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Take too much in a single setting, and you die. It's poison. But gawd I love it.

Caffein: Take too much in a single setting, and you die. It's poison. But gawd I love it.

Sugar: Take too much in a single setting, and you die. It's poison. But gawd I love it.

And finally, for this incredible adrenaline rush!>

Man... anything can and WILL kill you in to much a single setting, even an adrenaline rush!

Take too much in a single setting, and you die. It's poison. But gawd I love it.

Caffein: Take too much in a single setting, and you die. It's poison. But gawd I love it.

Sugar: Take too much in a single setting, and you die. It's poison. But gawd I love it.

And finally, for this incredible adrenaline rush!>

Man... anything can and WILL kill you in to much a single setting, even an adrenaline rush!

Sounds pretty safe from the reading MSDS.

1-decanol. Yuck.

If you're an academic (you can probably get an entercard if you are, through your institution), and can travel, get into one of the other legal deposit libraries. There are two within striking distance of London:

the University Library of the University of Cambridge

the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford.

The UK legal deposit libraries are, I believe:

the British Library
the University Library, Cambridge
the Bodleian Library, Oxford
the National Library of Scotland
the National Library of Wales,
and, bizarrely, the Library of Trinity College, Dublin (in Eire).

I'm impressed that the UK legal deposit system has offsite backups :)

At least Enron would balance the budget and pay off the debt in 1 quarter.

Well, at least they would try to balance the budget and pay off the debt in 1 quarter, and fail, and bring down the world economy, and set off World War III, and end cilisation as we know it, but at least they would try. That's much more than you can say about the guys currently in charge.

And always look on the bright side of life...

Personal computers, originally isolated, almost immediately began to self-organise into means of communication as well as computation--indeed it is the former, rather than the latter, which is their principal destiny.

The aroma of that argument reminds me a bit of Haldane soup.

Trusted computing? Trust yourself.

Seems rather complicated. Why not port the REXX script to the Linux box? There are some free REXX interpreters available for Linux.

it shows that you look for the cheapest and easiest way of getting a piece of paper rather than looking to obtain a real qualification.

Agreed. In a age where real universities such as City and Oxford do part-time courses, it's very difficult to justify a "rubber stamping" course.

They don't study CS at Oxford at all (their closest course is part of the maths dept.) For computer science it's Cambridge you want.

They do study C.S. at Oxford, here is their CS department. However I would have to agree with you that The Computing lab at Cambridge is superior as they are ranked as the best in the U.K. by the Times.

Supposedly, in the England, we were a year ahead of Scotland/Europe by the start of University and some 2 years ahead by the end. This extra depth comes at the expense of (sic)bredth of education.

I can't speak for Europe, but English undergraduate degrees do not finish two years ahead of Scottish Degrees, however you are right about being a year ahead prior to University, this is because Scottish Highers last one year while English AS/A-Levels are two years. That difference is compensated for by Scottish first degrees being a year longer than the English equivalents.

Of course, the shuttle never has flown a polar orbit, and SLC-6 at Vandenberg has it's own little hard-luck story (don't build your launch site on Indian burial grounds). The short of it is, the military got spooked about the reliability of the shuttle after Challenger blew up, decided it wasn't worth it to fix the problems at Slick-6, and have used Titans ever since. For the shuttle, that was a lot of very lucrative business lost.

Were it not for Challenger, the shuttle might have operated out of Vandenberg. What would public perception of the program be like if that were the case?

Here's a listing of all military launches using the shuttle.

Here's a Press Release...

Actually, they do, but they are referred to as vector processors rather than DSP's. Probably the most famous and the first was the Cray supercomputer. And there was also the INMOS "Transputer"

DSP's are optimised to handle streamed data of a particular maximum size (Eg. 4-element float point variables). Useful for image processing (red,green,blue,alpha) and 3D graphics(XYZW), but if you're modelling something like ocean currents, global weather, every data element is more than likely going to have more than four variables (eg. temperature, humidity, velocity, pressure, salinity, ground temperature), you may not get full optimisation.

