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Dark photons come from dark suckers.

Now get offa my lawn!

Other satellites noticed Greenland's extensive surface melt because melting snow lowers the ice sheet's albedo. However, water has the same mass as a liquid or solid, so GRACE can't tell the difference between ice and meltwater. GRACE can measure how much meltwater flows into the ocean, because in that case there would be less mass on Greenland.

Also, Ambitwistor referred to the popular monthly GRACE fields, which are available as spherical harmonics and gridded fields. In addition, CNES produces 10 day solutions, and Bonn even produces (constrained) daily solutions. But the monthly fields are by far the most widely used, because the ground track coverage is more complete during a month, and the extra data increases their signal to noise ratios.

That conficker.c blocks anything with conficker in dns request. There's another one here, with a simpler interface: http://iv.cs.uni-bonn.de/fileadmin/user_upload/werner/cfdetector/

Hey, I didn't mean to slashdot the page :-( The Honeypot guys have a similar type of page here, but I'm not sure if it'll get slashdotted as well. Also, it's not nearly as much fun, as it only gives you a yes-or-no answer, with no cute .gifs to indicate your level of doom.

1. Download and install Python 2.6.1: http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.6.1/python-2.6.1.msi
2. Download Impacket from http://oss.coresecurity.com/repo/Impacket-stable.zip (or maybe http://pypi.zestsoftware.nl/impacket/ or some other mirror)
3. Download the scanner from http://iv.cs.uni-bonn.de/uploads/media/scs.zip
4. Unpack Impacket into a folder, then install Impacket from a command line with c:\python26\python setup.py install
5. Run the scanner with the command c:\python26\python scs.py [start_ip] [end_ip]

(Hat tip to an AC comment at El Reg). Just a warning - it runs like a dog. I found that a passive Honeypot like Honeybot works well and is easier to install.

We all have our pet peeves. Mine is people that go around claiming things are stupid and unscientific when they have no scientific backing.

Please try to research a subject before you claim it is unscientific, or stupid:

Study Shows Aspirin Blocks Plant Pain

It's not news anymore that plants may "cry in pain" when attacked or damaged by a hungry herbivore, but now we know that there is a way to stop all this vegetable "suffering" right in your medicine cabinet -- with simple aspirin.

Neurobiological View of Plants and their Body Plan

Each root apex harbours a unit of nervous system of plants. The number of root apices in the plant body is high and all brain-units are interconnected via vascular strands (plant nerves) with their polarly-transported auxin (plant neurotransmitter), to form a serial (parallel) nervous system of plants. The computational and informational capacity of this nervous system based on interconnected parallel units is predicted to be higher than that of the diffuse nervous system of lower animals, or the central nervous system of higher animals/humans.

Usually there is no hint of the original colour preserved in fossils, but colour patterns have been found in plenty of fossils of a variety of ages and types and have been known since at least the 1930s (check this book chapter). Unfortunately there are no pictures in these web sources. You'll have to look up the sources on paper, sorry.

What sort of things preserve colour patterns? There are cone-shaped nautiloids from the Devonian of Germany with zig-zag and linear stripe patterns, snail and other shells with stripes or spots, insects from Brazil (Cretaceous) and Utah (Eocene) whose wings have preserved colour patterns, and, as the article hints, bird feathers with colour patterns have been known for decades. Because they are only patterns, it isn't known what the original colours were (for all we know it could have been a boring brown versus grey or something exotic like green and purple), but it's better than nothing, and even finding the patterns is quite rare.

What's news in the posted article is only the part about the possibility of melanin or something derived from it being preserved. So, it's a bit of progress on what, exactly, is being preserved in these colour patterns.

There's one instance I know of where the actual colour of the ancient creature is preserved as a fossil: a beetle from a famous locality in Germany called Messel. Here's a picture, and here's a news article. As seen in quite a few modern beetles, the colour isn't caused by pigment but by irridescence (i.e. light interference) due to the microscopic structure of the insect's wing covers. It's analogous in some ways to the rainbow of colours you see on the bottom of a CD due to the pits on the surface. In animals this is sometimes called "structural colour". The preservation at Messel is so good that this fine detail was preserved, and the beetle therefore still has it's colour visible!

