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Not sure how it goes with small devices, but Dasher is an interesting input method that you may want to check out if you're interested in that kind of thing.

They try. Problem is that the interesting calls, things like program loading and disk read/write, aren't easy to pin down exact timings for. How long the disk read calls take, for example, depends heavily on what else is running at the time (taking CPU cycles away from the reading process) and what the I/O load is (which affects how long it'll be before the read actually completes).

And, how is the scanner doing it's timing? Using system calls. To the operating system. The one that's compromised and lying to the scanner about how much CPU time it's used. See Programming Satan's Computer (PDF) for the problems inherent here.

It's probably not that great on its own for able bodied people, but as one of many inputs it could be quite interesting. It could be used to subtly alter camera views towards what you find interesting, I suppose. This sort of stuff is already in use to generate "heat maps" of where people are looking when using a computer. Like where on a webpage you look, or in game, etc. It'd be useful to know what sort of things people don't care about, or how distracting something fading in / out might be to the task at hand.

It's also usable with dasher as a fairly fast text input for the disabled.

... make the fonts look smoother. This has the effect of lowering the rise time of the signal...

Increasing the rise time, actually.

The other thing is that LCDs don't emit RF harmonics to nearly such an extent. The days of Tempest and Van Eck phreaking are pretty much gone.

They're very much alive, actually (8 MB PDF).

Indeed it is possible. Here's a paper describing the technique:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/pet2004-fpd.pdf

The new site is the largest collection of Darwin's work in history... Wow, quite a feat. Must have taken some really intelligent design to put all that together and make it work.

But I think there's an ulterior motive here. As a part of Chip-and-PIN, the UK is testing a brilliant two-factor authentication system this year for cards that will cryptographically render browser, PC, and merchant security moot.

This sounds not entirely unlike the bat system worked on in Cambridge, UK.

IIRC one very simple approach to privacy was to notify people when someone checked on their position, and who it was.

Lucky imaging:
http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~optics/Lucky_Web_Site/

Only sqrt(1000) times as effective.

• Lambda calculus-ish
  • Scheme
  • Haskell
• Combinator/Forth-ish
  • Joy
  • Interesting but not practical: unlamdba iota and jot
• Logic
  • Prolog
  • Mercury - compiled and pure
  • Lygon - prolog like linear logic programming.
• Pi calculus-ish
  • Join calculus
  • Nomadic Pict

I think I want to master logic programming next, though it may be better for me to do some haskell programming first so I have a better foundation. Monads/Arrows give me a headache, but with enough time, I'm sure I could get used to them. s-expressions a-la lisp/scheme are very similar to xml, except better, but logic programming seems more likely to make the hardest parts of internet programming easier.

Unfortuately, I have nowhere near enough time to get proficient in all these languages.

Wikipedia's had a run-in with the ACS just recently. Thankfully, we worked things out okay. It can be very useful to be the only top-ten website run by a nonprofit.

Wikipedia's had a run-in with the ACS just recently. Thankfully, we worked things out okay. It can be very useful to be the only top-ten website run by a nonprofit.

YYYY-MM-DD would be better; the different delimiter character avoids confusion with other date formats. This is the standard date and time notation.

'course, if you're making subdirectories on a Unix filesystem, using / is handy.

But its not just a case of seeing "all" the evidence, its also a case of asking "all" the questions.

Lets take the question of intelligent design, from a scientific point of view, without reference to "god", and work our way backwards.

Lets accept that evolution exists, and biology is controlled through genetics.

Daisyworld shows that there can be significant feedback loops between the process of natural selection and the environment.

Humans share 98% of our genetics with a chimpanzee, and 50% with a banana. From a programmers point of view, thats could be interpreted as a large amount of redundant library code. Is there a possibility that certain genetic patterns, such as eyes, already exist within this shared genetic library code, or can be quickly assembled from other shared fragments, Though this question would still leave the unanswered question of how these patterns got there in the first place (Could evolution have started before life on earth and been seeded here?).

Is random/dominant allocation of genes passed down from parents the one and only mechanism that determines an individuals genetics? Are there any other factors that may play a part in genetic selection, even its is only a fairly minor weighting of the randomness in generic inheritance that would only become significant over thousands or tens of thousands of generations?

