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And as usual, there is no explanation as to *why* lithium batteries are now illegal to carry. I assume this is to reduce the possibility of a lithium battery shorting out, but if the batteries are contained in their shipping packages, they should be no more dangerous than many other items that you can carry on planes. This of course means a whole new hassle for those folks that use lithium batteries for their work such as photographers who need to travel by air to many of their assignments among many other folks and carry with them batteries to sometimes remote locations. What is the rationale? Have they examined the potential impact before coming up with yet another new restriction on travel? Are they worried about this as a terrorist act? Because, look, if someone really wants to bring down a plane, there are many ways to do it even without using lithium batteries. Think sodium metal or any explosive really, that is keister stashed until the terrorist gets to the lavatory. Think any common item on a plane that can be used as a weapon including newspaper, components of the interior finish and cabin materials,

Every time I come back into my own country after spending time abroad, I am frustrated and depressed over how bad things are getting here. I talked about some of it including the marketing problem we are manufacturing for ourselves here after my last trip to Japan.

It also makes one wonder how much all this is costing the US in terms of lost business, lost productivity, airline delays, increased cost burdens on airlines and passengers and more... And this is all being done in the name of safety and terrorism, but you know... it's funny because I remember flying back in the 70's and 80's where people routinely carried firearms on planes. The restriction was that they had to be long guns and unloaded. I even remember one Texan getting on a plane and commenting to his friend that he would never check his shotgun because it might get damaged by the baggage handlers. I also routinely used to carry a pocket knife with me wherever I went even up to a few years ago on planes before they were outlawed... which leads me to wonder if the per capita risk of hijacking is any different now versus what it was back then.

I've got my dream office here.

Mac Mini's and Mac Pro's for servers make for quiet work.

The PNAS paper isn't available to the public, technically. As the lead author, he could probably get in trouble for linking to an unofficial (non-PNAS) copy.

Not being under those constraints, I might point you toward this. He also has a faq up on his blog about the paper.

Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution

As men age their germline DNA contains more mutation errors because of continued DNA replication to produce sperm. Therefore, the fertilisation by older men accelerates evolution!

Wow, I remember my first hard drive for the TRS-80 Model II that I had. It was a 5MB primary hard disk system that required you to turn a key to power it on, then wait while it ran up sounding like a jet engine before you pressed the "active" button to enable reading and writing. The cool thing about it was that you could actually hack it and get it to work on my later Apple ][+ that I used throughout junior high, high school and half of college before replacing it with a Mac IIci. Oh yeah, it weighed about 20 lbs and was in a case bigger than the Apple ][+ case alone. Finally, the interesting thing is that Kryder's law has been maintained over time like Moore's law and it is stunning how much storage space money buys these days. I seem to recall that original 5MB Tandy hard drive costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $4000, and for that money I can now buy ~16TB of storage like this setup in my office.

Yeah, just don't let Boyd Coddington anywhere near those salt flats. Look what he did to the Bonneville Salt Flats this year when I was out taking photos.

Far out, you seem to have found Bob Dobbs there in that coffee kiosk / snack shack.

I have to say that after just getting back from Japan that they do have a certain affection for the whimsy even on large scale publicly funded projects that is just awesome. One of the things I saw was a huge platform with a glass top and water on top that served nothing more than a spaceship like cover for a courtyard down below and an attraction. Pics here .

I would have loved to have traveled on these roads while I was there...

I fly a reasonable amount as a passenger (used to fly small private aircraft as well) on commercial airlines and I've seen quite a few planes that come by shockingly close. I was prepared early enough one day to get a reasonable pic out of a cheap little point and shoot here of another aircraft in reasonably close proximity, but this is by no means the closest I've seen planes fly to one another. One time flying over Columbia on this flight we followed *very* close to another large commercial airliner for quite some time. It was hard to get a picture given it was at night with a little point and shoot, but it was close enough for me to see people in windows in-between flashes of lightning. Granted this was in controlled conditions as we were flying almost in formation, but I've also seen planes flash by in close proximity flying in the opposite direction as well. Much closer than the 3-5 mile limit I understood was in place.

