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We suck at seeing blue because, of the three kinds of cones in the retina (most sensitive to red, green, and blue) light, we have far fewer of the blue kind than the other two. The two kinds of red/green color blindness do not impair visual acuity because the pigment from red cones is used in the green cones, or vice versa; so all the cones are still useful, but all respond to the same thing. There is a very rare form of color blindness in which (it is suspected) the blue cones have no pigment at all. Because there are so few blue cones, even though they are completely useless, vision is not harmed much.

You can read more here.

I'm a student at the tragically underrated University of Calgary, which has come up a few times in this discussion. In the past few years, I've followed this story quite closely - I write news for the school's undergrad paper, The Gauntlet and I covered two relevant pieces:

Story 1, June 2001
Story 2, July 2001

The first link is to the original story, which attributed the find to Dr. Peter Forsyth. Later on, Dr. Patrick Lee (who has been mentioned multiple times in this discussion) poached the research and headed for greener pastures at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

The interesting fact is that Forsyth's research found inexplicable gray spots in the residue of the destroyed tumour. At the time, I found it quite unsettling that this fact was completely ignored by the mainstream media in spite of the fact that he spent a significant portion of the press conference discussing the potential hazards that the spots could indicate, including encephalitis.

It looks like the clinical trials at Oncolytics (Forsyth and Lee were directly involved) are optimistic, showing no side-effects, but I urge everyone to temper their excitement for the time being. The allure of jumping to the conclusion that REO virus treatment is a miracle cure is significant, but the consequences of doing so could be disastrous.

This may seem like bitter cynicism, but take a hint from someone who has been on the front lines of this very discovery: the story reported by the mainstream media is never the whole story.

Patrick Boyle

I'm a student at the tragically underrated University of Calgary, which has come up a few times in this discussion. In the past few years, I've followed this story quite closely - I write news for the school's undergrad paper, The Gauntlet and I covered two relevant pieces:

Story 1, June 2001
Story 2, July 2001

The first link is to the original story, which attributed the find to Dr. Peter Forsyth. Later on, Dr. Patrick Lee (who has been mentioned multiple times in this discussion) poached the research and headed for greener pastures at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

The interesting fact is that Forsyth's research found inexplicable gray spots in the residue of the destroyed tumour. At the time, I found it quite unsettling that this fact was completely ignored by the mainstream media in spite of the fact that he spent a significant portion of the press conference discussing the potential hazards that the spots could indicate, including encephalitis.

It looks like the clinical trials at Oncolytics (Forsyth and Lee were directly involved) are optimistic, showing no side-effects, but I urge everyone to temper their excitement for the time being. The allure of jumping to the conclusion that REO virus treatment is a miracle cure is significant, but the consequences of doing so could be disastrous.

This may seem like bitter cynicism, but take a hint from someone who has been on the front lines of this very discovery: the story reported by the mainstream media is never the whole story.

Patrick Boyle

I'm a student at the tragically underrated University of Calgary, which has come up a few times in this discussion. In the past few years, I've followed this story quite closely - I write news for the school's undergrad paper, The Gauntlet and I covered two relevant pieces:

Story 1, June 2001
Story 2, July 2001

The first link is to the original story, which attributed the find to Dr. Peter Forsyth. Later on, Dr. Patrick Lee (who has been mentioned multiple times in this discussion) poached the research and headed for greener pastures at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

The interesting fact is that Forsyth's research found inexplicable gray spots in the residue of the destroyed tumour. At the time, I found it quite unsettling that this fact was completely ignored by the mainstream media in spite of the fact that he spent a significant portion of the press conference discussing the potential hazards that the spots could indicate, including encephalitis.

It looks like the clinical trials at Oncolytics (Forsyth and Lee were directly involved) are optimistic, showing no side-effects, but I urge everyone to temper their excitement for the time being. The allure of jumping to the conclusion that REO virus treatment is a miracle cure is significant, but the consequences of doing so could be disastrous.

This may seem like bitter cynicism, but take a hint from someone who has been on the front lines of this very discovery: the story reported by the mainstream media is never the whole story.