If mechanical calulators and computers interest you I highly recommend the Arathmeum in Bonn, Germany. There are machines from the 17th-20th centuries and you're allowed to try some of them yourself. Even my wife enjoyed it.

We don't know all the details of the Big Bang and of biogenesis.

If we accept that there is observational evidence for dark energy, we would rather believe we know pretty much next to nothing, given the proposed composition of the universe (dark energy 70%, dark matter 26%); which leaves 4% for the details.

CC.

P.S.: Agnostic with a bias towards Taoism and a 'Gaian' type of theory

Take a look here --> http://kubuntu.org/announcements/koffice-16.php

or, add these to you /etc/sources.list :

        * deb ftp://bolugftp.uni-bonn.de/pub/kde/stable/koffice- 1.6.0/kubuntu dapper main
        * deb http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.kde.org/pub /kde/stable/koffice-1.6.0/kubuntu dapper main
        * deb http://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/kde/stable/koff ice-1.6.0/kubuntu dapper main
        * deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/koffice-16 dapper main

" For really big numbers, see:
http://www.uni-bonn.de/~manfear/numbers_names.php "

    Hey! I always thought Yocto, Zepto, Atto and Femto were the four Marx brothers!

"antimatter states at 3 trillion times a second."
But that's only American trillions (10EXP12) and not the real trillion (10EXP18)
10EXP Am RestOfTheWolrd
    6 million million
    9 billion thousand million (or milliard)
  12 trillion billion
  15 quadrillion thousand billion (or billiard)
  18 quintillion trillion

For really big numbers, see:
http://www.uni-bonn.de/~manfear/numbers_names.php

I as well was wondering this. They reference this "film" repeatedly, and no film is shown on there, nor a link to it. FINALLY somebody that notices these things too. I'm usually the only one to see such greivous errors as mentioning a film yet not having one.

Lucky for you, I'm bored at work and have access to google's translation tools. It found a part of the university that did this, and it linked to a place that DOES have films:

Film: http://www.opticsexpress.org/abstract.cfm?URI=OPEX -11-25-3498

Just for reference, it was linked form here:
http://www.uni-bonn.de/Aktuelles/Presseinformation en/2003/455.html

Java is already fragmented. The result of open sourcing Java will actually be consolidation, i.e. killing of competing VMs. And a huge open source test suite will greatly benefit all surviving JVMs, which is a good thing.

How can you not see this?

Javas problem is not that it might get fragmented, the problem is that it IS fragmented. Do something about it! Let Java free!

Endlessly rising or descending tones using Shepard tones can be pretty creepy when done slowly and coupled with a distraction.

One of the creepiest effects I know of is Libet's Experiment. It turns out that you can measure a brain signal called the "Readiness Potential" on an EEG that appears about 0.5-1.5 seconds before you consciously decide to push a button! Hook the EEG up to a light, and the light will come on when you're about to push the button; you can't fool it. It's possible these days to rig an audio card EEG; a skilled geek should be able to build a Libet machine to leave lying around for folks to play with. Let us know if you achieve OpenLibet, as we will all want to build our own.

http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs159/filter.html

Here you are.

So basically what they are saying is they should have used the space for some other experiment?

Not really. Cassini would have received a stronger signal, and the changes in relative motion between Huygens and Cassini would have resulted in larger doppler shifts. This would have improved the precision and/or accuracy of the measurements. In addition one of the features of the DWE is the fact that the two oscilators were designed and calibrated to be extremely close to each other in frequency. Without a similar matched oscilator on the ground, there is another possible source for error. For technical details you might see the actual description of the insturment package. A third problem is that 20 minutes of the doppler data is missing. Any time you have to change insturments in the middle of an experiment, you have another source of error to account for.