Given the increasing amount of air traffic, I would not be surprised to see incidents (not comforting given upcoming travel), but the shocking thing is that the FAA (and the public) is still dealing with a completely antiquated air traffic control system that like other aspects of our national infrastructure is woefully lacking, particularly around large airports.

I fly a reasonable amount as a passenger (used to fly small private aircraft as well) on commercial airlines and I've seen quite a few planes that come by shockingly close. I was prepared early enough one day to get a reasonable pic out of a cheap little point and shoot here of another aircraft in reasonably close proximity, but this is by no means the closest I've seen planes fly to one another. One time flying over Columbia on this flight we followed *very* close to another large commercial airliner for quite some time. It was hard to get a picture given it was at night with a little point and shoot, but it was close enough for me to see people in windows in-between flashes of lightning. Granted this was in controlled conditions as we were flying almost in formation, but I've also seen planes flash by in close proximity flying in the opposite direction as well. Much closer than the 3-5 mile limit I understood was in place.

Given the increasing amount of air traffic, I would not be surprised to see incidents (not comforting given upcoming travel), but the shocking thing is that the FAA (and the public) is still dealing with a completely antiquated air traffic control system that like other aspects of our national infrastructure is woefully lacking, particularly around large airports.

Tell your hurricane insurer to listen to this. It's a lecture on hurricanes and global warming from the University of Utah's Frontiers of Science series, delivered by a very well regarded scientist named Kerry Emanuel. According to him, AGW hasn't increased the frequency of hurricanes noticeably, but it has a huge effect on how strong they get and where they go. He also points out that most hurricane-attributable economic damage has occurred in the last fifteen years, simply because we've built more infrastructure in hurricane-prone areas (a trend unlikely to reverse itself).

I was at the lecture, and the charts he showed did not include the economic effects of Hurricane Katrina, which would have dwarfed everything that came before. But we can't prove that Katrina was actually made worse by global warming, so we must be safe, right? Right?

The energy carried by a hurricane is a function of the cube of the wind speed, and the economic impact has been estimated to be something like the seventh power of the wind speed. Throw in the fact that hurricanes are more frequently wandering into areas that have never seen them before, and whose building codes don't account for them. Despite your know-nothing rhetoric, hurricane fear is still very much in play.

As I said in my blog entry about it ('bout 3:00 this morning when we heard about it), I am actually surprised it took this long as it would be hard to quantify how much science has been dependent upon Mario's work or even work that comprised prior Nobel Prize awards. Certainly my science going back to my dissertation has relied on transgenic techniques pioneered by Mario Capecchi and I owe much to him, but more importantly the doors for much discovery made in bioscience over the past several decades would simply not have been possible without Mario's pioneering work.

Well, given that the F-22 has made more than one appearance in Japan, I am certain the Japanese government is interested. However, this raises more than a few issues, specifically related to technology and sociopolitical issues as well. The JDAF (Japanese Defense Air Force) has been so named as it has been a Japanese Constitutional issue that their armed forces are for defense only and not aggression. The interesting thing about stealth technology however, is that it is almost exclusively used for aggression rather than defense if you play your strategy according to tradition.

I got a quick tour of the F-22, but no pictures allowed of the F-22 during my last visit up to Hill AFB and the F-22 is making the rounds and is being explored for possible basing in other countries, but there are technology sales issues with the aircraft as it will be almost impossible to strip the sensitive technologies out of the aircraft and make it "saleable".

Worse, I think, is the act of spamming blogs with links. The theory is that, the more links there are pointing to a website, the more popular it must be; so, by using commonly-available, spam-advertised commercial software to pollute blogs with links unrelated to the subject matter, webmasters imagine they can improve their ranking without paying baksheesh to the search engine companies.

I have had an idea for a hack to WordPress, which will make all links invisible to GoogleBot (and maybe the other search engines too). This should make it pointless for anybody to spam blogs with links to their site, since the links won't be picked up by search engines. In a nod to Mel, I call this "Search Engine Pessimisation".