Patrick Boyle

We made a video a few years back on how the reovirus accomplishes this feat, in connection with Dr. Patrick Lee, at the University of Calgary, where the work first started.

How Reovirus Kills Cancer Cells

Quicktime required.

J

windside writes "Rex Murphy is reporting on the Canadian Prime Minister's website's use of its robots.txt file to disable search engines from crawling certain material. Many excluded items in the robots.txt file involve mentions of America, possibly to prevent people from finding out that taxes are much lower, that money is spent on government programs instead of on kick-ass jets for parliamentarians and that their senate actually does stuff." It seems Canadian officials could not be reached for because they were all busy taking bribes from their favourite soul-devouring oil company.

Note: Remember, Canadians may look nice, but we're mostly just as corrupt and evil as the Americans.

this one is even smaller, and has no moving parts:

http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~mirtchov/p9/cluster /

the laptop is used as a file- and authentication server (frontend to the cluster).

there's virtually no limit to how much it can grow (using Plan 9 as the underlying OS is key here).

also note the cute switch.

at USENIX this year this baby stole the show at the LinuxBIOS and Plan 9 BOFs.

It's even more fun in HTML

Calling all Geeks

I hope your thsesis didn't require the utilization of complex markup tags.

8.5 also hasn't been used ca. 1995. The replacement is called Rio. You can see many screenshots here.

Simplicity is key with this environment -- Rio's code base is ~7000 lines of C code, it is created (and optimized) with zero-copy of images for remote displays and other optimizations.

Because of the 'everything is a file' paradigm in Plan 9 every graphical program views the system as if it was running on the 'root' window in X. This kicks ass so much that it's unbelievably easy to program for.

To have remote viewing all that is required is to import and bind your /dev/draw /dev/mouse and /dev/cons over /dev in the remote system and just start the graphical program you desire.

It's quite neat, and it boils down to this: it was created by programmers for programmers. In terms of simplicity, clarity, generality and usability it is the Best Damn Environment you can get :) I admit I'm partial.

Plan 9 had it 14 years ago. Importing something and using it as your own is a consequence of its design -- everything is a file, so everything could be shared -- not a special hack like in QNX. That means I can let people import my mailbox so they can send mail to me on the 9grid or I can import somebody's IRC file system on my machine.

And it really means _everything_, not only devices. Check out this MPI implementation using remotely served and imported _pipes_:

message passing for Plan 9

i -- a browser attempt by Howard Trickey done sometime around 1996. you can view slightly less complex pages without crashing with probability of around 50%. i know of at least one masochist that uses it regularly.

charon -- the browser packaged with VitaNuova's Inferno operating system which runs native atop Plan 9 (among other OS's). this is your best bet if you want to stick to using Plan 9 only.

Everything else the runs under UNIX/Windows (see Opera lurking in the background?). you only need to have a machine to run VNC on.

links -- two people have started a port of this graphical browser to Plan 9, one may succeed, who knows :)

as for mozilla, there is a slight problem with porting it to Plan 9 -- the browser sources are twice the size of the entire Plan 9 operating system (including the PostScript viewer).

C'mon up to Canada for your education. The tuition is about half (or less) of what it is in the states, if you're gay you can get married, and we're about to decriminalize marijuana.

Better yet, you don't have to pay to see our rankings:

1 Toronto
2 Queen's
*3 McGill
*3 Western
5 UBC
6 Montreal
7 Alberta
8 Sherbrooke
9 Ottawa
10 McMaster
11 Dalhousie
12 Saskatchewan
13 Laval
14 Calgary
15 Manitoba

There's an abandoned project called SnapFS that worked as an extension of the ext3 filesystem, but it seems long dead. There's more mention of it here as well.

Hmmm...doing some Googling, I found this page that may have a useable download, but it's in alpha form.

It also looks like you can use LVM to create snapshots as well. I'll have to look at that more myself.

I suggest using the Notification Collage, which supports casual communication between close groups of collaborators (smaller teams within your company). It's an extremely lightweight application that has a clean install/uninstall process, and is easy to run (and leave running) all day.