Humans possess both conciousness and sentience. Animals are known to possess conciousness. Is it possible that individual cells are also capable of possessing some limited form of conciousness. Could cellular conciousness, if it exists, influence which segments of genetic code are run within the cell, and/or have some influence in gene selection during embryo fertilization and growth?

If cells have some form of conciousness, is it possible for them to exchange information with each other, such as through accessing shared quantum non-local information?

Are there other means of transferring biological information, such as the use of viruses to communicate genetic information cross-laterally between sexually incompatible species?

And now for the most important question, and the one that will really "freak out" the fundamentalists: How does our understanding of evolution and genetics help us to scientifically understand and define the nature of god?

That's software, a separate issue. If I get one of these, all it has to do is emulate a mouse, then I will want to use it with e.g. Dasher, on top of a Tablet PC interface.

And another fascinating one: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/projects/currency/

There's StegFS, a 'plausible deniability file system'... http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ih99-stegfs.pdf

Probably the same way these guys did.

Seriously, this sounds very much like Trusted Computing, only making it mandatory (heh, good luck with that, Mr. Sherman). Install a Fritz chip in every computer and make all content slowly slide toward only being usable through the TC subsystem. Extend that to players and formats, and you've got your monopoly, especially when the operating system itself can only be used on a certified system and starts only running certified applications.

The TCPA FAQ gives an insightful perspective on it, what they want you think it can do, and what it will probably actually be used for.

I have not performed any experiments on exploding double layers. Acutally, I am not aware of any having been done at all. The idea of exploding DLs by Alfven was to describe the substorm process in the Earth's magnetotail.

To be sure, double layers explode not only in the magnetotail. Alfven himself observed it en vivo, for example, when he was invited to investigate certain large-scale accidents at the Swedish power company. Moreover, double layers are heavily involved in the process deceptively called "magnetic" reconnection.

J.F. Drake. Collisionless Magnetic Reconnection.

However, this tenet is not usable any more, because this double layer has not been found to exist in the Earth's magnetotail.

Really? Not found to exist? Please point me to the sources for your statement. In the meantime, allow me to remind the readers of the most elementary properties of plasma. Double layers always form at the boundaries between plasma regions of different physical conditions. As an example, consider the stable double layer in the magnetopause. They even form under the conditions of relativistic Weibel instability; in lab, point a relativistic electron-positron or electron-ion beam at a slightly magnetized plasma; in space, a gamma ray burst will do:

Milosavljevic M., et. al. Steady-State Electrostatic Layers from Weibel Instability in Relativistic Collisionless Shocks. Astrophys. J. 637 (2006)

Double layers also form in current-carrying plasmas; in general, wherever there exists a voltage differential in plasma. Their formation leads to and/or is result of various plasma instabilities. Therefore, among other things, double layers are very common in multi-ion-species plasmas (typical in space). The cross-field current instability, that plays such an important part in the current disruption model, is one; see, for example:

G. Zimbardo, et. al. Magnetic turbulence and particle dynamics in the Earth's magnetotail. Annales Geophysicae 21 (2003)

R. L. Stenzel, et. al. Double layer formation during current sheet disruptions in a reconnection experiment. Geophysical Research Letter 9 (1982)

J. E. Borovsky. Double layers do accelerate particles in the auroral zone. Physical Review Letters 69, 7 (1992)

Reddy R.V., Lakhina G.S. Ion acoustic double layers and solitons in auroral plasma. Planetary and Space Science 39, 10 (1991)

El-Taibany, W. F.; Sabry, R. Dust-acoustic solitary waves and double layers in a magnetized dusty plasma with nonthermal ions and dust charge variation. Physics of Plasmas 12, 8 (2005)

Xiao C., et. al. Cluster Observation of Wave Excitation in the Magnetopause Caused by Interplanetary Shocks. 2006 Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting

Quoting the abstract: "Intense geomagnetic storms are usually caused by the CME-magnetosphere interaction. Up to now there are only very few in situ measurements with respect to the details of interactions of CME with the front shock and magnetosphere. In this paper we report such a fortuitous observation made by Cluster four spacecraft. At 16:35 UT on Nov. 4, 2001 LASCO/SOHO observed an Earth-direction halo CME. Associated with the CME were a front shock and a magnetic cloud, which caused an intense magnetic storm with $DstI could keep citing articles ad nauseum; there are too many to list here. Jus

Agreed.