Plus, you also need a means of getting all these processors to talk to each other. DSP's are nearly always optimised to operate in single pipelines, so don't need much communication support (eg. Sony Playstation 2). However, if you're designing a supercomputer system, the major bottleneck is the communication between processors (network topology). Some applications might only need adjacent processors to talk to each other (global weather simulation usually represents the atmosphere as a single large block of air, with sub-blocks assigned to seperate processors. Other applications might assign individual processors to different tasks, which complete at different rates (eg. the Mandelbrot set). A configurable network architecture allows the system to be used for many more different applications.

• What makes for a good advisor/program/topic
  • There is a famous fable, which states that choice of advisor is more important than choice of topic. While this may be overstated, good advisors have a sense of what is interesting and provide interesting directions. However, be wary of working with really big names, often they are very hard on their students. Try to determine how they treat their students and what sort of time frame and rate do they graduate at.
  • Getting the right advisor is more important than going to a fancy school. E.g. if say, Don Knuth came out of retirement and went to teach at some relatively unknown University with a new Ph.D. program, his recommendation would still carry significant weight. However, good programs tend to have more good people (which is why they are good) and a larger program can carry on more ambitous research projects.
  • Before going to grad school, try to pick one or 2 areas to focus on and target those areas. If you like say Data Mining, read the recent conferences and see who is doing interesting work. Often a few good people will be at the same institution with a small focus group working on a particular problem.
• What the student should be trying to do
  • Learn to finish - you must also learn to say no to projects that distract you from your goals. Pick a project and stick with it. Students who drift between projects often start many and finish none. If you have trouble finishing projects a Ph.D. is not for you.
  • Familiarize yourself with the literature - Read the major conference articles. You can't possibly read everything however, that will paralyze you. Pick a sub topic and survey it.
  • Keep your research active - many students and faculty get paralyzed because no project seems good enough, so they pick some hard open ended problem and get stuck in a "tar pit". Being deep doesn't mean being narrow.
  • Try to do work that gets cited. Writing a lot of papers is important, but being read and known in the community is important.
  • Go to conferences - try to go to one early in your academic program (before you even publish) to see what the leaders in your discipline are doing and to get a sense of the currently interesting research directions. You can pick a hard topic that seems important, but it helps if others agree that it is important.
• Hiring Related Timing matters when searching for a job, especially at the Ph.D. level. A Ph.D. can be thought of as a certification, sort of like a driver's license, it doesn't mean you are Mario Andretti, nor does it mean that people lacking the certification are incompetent. Most Ph.D.s are expected to specialize and extend the state of the art. A Ph.D. in a theoretical topic can generally expect greater difficulty in finding a good position (unless they do landmark work) while a hands on type may fare better. If you are in Computer Science, you would be well advised to look at the Taulbee survey (see the CRA website for this an more information), which gives an annual salary survey and dicsusses the outlook for Ph.D. placement. When I started (early 1990's) the outlook was quite poor, and I went against the grain. I was lucky that I got out at a good (nearly optimal) time.

My guess is that sun lacks a mascot who stands for liberty, love and the pursuit of happiness all the while standing up for the little guy.

A mascot should enjoy being a super hero, fragging, and sports and should appeal to the geek, the freak, the n00b and those corporate types.

And no! Duke is not cool. Duke thinks that he is cool. But he only reaches cute. And cute is for sissies.