Close collaborators can maintain awareness of each other using video snapshots, as well as desktop snapshots (both automagically taken at set intervals), and can communicate with sticky notes and chat items. They can share photos and stuff with each other too.

I should point out that I belong to the lab that created this little app. To be fair, it is a research prototype, but it is quite neat. We all run it in our lab to stay in touch because a few of us telecommute.

Sure you can write in elvish in Plan 9, I'm glad you asked. After all, those are the people who brought you UTF-8!

Screenshot here!

On the other hand lifes have been lost decades long because humans have made the wrong decisions. In the end we just have to see wich kills less people, hotshot pilots who think they are god, or computers wich don't think at all.

I recently saw a documentary about the US navy testing an autopilot system for landing aircraft on a carrier. Even in this extreme hotshot enviroment the computer is taking over. Because despite all the non-instinctive way of machines they beat us each time in reliable doing the same thing again and again.

Oh and of course a computer can not be threathened.

AINAL? What's that? A lawyer for the Arctic Institute of North America?

• Recency-based, instead of stack-based, history. If you're on Page A, click to Page B, hit 'Back' to return to Page A, and then click on Page C, you've lost Page B from your history. Some had the idea of having 'Back' not move a pointer down the history stack, but copy or move a history entry to the top of list. That way, hitting 'Back' twice would always return you to the page that was on your screen two navigational gestures ago.
• Tree-based history view. A lot of people have thought of, and tried, this one--show history as a 2D tree-like structure instead of a flat list.
• Smarter bookmarks and history. For example, knowing how many times you've visited each page and sorting them accordingly. Or showing pages in some arrangement that reflects the "nearness" of pages to each other.

For some details, check out some of the papers by S. Greenberg. (There are tons of other links I had around but I can't find them right now.)

I think the heavy research into this kind of "browser innovation" may indeed have died five years ago. What researchers began finding out then is that people had become very conditioned to the Back/Forward/History/Bookmark behavior provided by Netscape/IE. Any deviation from that made users uncomfortable and confused.

Notice that while Opera, Firebird, and the like have provided some nice advancements, they have not changed the basic behavior of these buttons. Either they (Opera, Mozilla) didn't think about any alternatives, thought the accepted behavior is the best, or didn't think users would accept the alternatives.

It's really inevitable, isn't it? At some point a UI convention becomes so ingrained to so many people, that an alternative that provides 50% improvement is not enough. It would take an order of magnitude improvement to make the masses switch. Basic browser behavior seems to have hit that wall.

We've released a statement outlining our position. Happy Reading...

The most critical part of the Third World ... I think remains today the Middle East, for the very simple reason that it's the locus of the world's major energy supplies for as far ahead as anybody can see. Hence, it was considered to be, and is still considered to be, of particular importance that the first beneficiaries of that wealth are not the people of the region; rather the resources must be under effective U.S. control; they must be accessible to the industrial world on terms that the United States leadership can see is appropriate and, crucially, the huge profits that are generated must flow primarily to the United States, secondarily to its British junior partner, to borrow the term used by the British Foreign Office, rather ruefully, to describe its new role in the post Second World War era. This is done in various ways. In part it's recycled by local managers who have to be dependent on the global rulers, a long story which continues.

Well quite naturally these arrangements breed continual conflict. Internal U.S. documents describe them in the conventional way. The conflicts are conflicts with radical nationalism, radical Arab nationalism that threatens U.S. dominance. For the public it's put a little differently, varying over time. These days it's international terrorism, or the clash of civilization; tomorrow it will be something new, but it's basically the same ones all the time. The question is, who's going to be the first beneficiaries of the region's resources? These conflicts are likely to become more virulent and ominous in the coming years, at least if the analysis and projection of quite a number of geologists are anywhere near accurate.

CPSC 599.48, Computer Viruses and Malware.

The 1st two courses in our program are called: "Introduction to Computer Science" NOT "Programming". The emphasis in those 1st courses is supposed to be on fundamental concepts - we are laying down the foundation for the rest of the program. 231 has not become a Pascal course, and 233 has not become a Java course. At least, that was never my intent.

I could prove it: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~erik

But, looks like someone has been doing some early studying for the course; our DNS is pooched. Oh well, its after hours now - it'll have to wait until tomorrow...