In addition, one of the things that is really central to science is independent confirmation of results. It is likely that doppler analysis of the ground-based telescopes would have been done anyway. But the results would have been quite a bit stronger with the missing Cassini data. The fact that we have some data about wind speed as opposed to no data is a good thing, but it certainly is not an ideal outcome.

With Linux, Hurd and BSD amongst others, we are slowly getting back to the same variety we had 20 years ago...

More variety is better, no doubt about it. It is a shame that all of the flourishing crowd of "alternatives" are all Unix clones (or at least strongly Unix flavored). Atheos and others ignored for the moment, until they have more than a dozen users.

To bring true diversity to the platform ecosystem, we need some viable workstation platforms that aren't yet-another-unix-clone. http://www.cs.uni-bonn.de/~costanza/lisp-ecoop/sub missions/Egdorf.pdf

The Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) has reported that the Huygens signal has been picked up by several Radio Telescopes on the ground. There was already a plan in place to investigate the Doppler on the signal to learn about Huygens' descent profile.
Also, the most recent ESA press conference on Huygens stated that they are trying to recover data from the ground telescopes (which they are now referring to as Channel C), although it was unclear if this would be just the signal's Doppler or actually decoding some of the lost data stream.

Folks around the world have been producing antiparticles for quite some time. They're also created by natural processes, but don't last long in high matter density environments.

Ummm, there is a whole subfield called "content-based image retrieval" that has been doing this for over a decade. See for example, http://www-student.informatik.uni-bonn.de/~gerdes/ CBIR/ for a nice survey containing 39 examples of prior art!!!! Perhaps IBM would like to comment on the patent (see their QBIC system).

340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,45 6

. . .

Hmm... I'm not even sure what you'd call that number above, but its a lot more than 60 billion.

That would be (drumroll, please):
340 undecillion
282 decillion
366 nonillion
920 octillion
938 septillion
463 sextillion
463 quintillion
374 quadrillion
607 trillion
431 billion
768 million
211 thousand
456.

Well, that's how we Americans would do it, anyway. Brits (and others?) do it a bit differently, beginning with a billion (milliard to them). I could write that out too, but . . . do you really want me to? ;-)

Here's the new-and-improved California Penguin:
click

"As for the alternative music players you can easily convert the iTunes AAC files to some other format by burning a music CD and re-ripping to the format you want or by using one of the open source converters that have popped up. It's fairly simple and then your music is in whatever format you need."

Oh my fucking God. Are you serious?!

You're seriously considering downloading a lossily compressed file, making a PCM 16/44.1 format copy of the lossily compressed file, then lossily encoding it AGAIN?!

Have you ever had a cassette deck and made a copy of a copy of a copy? How did that sound? Do you think that your computer is, like, magical or something, that the laws of mathematics don't apply?

Do you have any idea what kind of compression artifacts will result? Do you even have any idea what lossy compression *is*? Do you know how artifacts are generated? Do you know what "perceptual encoding" is? Do you know that once you've lossily compressed something, it can never be de-compressed back to the original? Have you ever heard the effect of multiple iterations of lossy compression, the best efforts of these kind folks notwithstanding?

Cuz it's damn ugly.

research before posting, especially if yer gonna throw around terms like "artifacts" like you have any clue what you're taking about.

In Sweden:

Miljon - 10^6
Miljard - 10^9
Biljon - 10^12
Biljard - 10^15 *
Triljon - 10^18
Triljard - 10^21 *
Kvadriljon - 10^24
Kvintiljon - 10^30

* Logical continuation words borrowed from the german/dutch language. Not used very often.

Well, This page explains everything very good. AE, BE, german and old greek named numbers.

• Many that don't?? Many?? Such as?

• Again, its not just "my logic". Forestry is a science that's hundreds of years old. In North America, outside the unique ecosystem of the Pacific Northwest/Cascadia, where do trees live to 400 years?