* Trust is only dangerous when you have to rely on it.
* Reality is a dangerous concept.
* There is no logical reason why aliens should be hairy.
* I am not stupid, I'm not expendable, and I'm not going.
* No good deed goes unpunished.
* It is frequently easier to be honest when you have nothing to lose.
* Civilization has always depended on courtesy rather than truth.
* On Earth it is considered ill-mannered to kill your friends while committing suicide.
* The art of leadership is delegation.
* All that patience gets you is older.
* Show me someone who believes in something, and I will show you a fool.
* Regret is part of being alive -- but keep it a small part.
* He who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.
* Infallibility depends on your point of view.
* There are times when even the most cynical must trust in luck.
* Heroics seldom run to schedule.
* Dignity, at all costs, dignity.
* The choice is very simple -- either you can fight, or you can die.
* In the end, winning is the only safety.
* Power usually makes its own rules.
* Some days are better than others, Section Leader.
* It is not necessary to become irrational in order to prove that one cares; indeed, it is not necessary to prove it at all.
* While there's life, there's threat.
* Luck has nothing to do with it.
* Strategic withdrawl is running away, but with dignity.
* Idealism is a wonderful thing; all you really need is someone rational to put it to proper use.
* Nobody is indispensible.
* Everyone's entitled to one really bad mistake.
* In the end, your word is all there is, really.
* There are other rules, but you'll find out what those are when you break them.

A little background story. I've always been a Malaysian citizen although I went to school and university in the UK. My first job was in the IT department of a rather large investment bank and I recently got made redundant.

As a graduate of a university of some repute and with 18 months of work experience under my belt, I would expect to have exactly the same job prospects as any other British university graduate here in the UK. Unfortunately (for me), work permits are hard to come by as companies have to prove that they've advertised for positions in local newspapers/trade journals for a minimum of two months before they are allowed to tap the international job market and, as a result, I've had no jobs coming my way. The result of this is that I've accepted a job in my home country for an 80% pay cut (my new job is paying US$ 790 per month).

Folks, I've seen a few posts which either directly or indirectly imply that we Third World workers are nowhere as productive as Americans. I agree this is most probably true for world-class programmers, you can't realistically expect me to believe that EVERY SINGLE American university graduate is that much better. The company that I'll be working for was founded by an Oxford graduate, several of the directors have been educated in England and the United States, and we're all working for substantially less than what you in the West are used to.

Keeping that in mind, please tell me what incentive large corporations actually have for employing an American (or European) worker if you can get quality work done for much cheaper elsewhere.

It's not all doom and gloom, guys. I've been thinking about the situation and there are sectors in which jobs should still be available. I doubt it's that worthwhile for smaller IT outfits to offshore their work, having no infrastructure in place in India (for example). You also have many more contacts and knowledge about your respective countries (be it the USA, the UK, Finland, or whatever) than Ranjit from Bangalore or Abu from Kuala Lumpur. Use that as leverage.

I do wish everyone the best of luck, though I don't expect it to be very pretty in the short term.

You can get a book about Z here.

Apparently it's caught on here too... :S

Just wait till Project Gutenberg gets a hold of these!"

You can already find some Sumerian texts on the Internet, along with translations:

The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature

"The fact is humans tolerate a certain amount of radiation. Regarding Plutonium being poisonous do you know Caffeine is more poisonous than Plutonium? Think about it next time you have a cup of Coffee or drink Jolt."

Whoa, I just went to do some googling to prove you stupid but all I could come up with are this, this, and this. These give the LD50 data for both of these substances. LD50 means the lethal dose that kills 50% of a given population within 30 days (given in milligrams of substance per kilogram of body mass).

Caffeine has an LD50 of 57-260 mg/kg, while plutonium has an LD50 similar to that of pantothenic acid which is up to 10 g/kg (if taken orally) or 820 mg/kg (if injected). Caffeine is clearly more toxic than plutonium according to this! I still don't quite believe this, so can someone come up with better numbers or a good reason why this isn't the case?

"The fact is humans tolerate a certain amount of radiation. Regarding Plutonium being poisonous do you know Caffeine is more poisonous than Plutonium? Think about it next time you have a cup of Coffee or drink Jolt."

Whoa, I just went to do some googling to prove you stupid but all I could come up with are this, this, and this. These give the LD50 data for both of these substances. LD50 means the lethal dose that kills 50% of a given population within 30 days (given in milligrams of substance per kilogram of body mass).

Caffeine has an LD50 of 57-260 mg/kg, while plutonium has an LD50 similar to that of pantothenic acid which is up to 10 g/kg (if taken orally) or 820 mg/kg (if injected). Caffeine is clearly more toxic than plutonium according to this! I still don't quite believe this, so can someone come up with better numbers or a good reason why this isn't the case?