I was suprised at the raw nerve I seemed to have hit with the prof I was speaking to because she became somewhat defensive.

Becker gets that way.

I earned an A in the last academic C course [cpsc231/233] there four years ago. That course is now Pascal and Java, which are real handy for introducing green students to the concept of programming a computer.

There is this, which overlaps somewhat with the former C course (and was introduced with the abolishment of the C course), but at about 4 times the price with no credit...

(anon because other faculty read /. too)

No, the port simply hasn't been maintained by anyone. You will also want to note that programs like galeon do not work with OpenBSD/Mozilla yet.

There are specific instructions for Mozilla 1.3, as well as Phoenix.

It looks like the day is getting an average of 2ms longer per century, but it fluctuates 4-5ms away from that on a decade timescale plus some shorter-term noise.

• Obsession with encapsulation and single inheritance
• Dissing dynamic programming as being "slow" and "difficult to use." This is only true when you don't know any better than to program in a brain dead language. Otherwise, users of Lisp-derived languages have, in one way or another, been using an OO approach to programming even while passing around closures with dynamic data types.
• A pathological, unhealthy obsession with language bloat. Having several-hundred odd special case libraries because your language doesn't support dynamic typing is A-OK. C++ designers admitted they lost and just added STLs.
• "There is no logical need for a programming language to use dynamic typing or first-class procedures!" This is something that drives Java programmers nuts because they're constantly forced to cut-and-paste code for their stupid interfaces. However, they're not at all upset as this makes them seem more productive in terms of written LOC.
• Computing Power makes programming language inefficiency irrelevant. That's why today's native-code Common Lisp compilers feature tail-recursion removal and nearly optimal numerical compilation, while Java programmers are stuck running out of memory and C++ programmers are tweaking bits (the common expressions "penny wise pound foolish" applies very well to code optimization, it seems).

He could have downloaded this off of Kazaa or somewhere.

I could be mistaken, but I don't believe one can get an actual CD-ROM via Kazaa...

Seriously. A Linux nerd pointing out a licensing discrepancy is gonna end up fucking up the free Microsoft software for everybody.

Why not shut your fucking mouth, you arrogant nerd?

Poor Lance is already in violation of the restrictions on the media they gave him... he made an illegal copy and posted it on the Internet.

No, no, no. It's not a matter of if you want to or not. If you do, there's a world of mathematicians who will tell you that what you are doing might not qualify as mathematics.

One is not prime. Prime means having exactly two divisors, one of which is one. Please find enclosed a snider definition and commentary.

(Yes, I took MATH 230, but no, I didn't pass. Sorry I couldn't hold on, Clive.)

Um...now?

Note, that this is a hack, not an actual port.

April 1 It's a great book; I've never been comfortable with the Art vs Science camps in software development. Calling it a craft opens up a whole new model, which I think fits much better.

about Scrum tomorrow (wednesday)

Scrum is a way for everyone to feel good about their job

Hmm this might be why the U of Calgary introduced an A+ just this year. It counts as a 4.0 (same as an A) towards the GPA but shows up on the transcript as A+. One of my instructors said students with a 98% or higher on everything would get an A+ in the course. I think an A was 90% (possibly 85%).

In first year (a few years ago) I had a calculus prof who explained that a C was "good", a B was "really good" and, an A was "exceptional". I had to evaluate two (Comp Sci) teams at the end of a course last semester. I didn't give out a sigle A or A- (about 24 team members overall).

My reasoning was I hadn't seen anyone who was "exceptional", a couple of "really good"s for sure but I didn't give out an A.

This month I ran into someone from one of my teams. This person recieved a C+ from one team. That was below average so their mark was dropped down. To me a C+ is someone who showed up, worked enough and was willing to participate. I guess I'm behind the times a bit or maybe too critical.

Frink

Hmm this might be why the U of Calgary introduced an A+ just this year. It counts as a 4.0 (same as an A) towards the GPA but shows up on the transcript as A+. One of my instructors said students with a 98% or higher on everything would get an A+ in the course. I think an A was 90% (possibly 85%).