4 isntcae Y dnot tehy certae A cpachta lkie tihs?

There is a good deal of research supporting the idea that recognizing words spelled improperly but with their first and last letters in the right place is easy for the human brain, but how difficult would it be for a computer to do the same?

simon is open source.
julius is open source.
htk is *NOT* open source.

The latter is a micro$oft by-product, as clearly shown by the license that you have to first agree with and then send your email to them in order to download the tarballs...

myself never done this since 1995.

Hmmm, from the http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk/ site

"HTK was originally developed at the Machine Intelligence Laboratory (formerly known as the Speech Vision and Robotics Group) of the Cambridge University Engineering Department (CUED) where it has been used to build CUED's large vocabulary speech recognition systems (see CUED HTK LVR). In 1993 Entropic Research Laboratory Inc. acquired the rights to sell HTK and the development of HTK was fully transferred to Entropic in 1995 when the Entropic Cambridge Research Laboratory Ltd was established. HTK was sold by Entropic until 1999 when Microsoft bought Entropic. Microsoft has now licensed HTK back to CUED and is providing support so that CUED can redistribute HTK and provide development support via the HTK3 web site. See History of HTK for more details."

Go on, read the report, it's interesting:

From the executive summary it seems that Microsoft's stubborn refusal to read/write ODF is coming back to roost (is that the correct idiom?). The report is'nt really very negative but says there's no strong case to buy this new expensive software (MS Office 2007).

there were interoperability concerns regarding Office 2007; and Microsoft should urgently provide 'native' support for the OpenDocument format (ODF)

<slightly-offtopic-rant>

Imagine a world where everyone can always read each other's documents, no incompatibilities or "you must buy the newest version of your office program". It just saves everyone a bit of bother, this is not difficult to understand. Instead all I hear around me is comments how "Open Office ate the MS Word document that people e-mailed me" instead of the other way around.

</slightly-offtopic-rant>

<wildly-offtopic-rant>

I can't wait until that situation changes, until we're in the IMHO "lower-energy-cost" of these two bi-stable states. There's some "activation energy" movement though, recently (well, here in Europe).

Hey, what do you think of this comparison I just came up with (I'm having a bad cold and can't think straight today so please bear with me a bit longer):

• ODF is like ISO 216/DIN 476 A4

• MSOOXML is like U.S. Letter

Which is better for the kids in British schools? If you're still in doubt or American, read this nice explanation: link.

</wildly-offtopic-rant>

Coincidentally, I've been thinking about this recently. It's was a bit of a shock when I saw the idea here on Slashdot :-)

You could easily make a 2 or 4 wire serial bus out of the 4 feet and reception points of a block, but it might be quite limited in speed. Technically though, this could be pretty simple. Most controller and DSP microcontrollers have support for some type of serial bus, and the whole system can standardize on one.

Something like Microchip's CAN (controller area network) seems ideal - nodes do not need a specific ID to be addressed, rather the whole thing is a message passing system built in hardware. IIRC it uses a 2 wire bus, so it wouldn't even need to use all four contact pads.

But like I said it would be rate limited. The fasted serial buses I've seen are limited to about 1Mbps. Maybe it could use 2 buses to double that speed.

It could be done instead using a parallel bus which would be faster especially if it's a wide bus and can move many bits an one go, but this enlarges the connections between the blocks, microcontrollers don't have direct support (complicating programming) and all of a sudden things don't just "click" like Legos ;-)

As a mathematician, let me reply to your comment. We rarely care whether or not what is discussed can exist or not. For example, our universe appears to completely finite, but we discuss orders of infinity constantly. Also, we are completely comfortable with non-scientific words like "pretty". A good example of this may be found at http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~ym101/tie/short/tie_nature4.html discussing the possible nice looking possible tie knots.

by the way, i just recently saw articles on "the holographic principle." It states that the universe is made up from information and that matter/energy are merely accidentals which pose resistance to the flow of information. How the information moves is dictated by "laws" on the boundaries of preceding dimensions. So for example a 2d boundary describes a 3d, this last dimension acting as a projection of the last. The catch is that the dimensions are nested, so they inform each other, like links on a chain.