• Yeah, except I do live "on the west side of Cascadia" you speak of

Celebrating its 20th anniversary the Chaos Computer Club has made a special present to itself and the city of Berlin. From September 12th, 2001 to February 23rd, 2002, the famous "Haus des Lehrers" (house of the teacher) office building at Berlin Alexanderplatz has been enhanced to become world's biggest interactive computer display: Blinkenlights (a term defined by the Jargon File).

The upper eight floors of the building were transformed in to a huge display by arranging 144 front windows. A computer controlled each of the lamps independently to produce a monochrome matrix of 18 times 8 pixels.

During the night, a constantly growing number of animations could be seen. But there was an interactive component as well: you were able to play the old arcade classic Pong on the building using your mobile phone and you could place your own loveletters on the screen as well.

Blinkenlights was up and running at until February 23rd, 2002, running 23 weeks and 5 days in total. During that period, we constantly improved its feature set. Even now, work on Blinkenlights is not completed. The software has been released as Free Software under GPL. Our documentation video shows all aspects of the project in 11 minutes.

For the friends of Blinkenlights we have prepared a little trailer movie [QuickTime 5 Format, 3,2 MB] [MPEG-1 Format, 3 MB]. If you want the soundtrack of the trailer have a look here.

Overview

Using your mobile phone you could play Pong with Blinkenlights or your friend. The program Blinkenpaint enables you to create your own animations allowing you to take part in our contest.

For the nerds there is a description of the Blinkenlights Movie format and a couple of nice tools to display and convert your animations. A look behind the scenes reveals some technical details of our system.

A list of press reports about Blinkenlights und a couple of interesting links to other projects complete the overview. Get a regular update on what is going on with the project on our News page.

WebCam

Those who wanted to have a remote view on the building were able to have a look at the pictures of our webcam. The WebCam is no longer in operation. We are going to publish the WebCam picture archive here soon.

The BerlinOnline WebCam looked at Blinkenlights as well, although it was a bit more distant than our cam. Maybe you find some nice pictures in their archive as well.

Contact

Although the installation itself is now dismantled, the Blinkenlights project group is still active. Your contact for inquiries of all kinds is Tim Pritlove contact@blinkenlights.de.

If you are interested getting information on our future activities, please send a mail to blinkenlights-update-subscribe@lists.ccc.de.

Going back to our Latin roots, [...] this flower is "scientifically" defined as an unusually huge and shapeless representation of the male penis. This is why men shouldn't name flowers.

Well, it does look like a big honkin' dick, so perhaps it was aptly named after all.

I find it remarkable (and very cool) that there exists a flower that has naturally evolved to be so large and, well, colorful. Methinks a little genetic intermingling with redwoods could lead to a very, very cool, mondo Dogwood-esque blooming tree.

Or perhaps we could try some even more baroque variants, creating new forests of diverse and strangely delightful plants. However, I would avoid anything carnivorous ... the last thing we need is a sequioa sized venus fly trap (though that would keep the tree huggers and loggers alike at bay, but then, too, the spotted owl would likely not fair to well in its branches either).

Live Webcam of the flower. As I post there are a bunch of people standing around looking at the flower and the flower dwarfs all of them. Quite impressive.

Just what I was thinking. As if the Mac doesn't already have a reputation for being fruity, someone goes ahead and installs PEAR. What's next, grape? Papaya? Just don't put an OrangePC card in your machine or it will turn out to be a lemon.

Who said that a picture has to use light? Anyway, we have taken pictures of individual atoms using optical photography.

Writing With Atoms

Imaging Atoms at Sub-Angstrom Resolution with a Corrected Electron Microscope

Bell Labs researchers invent technique for imaging single impurity atoms within silicon

Imaging Bose-Einstein Condensates

Trapped Atoms Photo

Single Atoms in a MOT

(Adding to bloated threads is fun!)