In first year (a few years ago) I had a calculus prof who explained that a C was "good", a B was "really good" and, an A was "exceptional". I had to evaluate two (Comp Sci) teams at the end of a course last semester. I didn't give out a sigle A or A- (about 24 team members overall).

My reasoning was I hadn't seen anyone who was "exceptional", a couple of "really good"s for sure but I didn't give out an A.

This month I ran into someone from one of my teams. This person recieved a C+ from one team. That was below average so their mark was dropped down. To me a C+ is someone who showed up, worked enough and was willing to participate. I guess I'm behind the times a bit or maybe too critical.

Frink

It's called either CZWeb or Thoughtscape, depending on whether you are talking about the research or commercialized version.

As for the back button thing, it has already been done as well.

The University of Calgary has a new Computer Science concentration (to go with Theoretical Computing, Software Engineering, etc) called "Games Design" that's about designing video games.

It's being billed as the first of its kind in North America: Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science with a Concentration in Computer Game Design. The (tacky) webpage for the concentration is here: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~becker/GamesConc/

>It's 20% of your gasoline budget, it's 20% less smog on the road. And remember that hybrid cars won't necessarily be replacing just economy cars, they'll be replacing older gas guzzlers as well. Frankly, i think a 20% savings *IS* relavent in the big picture.

Yes, but the cars are relatively unproven, and having experienced a long-lasting Toyota Corolla before, I didn't want to take the risk for such a small margin.

>The best solution is to lobby for legislative action, and eventually, lawsuits.

Yeah, but the problem is for every action, there's an unequal and opposite reaction (witness Alberta, a province heavy on natural resource use, acting like a chicken with it's head cut off over the Kyoto protocol).

>Potato cannons and giant 40ft. tv towers, two of the things you mentioned, don't strike me as hallmarks of an "intelligent lifestyle". *I* live in a city and I have DSS (don't need threee dishes I have a quad lnb) and I used to have an 8ft C band dish on the roof. I'm assuming you need the 40ft mast for reception, which wouldn't even be an issue if you weren't out in the sticks.

Okay, okay. Here's the problem which you (fortunately) don't experience in the US. In Canada, broadcast media is censured for non-Canadian content. I'm a bit less xenophobic than your average Canadian, so a 40 ft. TV tower, C-band dish, and those 3 DSS dishes ('till they outlawed those) get me non-Canadian TV.

Not to mention you have no hope of playing in the fun-but-pointless DXing game without a TV tower of some sort.

Without the 40 ft. tower, I can get pretty much all the locals on rabbit ears. But I just don't enjoy that type of xenophobic education. I know it's hard to believe Canada censures like that, so here's a few ways it's done. Oh, and swearing is so illegal the CRTC can, will, and has kicked people off the air for it, and fined stations for it. I won't even go into how the CRTC is accused of stealing C-Band dishes from Canadians that want a choice, or (shudder) how they told a local Nazi (yes, I do hate him... but saying that should have put me in jail, no? Fun how the laws are just one way) his website will be dismantled and destroyed should he choose to operate it in Canada. (I will make a journal entry about this one day... the world really needs to know broadcasting in Canada is goverened by a gestappo).

As a techno radio DJ I can assure you it's true, it seriously pisses me off that I can't play good music since I have to spend my time looking for (in general, really poor and unavailable, but there are gems) "canadian" techno. My 2 hour show basically shrunk to a 1 hour show + 1 hour weekly Canadian repeat once the station told me to follow the rules "or else".

Besides, while you seem to think it isn't "intelligence", this extra learning has provided me with a handsome second income (until mid-way through this year) installing satellites for people. I guess it's on to modchips now... At least I can use my soldering skills again!

>Eventually, ALL metro area will look like LA. Is that what you want?

YES! Again, what's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander. Mennonites designed this town, causing main streets to meet up to three times. I'd go for straight roads _any_ day.

>What is so bad about urban living (we're not talking coffins or archologies here, we're talking about an apartment) that you'd rather DIE than live there?

Simple. Like I've said, I won't be force fed Canadian content. Not to mention I simply enjoy being able to do my hobbies.