Here's a googlevideo lecture

it's all quite interesting, perhaps the problem in understanding this problem lies in language. using words like "laws" and "random" when signifying cosmic, or even meta-cosmic properties tends to muddle the whole thing. Ironically, mathematical language is what gives us that middle point.

Ahh, so what you mean is that massive numbers of native stacks are evil. Well duh. :)

and locks are used internally for queues even for languages with message passing primitives such as Erlang)

As an aside, why is this the case when there is so much good research on practical lock-free algorithms? What's with the Erlang guys?

The rules of the performance game are way different when you are dealing with massive parallelism. This is the reason why many concepts from functional languages, such as immutable data structures, are making a comeback.

If you're talking about massive scalability, then not having the option of changing a field in a data structure without allocating and initializing a separate copy first sounds like an expensive proposition. It's bad for memory locality (cache performance), it's bad for heap fragmentation, and it's bad for overall memory footprint. There's a time and a place for immutable data structures, but programming in languages where that's the only option is pretty limiting.

Can you make a movie with Soft TEMPEST fonts?

http://web.archive.org/web/20000816013319/http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/st-fonts.zip
http://rapidshare.de/files/38007929/st-fonts.zip.html

Soft Tempest: Hidden Data Transmission Using Electromagnetic ...
More information: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ih98-tempest.pdf

we have already won on FAXs and on Caller-ID. Next will be eMails and executable codes. NO SIGNATURE? NO EXECUTE.

• Digital rights management
• Prevent users from being able to to modify software
• Remove control over or access to data from users
• Strip away anonymity
• Leave backdoors into computer systems
• Remote 'bricking' of computer
• Forced upgrade/downgrade of system

... but I am as confident as I am that the Sun will rise tomorrow that it will be safe from terrorists. After all, we have the children to think about.

July 12, 2005

Copyright © 2005 Michael David Crawford.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

It seems that David Clark, who led the development of the Internet way back in the '70's - did you know there even was a '70's? - wants to create a whole new Internet that will fix many of the problems the current Internet is plagued with. The New Internet's engineers will be much more careful this time around to make sure it works better than the first one did.

I'm afraid, though, that the engineers are not the only ones who will be deciding how our New Internet will work.

If one is able to find any privacy or anonymity in this New Internet, it will be because of some undiscovered security hole, which will be quickly repaired, rather than any kind of conscious design decision. Probably one reason they are accepting proposals before rolling it out is to avoid the sort of accidental security holes that enable pr0n, peer-to-peer filesharing and left-wing political activism.

Microsoft, a leading contributor both to this nation's technology base and to the campaign coffers of its leaders, will embrace this new technology and extend it in such a way that the development and dissemination of Open Source software will be, if not mathematically and physically impossible, at least as intractible as factoring a 2048-bit public key.

Imagine, if you will, Trusted Computing implemented at the router level, in such a way that any packets that go farther than one hop are certified not only to support protocols whose patent licenses are fully paid-up and on file with the legal department in Redmond, but whose content is compliant with the Windows standard. The faintest whisp of a Public License, GNU or otherwise, will result in the dropping not only of the individual packet, not only in the cancellation of the entire file transmission, but, within microseconds, the reporting of the physical location of the offending server to responsible law enforcement personnel. The identities of its rogue administrators will be fetched instantly from the database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. (You will have to submit fingerprints and DNA samples to obtain a Windows server license, as after all, Internet servers can be used to disseminate explosives r

Will hitting the brain with electrons be enough to give us an understanding of these "weights", or just the connections between them?

Nope - it will be just the wire connections, just as if computer hardware without any software will have it's electrical circuits traced in order to understand better what a program running on the screen does - about in that magnitude, probaly much higher.

The "software" on a human brain is programmed from before birth and constantly changed.
Just the computing power of keeping all the muscles (multi-mode, contracting, brake-extending, stiff-blocking, spring-storing) coordinated and oriented in space to keep a human upright is enourmous.
The human (or any animated animal) body is an n-power parallel processor system with multi-media (pdf doc) parallel input/output processing.

This chapter, from Security Engineering - The Book has a good overview of this.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/xen/

Take an array of 1U cheapo intel servers with consistent Lights Out Management systems, a really nice 10Gbit ethernet switch, or maybe InfiniBand, install a basic Linux. Install Xen, Install a load balancing system like Sun Grid Engine.