Where did you park your Victorian time machine?!

Sodium methoxide is NaOCH3

The problem of GPL license taint is why I came up with a new license for my code.

People can take my code, modify it, redistribute the modifications, et cetera, but they can't add any sort of "taint" which would block future closed-source derivatives.

If things get a bit busy here's the primary mirror site

Why Helium Makes Your Voice Go Up:

Why does inhaling helium gas make your voice go up? Well it really doesn't! It only sounds that way because helium gas changes the resonant frequency of your vocal tract. Every tube, regardless of whether its a piece of pipe or your vocal tract, has one natural frequency at which it vibrates most often. We call this the resonant frequency and it is controlled by two factors; the length of the tube and the speed at which sound moves through it. Since helium is less dense than air, sound travels through it faster, about 2 1/2 times faster. This is what apparently makes you voice go up. The faster moving sound waves causes your vocal tract to resonate at a higher frequency which enhances the high pitched sounds.

The same physics applies to hydrogen. Here are some data points using hydrogen. Point 1 Point 2

This site strongly implies mass is lost in exothermic checmical reactions, but says that the mass lost is too small to measure. this site implies the same thing.

I'd welcome any other references (scientific journals?)

Especially since it includes his phone, address, email, picture and also a history of grade school exploits. I don't think this guy's going to have much trouble getting a job though.

Sounds like a combination of Google's Zeitgeist and LiveJournal's MemeTracker. In other words, nothing that new.

It's also the basis for Computational Lexicography. Doing analysis on large corpora. One of the interests people have in this field is introduction of new words in society. The field used to use corpora such as the British National Corpus, but since the explosion of the Web, sites such as Google can far exceed that size. Weblogs are simply a good example of a more natural form of language. The interesting thing would be not so much to find new trends through words... but if we can truly solve the whole natural language parsing problem and use such information to extract higher-level knowledge

I and countless others are getting fed up with all the "this is a dupe" reporters out there

And haven't you noticed you are now one of those people? Not the "This story is a dupe", but the "I'm sick of you dupe complainers" (whining, redundant, cowardly jerk.)

Are you submitting plenty of original articles to slashdot yourself?

Actually, two days ago, I submitted a story about how bioresearchers at the University of Oxford released a distributed computing screensaver to help scan for protein agents to fight smallpox. I was quite thorough in checking the text and the working links. In hours, they rejected it. It really bummed me out. At the time, I thought they didn't like my blurb, but that the story would be important enough to pick up someone else's submission. Nope, instead, they decided to run the capacitor story yet again.

So, the researchers could really use some CPUs, and some leech here probably could use the karma, so go submit this story again. Beats another dupe, IMO.

if you notice a dupe...fine...notice it and then shut the fsck up and go masturbate over some pr0n or something.

Don't you think if the editors can't seem to avoid duping stories within days (or extreme cases hours) from another, that they may need some help in having it pointed out to them?

When I taught at a fairly prominent UK university in the philosophy faculty, there seemed to be a process of osmosis whereby undergraduates would gradually come to be aware of roughly what an alpha-quality essay looked like, how it differed from a beta, a beta from a gamma, etc. This tacit knowledge would then get applied by the unlucky few of us who ended up as junior academics charged with the tedious taks of marking examination scripts. There was never any suggestion of fiddling with grades to arrive at a pre-established distribution at the end of the process, and quite right too: the standard for a degree of a given class was pretty much settled, so clueful recruiters could know just what they were getting when they hired one of our guys/gals.

It depends on the thread abstractions that are used for synchronisation and thread communication. The most commonly used abstractions today (semaphores, locks, etc) date from the 1970s; there are much better ways to do it!

One way derives from a mathematical notation created by Tony Hoare, called CSP. There is one unit of thread communications and synchronisation, called a channel. It's like a rendezvous point that allows a value to be passed between threads. If one thread tries to send a value on a channel, it will block until another thread tries to read from the channel (also, reading from the channel will block until another thread tries to send on it).