I've been borrowing my boss's old Palm IIIx on and off for the past few weeks. The first word that comes to mind is "indispensable". Who needs a brain when you've got a Palm? I carry it with me where ever I go, and I don't have to worry about forgetting things anymore.

The Calendar, To Do List, and Memos are invaluable. I've only begun to play around with the Mail synchronization. The prospect of jotting down quick e-mails when I'm on the go and sending them as soon as I sit at my desk gives me little goosebumps. Mmm..

As other people have mentioned: I'm sure it's not as useful to people who don't have many appointments. I'm a student, but work schedules me for various jobs and it's nice to keep track on that information in a Palm instead of a stack of papers.

I didnt' say people back then were dumb. I used the word "ignorant".

They just didn't know any better to realize such things as "the sun is the center of the solar system and the earth goes around it."

Another flaw is your failure to understand tha atheism isn't a claim, nor a belief. It's the default hypothesis when evidence is lacking, and there hasn't been enough evidence yet to sway from that default hypothesis.

We don't often see it as a default hypothesis because we are indoctrinated to believe in a god since early childhood, such that anything else now seems like a deviation from the norm.

I'm not calling them dumb. I'm calling them ignorant.

Then are particle physicists violating the DMCA? Won't be long before the WIPO is trying to shut down CERN, Fermi, et al.

There are several projects to connect remote university buildings here in Germany, some have been running for quite some time. For example these guys (in German) use a 155 MBit link over 2.9 km.

I've had contact to people who were connected over a Laser bridge a couple years ago. I was playing quake at the time and whenever it rained their connection went from very good to unplayable.

Both the B-52 and the Tu-95 are, actually, amazing aircraft, and both are highly demoralizing to look on in flight.

However, the Russians generally build the more aesthetic aircraft, top-of-the-line being the Mach 2 heavy strategic bomber Tupolev Tu-160. True aesthetics of death. Scares the hell out of me. :-)

They also claim to have nothing to do with Bin Laden which is highly doubtful, given their course of studies!

We also want to state that we have nothing to do with the hiding of Osama bin Laden, of whose existence we are still not convinced.

We also want to state that we have nothing to do with the hiding of Osama bin Laden, of whose existence we are still not convinced.

It might be equal, although I don't believe so at the moment, but your numbers for January and February may be messed up. January =1 , February=4 (BTW: A german explanation can be found at http://www.math.uni-bonn.de/people/gw/wochentag.ht ml)
73 Joerg

The mirror is:

ftp://bolugftp.uni-bonn.de/pub/kde

go and get it before and show everybody that you are the faster!

- german

I've converted the document to PDF and mirrored it here because the original site is both being slashdotted and not all of you can probably read PostScript. The mirror is on a 40 MBit connection and should be capable of handling the load.

You could build a random noise generator easily and cheap. Here's an example circuit. The idea is to amplify the natural noise of a transistor (white noise) and then hook that to soundcard. Cost is &lt $10 + the price of wallwart.

Why use Linux instead of the more conventional vxWorks? As usual, the reason is reliability. vxWorks provides no memory protection between processes. Programming errors quickly lead to a need to reboot, requiring several minutes of experimental downtime. When your accelerator costs tens of thousands of dollars per hour to operate, any downtime becomes inexcusable. In addition, the ready availability of excellent development and debugging tool makes it possible to put together a project like this with limited manpower.

It is possible to pay a wide variety of prices for a VME crate. A 6U crate with a small power supply should only cost you a few thousand dollars.

Haskell has some sophisticated (and of course free) compilers, but for learning the language and for small applications, the interpreter Hugs is IMHO more suitable.

Chilli

PS: Though Haskell is a super-cool language, unfortunately, it also does not magically solve the program of parallel programming - the programmer still has to devise algorithms that contain suitable parallelism (IMHO, this is not a problem of the programming language, but a fundamental restriction given todays - and probably also tomorrows - machine architectures).

you're problem is you need to download a new driver
check out this page:
http://titan.cs.uni-bonn.de/~canavan/ee pro/