I imagine they can do it in the time they say. I also imagine the results are very simple, like looking at one STR sequence and counting how many lengths of it are in the person's genome in a process similar to qPCR, less RFLP/southern, as parent seems to think. Despite what TFA might imply, I don't think there's endonuclease digestion involved. I may be wrong, and they could have a really, really fast breifcase thermocycler making this work. Maybe, doubt it.

I'm not any kind of STR expert, but from cribbing Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_tandem_repeat, here's my impression of what's going on with this kit:

1. get cells = blood and semen. yum. In fact, I'd infer this kit is probably a "semen-only" deal in practice, which makes isolating the DNA that much easier, since semen is largely DNA.
2. isolate DNA. Do it yourself, kids! (http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/units/activities/extraction/) 2-5 minutes with a kit.
3. PCR. Here's where things get interesting. What are their primers? I think they're using 5-10 nucleotide STR sequences that are already conjugated to a fluorescent dye. Since STRs for human identification use are just, according to wikipedia, 4-5 STRs (10-50 nucleotides) long, each cycle can probably be as short as 30 seconds. With ramping the temperatures we can call that 1 minute per cycle. How many cycles do we need? 10 cycles gives us 2^10 copies of the original STR, that's (biologist math)1000 copies(/biologist math). Add 2 minutes for our hot-start polymerase, and that's 12 minutes for PCR. Whoo! It well may be less, i.e. shorter elongation, fewer cycles. This is where they're claiming to save time, so who knows.
4. electrophoresis. Undoubtedly capillary, you can see it in the photo (at least I can), and since we're looking at stuff that's only 75 nucleotides max, can be done very quickly. I don't really know capillary gel electrophoresis, but it apparently kicks the shit out of slab gel electrophoresis: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=330505. We'll call that 10 minutes, lol. Could be a bit more? Balances with the PCR.
5. Of course, we added a 10-100 nucleotide standard conjugated to a different fluorescent species from the primers (i.e. the primers glow green and the standard glows red), so we can use our shitty little built-in 2-wavelength spectrophotometer to see where our unknown sample's bands are.

And now we have our data! And that only took... 25 minutes! Of course, this isn't a full-blown RFLP, like parent seems to assume. But just for doing a quick-and-dirty count of STRs, this could work. That's how I'd do it. Maybe I just invented a competing type of kit, lol. In any event, looking at the picture, I get the feeling their pipettes are crap.

Note this doesn't show how many repeats of a given legth the accused has, so the asshole could have 3 5-repeat ones and 2 4-repeat, and the machine would show that as being the same as a person with 1 of each. Also, they may use more fluorescent dyes to look at more STR sequences without too much difficulty. But in general, the samples will be unclean at best, total crap more often than they'll like to admit, and, in the end, only good as a blood-type-and-then-some test. How juries will react to this, I don't know.

To get even farther from parent, the real threat to your privacy is coming from gene chips, the next generation of sequencing technology. This kit is comparatively rudamentary, and obviously expensive. Yet more overhyped crap, whee!

Ray tracing is very CPU parallel, I don't dispute that. By "memory parallel" I mean that if you want to render something on two separate computers, you have to have a complete copy of the 3-d model on both computers. With rasterization algorithms, you can split up the work amongst a bunch of machines, and each one only needs one part of the model. That way, you can render things that wouldn't fit into the memory of a single machine. This isn't an issue for games, but for rendering scenes for movies it is a big deal. Take a look at the 2006 symposium on interactive raytracing keynote.

Not exactly. Given that each person's DNA is derived from both of their parents' sets, as well as the introduction of , the amount of mutual information between your DNA and any relative becomes drastically small.

Ah, I suspect this was either not a meteorite or there is something else going on given that any meteor leaving a 30 meter wide and 20 foot deep crater (meteor being approximately 30 inches wide) is not going to hit the ground steaming hot. On the contrary, it will be cold as ice (or colder) given its composition and time for heating. However, I suppose it could also be a re-entry event from a satellite carrying a toxic payload like plutonium... After all, we have the remnants of many satellites and the debris associated with them still in decaying orbits and you can easily spot many of them. Some satellites particularly those from the former Soviet Union and China have a history of toxic components. Though I suspect we'll know soon enough if it were a satellite, it would have been tracked by numerous agencies and individuals who monitor that sort of thing.

