsh phrases, made the sign and posted it next to the road.

Unfortunately, the Welsh email from the translation service said, "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated".

And that's what the Welsh portion of the sign now says.