This scheme is incredibly versatile, easy to use and cheap. There are also some tools that can aid in automatic verification of software built in this way. It's true that it's possible to deadlock in concurrent systems, but it's almost always possible to structure the system in such a way that it's deadlock-free by construction. For instance, if my program is structured as a one-way pipeline, it's impossible to deadlock.

Concurrency at this level in a GUI application can greatly enhance the simplicity and maintainability of a program. This is because it's generally much easier to write a straightforward piece of imperative code than encode the same thing as a state machine, e.g.

while (buttons != 0) {
(buttons, point) = <-mouse;
drawat(point)
}


(where <- receives from a channel), versus:


callback(buttons, point) {
if (state == DRAGGING) {
if (buttons != 0)
drawat(point);
else
state = NOTDRAGGING;
}
}

You say:
That would be the case if interaction was a parallel activity, but unfortunately it's not.

But it is! Yes, the user themselves only contributes one thread to the activity, but the program itself is often dealing with multiple activities at the same time; for instance updating itself in response to network activities or updating graphics on a time-step basis.

The most important thing it gives you, in my experience, is the sense of control. As a separate thread, you are free to structure your application in a way directly appropriate to the task being solved. In a callback system, you are at the mercy of the caller; you can't just wait for an event, then do the next thing, you have to encode your current state, return, and wait to be called back, whereupon you have to figure out where you just were!

For a language that exemplifies this, see Limbo, the language of choice in the Inferno environment. No problems with thread unsafe graphics there!

And Bill Clinton was not a Rhodes scholar, merely a candidate. He was tossed out of Cambridge after a co-ed charged him with rape.

Ah, I see. So, the Rhodes trust mistakenly sent him to Cambridge instead of Oxford, and Oxford mistakenly claims that he was a Rhodes scholar for the usual two-year term.

Easy mistakes to make.

With the exception of Donald Knuth, all of the names you list are of people who had mostly engineering contributions, as opposed to bringing scientific advancements in the field (although the two are somewhat related). Did you mean to exclude the people who created and formalized computer science? If not, then you most definitely want to include Alan Turing, Edsger Dijsktra, C. Antony R. Hoare, Niklaus Wirth, and Marvin Minsky.

public class CharArray {
protected char []chars;
public CharArray(){
chars =new char [100 ];
chars [0 ]='\0 ';
}
public String getString(){
int i;for (i =0;chars [i ]!='\0 ';i++);
return new String(chars,0,i);
}
public void insert (char c,int pos){
int i;for (i =0;chars [i ]!='\0 ';i++);
for (;i>=pos;i--)chars [i+1 ]=chars [i ];
chars [pos ]=c;
}
public void prefix (char c){
insert (c,0);
}
}

public class CharArray {
protected char []chars;
public CharArray(){
chars =new char [100 ];
chars [0 ]='\0 ';
}
public String getString(){
int i;for (i =0;chars [i ]!='\0 ';i++);
return new String(chars,0,i);
}
public void insert (char c,int pos){
int i;for (i =0;chars [i ]!='\0 ';i++);
for (;i>=pos;i--)chars [i+1 ]=chars [i ];
chars [pos ]=c;
}
public void prefix (char c){
insert (c,0);
}
}

In Europe, that wouldn't be considered *old*. Heck, in Oxford we've still got New College, founded in 1379.

Like this ?

I'm a medical writer so I can comment on the medical content of the sites in the Consumer Webwatch reports. I don't think they're good enough.

(Since I write for the web, I found the programmer comments very useful. OK, I'll change that code in my site RSN).

I agree completely that (my) content doesn't matter if you can't find it, and without good graphic design, backed up by good programming (thanks guys), you can't find anything on those web sites (which have thousands of pages). Everything you want to know about medicine is on the Internet many times over, but the problem is (1) finding it (2) in a form that you can understand and (3)evaluating its accuracy and validity.