Write some clever scripts and whahey! Your own personal mainframe/virtual datacentre with power and AC requirements which depend on your workload, which BTW, you can keep at 90% plus, rather than the more common 18%. The secret is in the "clever scripts", the fastest network (It's always been about the network) you can get your hands on and a bit of imagination.

This is BTW, what Cisco and VMWARE are working on. Basically a commodity mainframe; commodity hardware, commodity software. IBM of course have been doing it for decades... Smart cookies IBM, they really understand computing.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/information-units.txt

I mean 100 years of research, and nothing.

Have you actually researched it, or are you just asserting such to be the case?

Quoting statistician Jessica Utts:

I believe that it would be wasteful of valuable resources to continue to look for proof. No one who has examined all of the data across laboratories, taken as a collective whole, has been able to suggest methodological or statistical problems to explain the ever-increasing and consistent results to date. Resources should be directed to the pertinent questions about how this ability works. I am confident that the questions are no more elusive than any other questions in science dealing with small to medium sized effects, and that if appropriate resources are targeted to appropriate questions, we can have answers within the next decade.

Quoting parapsychologist Dean Radin (who's book, Conscious Universe, gives a reasonable layman's overview of results to date):

Most of the commonly repeated skeptical reactions to psi research are extreme views, driven by the belief that psi is impossible. The effect of repeatedly seeing skeptical dismissals of the research, in college textbooks and in prominent scientific journals, has diminished mainstream academic interest in this topic. However, informed opinions, even among skeptics, shows that virtually all of the past skeptical arguments against psi have dissolved in the face of overwhelming positive evidence, or they are based on incredibly distorted versions of the actual research.

Quoting Deborah L. Delanoy, of the department of psychology in the University of Edinburgh:

In conclusion, the findings from these meta-analyses suggest that consistent trends and patterns are to be found in the database. The consistency of outcomes found in the ganzfeld research, the robust PK effects, the modifying variables revealed by the precognition database, the variety of target systems displaying DMILS effects and the correlations found with personality traits are all indicative of lawful relationships. Given these relationships it is difficult to dismiss the findings as ``merely an unexplained departure from a theoretical chance baseline'' p. 301 [23]. Whether these effects will prove to represent some combination of currently unrecognised statistical problems, undetected methodological artefacts, or, as seems increasingly likely, a genuinely new, hitherto unrecognised characteristic of mind or consciousness remains to be seen.

I like where you're going with this. A dual A3/A4 device would be incredibly useful in workplace, where most stuff is printed in A4 but you often need to go to A3 for diagrams (especially Gantt charts).

The beauty of ISO standard paper sizes is that each in the series is exactly half the size of the next largest - i.e. the long edge of A4 is the same length as the short edge of A3. Therefore, if you want an A4 display you unroll your scroll half way. If you want an A3 display then you unroll it all the way.

...about the ramifications (both good and bad) of TC can be found here.

The main problem I have with TC is the fact that it removes control over the hardware from the user and gives it to a 3rd party entity.

When I purchase hardware, I expect to have full control over it's capacities. If the hardware is capable of doing something, I should be able to do it. There's something a bit eerie about giving your computer a command/instruction and having it come back and tell you it could do it, but that it won't (2001: A Space Odyssey anyone!?).

My worry is that TC misinformation will be pushed so much that the idea of the user being in control of their hardware will be considered old fashioned. Well, it may be old fashioned, but it also has the side effect of being correct.

Now, I do think that TC has a place in the corporate world where there is no expectation of employees being able to do whatever they want on the computer (businesses have a right to control their own equipment). But the propagation of TC into the public or home is what doesn't set well with me.

Worcester is pronounced Wusta ... ?!?!? They haven't just evolved - they've completely morphed!

The pronunciation probably dates back to before there was written English.

Towcester = toaster
Gloucester = glosster
Leicester = lester

I think Towcester at least goes back to the stone age although the name has changed over the millenia.

Then there are names like Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeley = Fanshaw-Chumley (although I think the hyphenation is more a case of "Just think if a Featherstonehaugh married a Cholmondeley")

St. John = sinjin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_St._John-Stevas
Caius = keys http://www.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/colleges/caius/
Dalziel = deyell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalziel
Menzies = mingiss http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Menzies_Campbell

Tim.