Oh, for the love of.... Use Google to find out. A quick search reveals information from In-Q-Tel's own site and from Google's own site of course these investments are all part of In-Q-Tel's mission and there is nothing secret about it. They are quite open about their investments and why they make those investments, so what is the big deal? Also, note that there are other companies initially invested in by In-Q-Tel that Google has acquired.

Further, the claim (again unsubstantiated) that you have a doctorate

Oh, come on now.... using Google is not all that hard, nor is clicking the links that I so thoughtfully already have provided for you. But, so you don't have to click twice, here it is.

From the linked list:Secrecy level: High. Two reporters from the local newspaper are the only media who've been inside the compound and written about it (See "Inside the World of Google"): Google treats any and all details as though they belong to the National Security Agency.

Well.... I know they were trying to be funny, but the authors could be more correct that they might have known given the history of Google (startup partially funded by CIA $$s) and how tight they are with NGIA (Google Earth projects), CIA etc..., it would not surprise me to see Google working intimately with NSA. After all, Google has been competing with NSA for PhD mathematicians for some time now (and winning) and it seems like a natural fit. Of course such a "hypothetical" collaboration would raise all sorts of ethical questions, but assuming one could appropriately compartmentalize those concerns, it could certainly be mutually beneficial.

Personally, I'd like to think that this little project (when complete) will certainly contribute to the creation of one or more of the Seven Wonders of the IT world. After all, we all have little wetware parallel supercomputers sitting in the backs of our eyes that can process massive amounts of data, pre-encode it, filter it and more all while dealing with a certain level of data corruption, particularly in disease.

From TFA: The average male Slashdot user probably looks a lot like our model -- but has more acne and bigger glasses. Users are 23 years old but look twice their age and steadfastly refuse to accept the fact that Windows is actually not a bad operating system. Far from being lovable dorks, the Slashdotters have a vicious streak. They hunt like spiders, awaiting the arrival of an article from their victims -- usually a hapless news reporter. The second moderators accept a story, they pounce -- pedantry, suspicion and anonymity their weapons of choice.

If you read the other entries, it is less an info piece and more of a fluff piece for c/net to blow their own horn when you get to the end. How do articles like this get posted to Slashdot?

That said, while there are those of us that have been around since '98 or so, many Slashdot users that started participating in this forum back have continued to participate and additionally have created their own blogs. All in all, I'd have to say that whether or not I visit a website says less about me than the content that goes into my blog does.

Its not quite that simple... The record companies are interested in absolute profits, that is true. However, these absolute profits can be maximized through a happy medium of selling the occasional blockbuster (song, movie, TV show) combined with a more Long Tail model of selling to a wider audience. This may mean more diversification in media companies rather than more consolidation, but that is not necessarily a bad thing in terms of profits. Also, remember that the iPod, iPhone, iWhatever is a widget that stores media not just songs. I first wrote about the concept of an iPod as a media storage device back in 2002 here and elaborated on this in 2005 here . Essentially, I relate that the iPod is a media device and database container capable of storing much more than just music. It's not about the raw storage per se after a certain point, but the experience of participation, managing information and navigating it that makes the iPod so special.

Its not quite that simple... The record companies are interested in absolute profits, that is true. However, these absolute profits can be maximized through a happy medium of selling the occasional blockbuster (song, movie, TV show) combined with a more Long Tail model of selling to a wider audience. This may mean more diversification in media companies rather than more consolidation, but that is not necessarily a bad thing in terms of profits. Also, remember that the iPod, iPhone, iWhatever is a widget that stores media not just songs. I first wrote about the concept of an iPod as a media storage device back in 2002 here and elaborated on this in 2005 here . Essentially, I relate that the iPod is a media device and database container capable of storing much more than just music. It's not about the raw storage per se after a certain point, but the experience of participation, managing information and navigating it that makes the iPod so special.

and an inordinate amount of traffic searching for hot women that somehow hit this page.

Not so surprising; it has the words "squeeze" and "tube" in the very first paragraph!