Here's a good example: I went to a doctor for a checkup, and he didn't perform a digital rectal examination, although he did give me a guiac test. A DRE is a way of screening for prostate cancer and rectal cancer, and the American Cancer Society among other well-known organizations recommends it for everyone above 50, like me. A guiac test samples the stool for blood, which is often a symptom of colon cancer. Various organizations also recommend sigmoidoscopy (a fiber optic scope that goes through the rectum and up the colon about a foot) and colonoscopy (which goes up the colon even farther) as screening for colon cancer. My medical textbooks were either out of date or ambiguous on these issues.

So, here's my question for the medical web sites:

Should my doctor have performed a DRE on a 50-year-old man in a routine physical?

My first stop was the web site rated No. 1 by the experts National Institutes of Health. Once I got there, I realized that I had to refine the question. What I really wanted to know is,

would a DRE have lowered my chances of dying of cancer?

As it turned out, there are scientific studies with control groups that found that there was no good evidence that patients who had screening DRE, sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy lived longer than patients who did not. However, patients screened with guiac tests did live longer (endpoint of death, they call it). I found this on the professional side of the site, not the consumer side, couched in technical language. Not easily accessible or understandable -- for something that your life depends on.

So when I read the Consumer WebWatch report, I decided to see how the expert's No. 2, MayoClinic.com handled it. To my surprise and dismay, the Mayo Clinic web site, in its extensive discussion of screening for colon cancer, did not make the point that only guiac testing had been shown to save lives. There is criticism in the medical literature that doctors don't provide enough hard information to their patients to enable patients to make an intelligent decision. I think the fact that the life-saving ability of 3 of those 4 screening tests is not supported by evidence-based medicine is an important fact for patients that the Mayo clinic should have provided for patients who are trying to decide whether to take an uncomfortable and (for the scopes) expensive test with a risk of perforating the bowel.

Evidence-based medicine, BTW, is a term of the art, and a good Google search. It means practicing medicine on the basis of scientific evidence, when it exists (the catch: you wind up saying, "science doesn't know" too much of the time).

EBM started when 2 doctors in Canada were having trouble keeping up with all their reading, and said, "Hey, let's just read the stuff that's supported by scientific evidence." That cut down the pile significantly.

A good explanation is on the Bandolier web site, from Oxford, UK. This will reduce medicine to the rationality that engineers and other geeks are used to thinking in.

What is series:
Evidence-based Medicine

Bandolier

Forms of evidence
Evidence is presented in many forms, and it is
important to understand the basis on which it
is stated. The value of evidence can be ranked
according to the following classification in
descending order of credibility:

I. Strong evidence from at least one
systematic review of multiple well-designed
randomised controlled trials.

II. Strong evidence from at least one properly
designed randomised controlled trial of
appropriate size.

III. Evidence from well-designed trials such as
non-randomised trials, cohort studies, time
series or matched case-controlled studies.

IV. Evidence from well-designed
non-experimental studies from more than
one centre or research group.

V. Opinions of respected authorities, based on
clinical evidence, descriptive studies or
reports of expert committees.

BTW, when people ask me where to find medical information on the Internet, I recommend peer-reviewed sources, starting with the Merck Manual Home Edition , then British Medical Journal, then Medicalstudent.com.

But you can't do it on the Internet alone without professional guidance -- medical librarians explained to me how to search the medical literature. And very often what you want to know is only available on paper.

I went into this in more detail when I taught a class in medical journalism. I interviewed a medical librarian and posted her explanation in an article on my web site. That's why brick libraries are so valuable -- they don't just have paper, they have librarians.

Perhaps you should concentrate on tcpdump logs instead of trying to reverse engineer the code itself. I've considered tackling this project myself.

I have tackled this project myself for a while. I didn't get anywhere with the handshake thing, but I found out about a bit about some of the proprietary protocols involved, such as RDT. The packet header structure looks like it's been deliberately obfuscated to prevent reverse-engineering. But as it's not actually encrypted, it's still hackable.

but it was the previously missing key to saving streamed media.