Not that it would be entirely on topic but you just remembered me of this guy who took high resolution pictures of the ISS, the Space shuttle, some spy satellite, and Mercury. He took multiple frames of the object of interest and selected the best for combining well here it is what he exactly did:

"Images of Mercury were obtained at 8 bits of resolution using exposure times of 16.7 ms at a rate of 60 frames per second and recorded on broadcast-quality videotape for subsequent data reduction. The images were sorted and selected based on maximum gradient of the planet's bright limb, co-aligned, and added in 16 bit space."

Here is a link:

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJ/journal/issues/v119n5/990240/990240.html

let me store it here so I don't forget it ;)

This method is used to reduce seeing which is random and capable of reducing that Mt. Wilson telescope aperture from 1.5m to some seeing limited aperture of maybe 10 to 20cm (my guess).

The pixelation problem is not that similar to seeing. I would think since each new larger pixel is the average of the same region in the original image it is somehow low pass filtered spatially. Recovering a part of the image would somehow make it necessary that the image information is stored in the time domain since you can't get it from that 2d single frame space. That high level view makes it again look like the seeing problem but with the seeing one gets some images which cover a large spatial bandwidth but have low dynamic range, while with the pixelation the spatial bandwidth is constantly low but the dynamic range in the image is constantly high.

Searching google gives me something about de-identification and how the simple methods here discussed are easily thwarted by face recognition software. I.e. the bad guy crosses the US border is photographed, later produces de-identified compromising images of himself. Then the blurred/pixelated image is fed into the face recognition program and compared to the border database - success should easily follow, because the facial features are still recognizable to the software.

Here is an example: http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/2003/CMU-CS-03-119.pdf

I just can't find what you were talking about, and I'll come across who knows what if I try to find it myself:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ieee02-optical.pdf

hell, didnt some tests show that as long as the first and last letter of the word was in the right place, the other letters could be all over the place and not affect readability?

Just to clarify, but the "tests" that so many people like to refer to didn't actually happen in the way that many people think they did. People are referring to a letter that was published in New Scientist making reference to the phenomenon. Some of the claims made in the portion of text that circulated around the Internet are clearly false; see this page for more information (he has some examples of sentences that are "scrambled" according to that rule, but are mostly unreadable).

RMS has many times explained very clearly why software patents suck.

At Cambridge University us Undergraduate engineers do a similar robotics project in 4 weeks on top of normal lectures. It's manic, but do-able. (Teams of 6 students) See: http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/DesignOffice/idp/index.html Of course, the project is run twice a term so all of the computing equipment and hardware you might need to build the robot is readily to hand - that makes a world of difference to speeding up development.

Hi!

I'm an undergraduate astrophysics major, but I've had some fun with amateur astronomy before. I know this suggestion will fall outside your budget, but it will eventually be the most cost effective strategy. First, buy a decent SLR digital camera. This will allow you to take nice deep images, quickly check your focus, or download them for postprocessing and printing (all in color and without having to purchase filters!). You'll want to mount the SLR on a ~10" reflector (Cass or Newtonian, not a big deal). That should give you enough light for deeper objects. Try finding things used through your local astronomy club. Perhaps you'll find a good deal. But do check the optics before you buy anything. This should be everything you'll need for years of great imaging. Good luck!

Interesting Links:
http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~optics/Lucky_Web_Site/LI_Amateur.htm
http://www.astro.shoregalaxy.com/webcam_astro.htm

Ahh OK for the record, Cambridge University didn't do any of this alleged research, according to Matt Davis, a "cognitive neuroscientist interested in language" working in the Cognition and Brain Science unit at Cambridge. Read the link for further details, and a lot more interesting analysis/discussion on this same phenomenon in other languages and whatnot. :)

Here's a decent rundown of the thing it made the front page here at the dot - though I'm having a tougher time tracking that down.

Check out http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/

http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~optics/Lucky_Web_Site/LI _Results.htm
Is that an 8 bit NES i see at the third picture from the top?

If you look at Oxford University Press's response to him, it seems this is nothing more sinister than a bug with OUP's website. They are working to fix it.

Seriously, what a jerk. This whole thing could have been solved with a 5 minute phone call to OUP's customer service line. Instead, he raises holy blogosphere hell (which, at the end of the day, is nothing more than a waste of time, of course). I hope he feels all self-important today.

I guess Hanlon's razor lives on: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."