These stats seem to hold up with what i am seeing on the stats for Jonesblog in that the majority of readers seem to be women looking for recipes , pictures of animals and interestingly, travel while the majority of searches from males tend to be stuff like guns , airplanes , cars and an inordinate amount of traffic searching for hot women that somehow hit this page . Stereotypes are sad, but true I suppose in some areas. The interesting thing that really surprised me was that I had to include a notice in my FAQ on my "status" as I've had more than one unsolicited request for a date from visitors to the blog.

These stats seem to hold up with what i am seeing on the stats for Jonesblog in that the majority of readers seem to be women looking for recipes , pictures of animals and interestingly, travel while the majority of searches from males tend to be stuff like guns , airplanes , cars and an inordinate amount of traffic searching for hot women that somehow hit this page . Stereotypes are sad, but true I suppose in some areas. The interesting thing that really surprised me was that I had to include a notice in my FAQ on my "status" as I've had more than one unsolicited request for a date from visitors to the blog.

These stats seem to hold up with what i am seeing on the stats for Jonesblog in that the majority of readers seem to be women looking for recipes , pictures of animals and interestingly, travel while the majority of searches from males tend to be stuff like guns , airplanes , cars and an inordinate amount of traffic searching for hot women that somehow hit this page . Stereotypes are sad, but true I suppose in some areas. The interesting thing that really surprised me was that I had to include a notice in my FAQ on my "status" as I've had more than one unsolicited request for a date from visitors to the blog.

These stats seem to hold up with what i am seeing on the stats for Jonesblog in that the majority of readers seem to be women looking for recipes , pictures of animals and interestingly, travel while the majority of searches from males tend to be stuff like guns , airplanes , cars and an inordinate amount of traffic searching for hot women that somehow hit this page . Stereotypes are sad, but true I suppose in some areas. The interesting thing that really surprised me was that I had to include a notice in my FAQ on my "status" as I've had more than one unsolicited request for a date from visitors to the blog.

These stats seem to hold up with what i am seeing on the stats for Jonesblog in that the majority of readers seem to be women looking for recipes , pictures of animals and interestingly, travel while the majority of searches from males tend to be stuff like guns , airplanes , cars and an inordinate amount of traffic searching for hot women that somehow hit this page . Stereotypes are sad, but true I suppose in some areas. The interesting thing that really surprised me was that I had to include a notice in my FAQ on my "status" as I've had more than one unsolicited request for a date from visitors to the blog.

These stats seem to hold up with what i am seeing on the stats for Jonesblog in that the majority of readers seem to be women looking for recipes , pictures of animals and interestingly, travel while the majority of searches from males tend to be stuff like guns , airplanes , cars and an inordinate amount of traffic searching for hot women that somehow hit this page . Stereotypes are sad, but true I suppose in some areas. The interesting thing that really surprised me was that I had to include a notice in my FAQ on my "status" as I've had more than one unsolicited request for a date from visitors to the blog.

These stats seem to hold up with what i am seeing on the stats for Jonesblog in that the majority of readers seem to be women looking for recipes , pictures of animals and interestingly, travel while the majority of searches from males tend to be stuff like guns , airplanes , cars and an inordinate amount of traffic searching for hot women that somehow hit this page . Stereotypes are sad, but true I suppose in some areas. The interesting thing that really surprised me was that I had to include a notice in my FAQ on my "status" as I've had more than one unsolicited request for a date from visitors to the blog.

These stats seem to hold up with what i am seeing on the stats for Jonesblog in that the majority of readers seem to be women looking for recipes , pictures of animals and interestingly, travel while the majority of searches from males tend to be stuff like guns , airplanes , cars and an inordinate amount of traffic searching for hot women that somehow hit this page . Stereotypes are sad, but true I suppose in some areas. The interesting thing that really surprised me was that I had to include a notice in my FAQ on my "status" as I've had more than one unsolicited request for a date from visitors to the blog.

These stats seem to hold up with what i am seeing on the stats for Jonesblog in that the majority of readers seem to be women looking for recipes , pictures of animals and interestingly, travel while the majority of searches from males tend to be stuff like guns , airplanes , cars and an inordinate amount of traffic searching for hot women that somehow hit this page . Stereotypes are sad, but true I suppose in some areas. The interesting thing that really surprised me was that I had to include a notice in my FAQ on my "status" as I've had more than one unsolicited request for a date from visitors to the blog.