What would you think if someone decided to take away everything you enjoy to save some trees and told you to live in a box? Would you feel that being forced in that manner is no different that being put in jail? There's a lot of people who'd rather die than be put in prison for the rest of their life.

>You live in Canada where urban crime is practically non-existent.

No, it's very much here. The difference is the "fear factor" is lower because you can trust no one will be pulling a gun on you (please, I don't need to talk about guns again......) so people walk about ignoring it. Which, to a certain degree is unfortunate, since it makes them easy targets. But, then again, minus the guns they usually don't die. Which, again, means the crime doesn't make the front page, yada yada yada.

Anyways, time for me to stop my "gassing" on this. ;-)

Can't the courts decide if a law follows the spirit of the constitution, so to speak? Yes, constitutionally Congress has the right to pass things like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act... but do you think preserving the copyright for a cartoon mouse created by a man who is long since dead is what our founding fathers had in mind? Copyright laws were created both to give the author/artist incentive to create new works *and* to ensure at some point new works could be created based on older stuff.

This is exactly how disney became so popular, by using the work of authors that had gone into the public domain! Snow White, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid are just a few examples of older works that Disney has used.

Now Disney, and other huge corporations like Sony etc. are trying to make sure that no one else can do what they have done. This, to me at least (I am not a Supreme Court Justice) goes against the spirit of the constitution. From the SFGate Story:The original decision made more than 200 years ago to limit the length of copyrights was deliberate and carefully considered. The goal, which was expressed at the time in letters written by Thomas Jefferson and others, was to allow newcomers to build on and improve works produced by others, but only after the original creators of those works were compensated fairly for their efforts. The reason: Human progress builds upon itself."

These companies are trying to stop progress, and trying to stop other from doing to them what they did to the brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, and Victor Hugo.

If you're asking `what does astronomy in general benefit anyone else' the answer is that it does so in exactly the same way as any other activity that makes the world a more interesting place to live in. If it doesn't push your buttons, feel free to ignore it.

If you're asking why astronomers need the SKA rather than existing telescopes, the answer is that it will be able to do stuff that will never be possible with the existing instruments (because the required sensitivity can't be obtained in a sensible amount of time).A partial list is here). And there's lots more. If it gets built, the SKA will change radio astronomy the way the HST changed optical astronomy.

Instead of relying on super-powerful transmissions from the aliens, as we do now, we could detect, for the first time, signals at the same strength as our own and "listen" to most of our own galaxy for them.

This is truly new, and means a SETI "hit" comes into the realm of the probable, IMO. The link is to the "SETI" page on the SKA site. It's down a couple of levels and jargonized, so I don't think I deserve a redundant mod... but you're the boss!

I know why I despise christians. They keep moralizing and thumping their bibles crying "thou shalt not kill", but man, when they really want to kill someone, they have the PR.

Most Paulists will say that 'kill' and 'murder' are two different things,

"Thou shalt not kill" is a mistranslation that found its way into Latin and English translations. The original text would more accurately be translated "thou shalt not murder"...this is the original (Hebrew) text. It is also how it was translated to Greek, so there are some translations that managed to get it right. Thanks for playing, though.

I found a link in the article to be almost as interesting as the article itself. This is a link to Saul Greenberg's site at the University of Calgary where he has a collection of user interfaces, most of which have been designed by his students and include video examples. Here It Is

Check out the photo of some of his index cards. He had tracking Robert Silverberg since 1954. I bet even Robert himself does not know the names of all of the stories on those cards.

They have a page on donations here, nothing specific about the library but I'm sure you could specify that a donation is for the library.

According to the article, library officials estimated that $250,000 (in Canadian dollars, I'm assuming) would be needed to clean and restore the material. I think this would be a worthy project to contribute to, especially with the favorable exchange rate.

I've been looking over the UCalagary library site but I couldn't find any explicit donation mechanism. Anyone know who to contact to donate funds to preserve this material?

No, it is actually "thou shalt not murder". Read more here, for example. (Google search on "thou shalt not kill" "thou shalt not murder")

What about the Square Kilometer Array? I know, it's a radio telescope, but it's bigger!