No, the way to save streamed media is to run tcpdump to capture the packets, while you play the stream using the offical RealPlayer, then investigate the logs. As the stuff still isn't encrypted, you can then reassemble it. I've done this a couple of times, but the code I wrote to do it is such a hack that I won't be releasing it any time soon. (Information about some of the media protocols involved can be found online if you look hard enough.)

Of course, if someone did manage to rediscover this key, or even if one of the original hackers who wrote Streambox could reconstruct it, and then it was released open source, Real wouldn't be able to shut it down so easily. Which would lead to one of two things: Either Real is no longer used as a streaming protocol, as everyone knows how to hack it (until they take time to build a new handshake protocol that isn't vulnerable), Or the few kilobytes of code required will reach the same state as DeCSS - you will be prosecuted for distributing it, reading it, using it, explaining it, and if it's found that you actually wrote it, then you're well and truly shafted.

Well, of even lower (artificial) intelligence, but to my mind hugely more impressive is the classic, unbelievable, ladies and gentlemen please put your hands together for David Horne's chess program for the unexpanded ZX81! It's amazing what can be done in 1K (well, 672 bytes really).

Here's the same link, but anchored for those too lazy to copy/paste:

http://tirian.magd.ox.ac.uk/~nick/UnionDebate/

Posting as AC to prove i'm not whoring karma ;-)

Well, if you actually read my article properly...... you'd see that Dave Green from NTK had a recorder with him, and the Union video'd the whole debate. No news on when (if ever) either of those will go online though - waiting on Dave seeing if the quality is good enough, and the Union reaching a decision on putting their debates on the net.

Blazing red hair is a very recessive trait created entirely by past inbreeding in Europe -- and past inbreeding is a common heritage for Europe, as well, since most Europeans can trace their ancestors back to a very small group of perhaps a dozen Ice Age survivors.

It's important to point out that traits and genes are not actually created by inbreeding, just expressed. (I realize you probably know this, but it needs to be emphasized).

Do you have a reference for the claim that Europeans are descended from "perhaps a dozen" Ice Age survivors? I've seen mitochrondrial DNA studies that can trace matrilineal inheritance back to this many women, but that's quite different from an estimate on a population bottleneck. In particular, it's quite possible for the size of the population could be much larger, but forfemale-line descendents of other "clan mothers" to have died out since.

This paper argues against the idea of a Pleistocene human population bottleneck:

Both genetic and anthropological data are incompatible with the hypothesis of a recent population size bottleneck. Such an event would be expected to leave a significant mark across numerous genetic loci and observable anatomical traits, but while some subsets of data are compatible with a recent population size bottleneck, there is no consistently expressed effect that can be found across the range where it should appear, and this absence disproves the hypothesis.

Lastly, I think forecasting the total extinction of redheads is a wee bit premature. The genes are out there, and while their frequency may decrease with time due to low birthrates in Europe and North America, you'd have a hard time convincing me that European descendents are going to leave no offspring at all. As long as there are two people carrying redheaded genes, whatever other "weird" phenotypes they have, their kids will have red hair. And it's not as though we're all about to go breeding willy-nilly.

You can contribute to a cure for cancer with a project managed by Oxford University's Dr. Graham Richards. This is currently in a second phase using LigandFit virtual screening software.Powered by Accelrys (scientific software) and United Devices (Global Metaprocessor). Link is here

OpenSSL has everything you need to run your own CA. If you need some more docs than those that come with OpenSSL, there are loads out there, including these written by me. I run a CA using OpenSSL, and it's great. Does everything I need. All the internal machines trust the CA, and those external people who need to have also set up their browsers to trust it, so all is fine.

There are a wide variety of people discussing the idea that "constants" (such as Planck's as mentioned) may indeed be variable. Although I'm not sufficiently nerdy to vouch for this, it is certainly something interesting. Discusses some of the possible instances of observed variance as well as some of the larger implications to theory that would result if the observations are correct.

I'm not in the seti or d.net competitions anymore because I'd rather spend my cycles on Distributed Folding, or a cure for cancer.