The company I work for uses True Image for our Windows deployments. The disk images save us a _ton_ of time when we need to do things like build twenty identical systems or create a new variant of an existing system. When we deploy new systems I can have the hardware shipped to our datacenter and the disks shipped to the office. I restore the Acronis image to each disk and then just ship the disks out. I've also got images prepared that contain a minimal Windows OS install as a starting point. This saves a few hours of work when it comes time to prepare a new type of server. We also ship external USB drives containing Acronis images to each datacenter so that the local tech can rebuild systems on-site.

The two major problems we've had with True Image are related to unsupported NICs (no driver on the boot CD) and interaction with on-board RAID controllers. Acronis has a very active message board and they are very good about addressing any problems their customers may encounter.

I've been meaning to look into frisbee, but simply haven't made the time. Frisbee's attractive because it's OS independent and supports multicast installs. There's a research paper on Emulab's site that claims near constant install times even as the number of simultaneous installs grows.

Look, I mostly agree with you. But I don't think Parallels is really the way to go, especially if you are doing graphics intensive gaming/[other graphics stuff]. Try playing around with http://www.cs.utah.edu/~jmk/simian/ and you'll see why Parallels sucks.

I'd recommend a dual/triple boot if you have the absolute need to run Windows.

Try this link for the heat to sound to electricity stuff: http://unews.utah.edu/p/?r=053007-1

why of course
Mel, the Real Programmer allegedly wrote one as told in this tale.
Though it was used as a timer, not just to slow things down, but to slow things down by a specific amount.

I should have also pointed out photo coverage of last years even here and the 2005 event here.

I should have also pointed out photo coverage of last years even here and the 2005 event here.

I'll have photos up on Jonesblog in the next couple of days on this effort and others out at the Bonneville Salt Flats here .

Shut up. Your blog has cheesecake [utah.edu] and flowers [utah.edu] on it. What do you know about being a man?

Ah, but I also have guns and ground support aircraft with even bigger guns and million dollar microscopes and cars and more cars and hot women on my blog.

I'm quite comfortable with who I am, but are those links man enough for you?

Shut up. Your blog has cheesecake [utah.edu] and flowers [utah.edu] on it. What do you know about being a man?

Ah, but I also have guns and ground support aircraft with even bigger guns and million dollar microscopes and cars and more cars and hot women on my blog.

I'm quite comfortable with who I am, but are those links man enough for you?

Shut up. Your blog has cheesecake [utah.edu] and flowers [utah.edu] on it. What do you know about being a man?

Ah, but I also have guns and ground support aircraft with even bigger guns and million dollar microscopes and cars and more cars and hot women on my blog.

I'm quite comfortable with who I am, but are those links man enough for you?

Shut up. Your blog has cheesecake [utah.edu] and flowers [utah.edu] on it. What do you know about being a man?

Ah, but I also have guns and ground support aircraft with even bigger guns and million dollar microscopes and cars and more cars and hot women on my blog.

I'm quite comfortable with who I am, but are those links man enough for you?

Shut up. Your blog has cheesecake [utah.edu] and flowers [utah.edu] on it. What do you know about being a man?

Ah, but I also have guns and ground support aircraft with even bigger guns and million dollar microscopes and cars and more cars and hot women on my blog.

I'm quite comfortable with who I am, but are those links man enough for you?

Shut up. Your blog has cheesecake [utah.edu] and flowers [utah.edu] on it. What do you know about being a man?

Ah, but I also have guns and ground support aircraft with even bigger guns and million dollar microscopes and cars and more cars and hot women on my blog.

I'm quite comfortable with who I am, but are those links man enough for you?

Shut up. Your blog has cheesecake and flowers on it. What do you know about being a man?

Shut up. Your blog has cheesecake and flowers on it. What do you know about being a man?

I recall very detailed plans in Byte Magazine in the 80s for building parallel processing boards. Anyone investigating prior art (under our new patent laws) ought to check out the November 1988 issue. This site lists tables of contents of all the old Bytes Can't remember if the processors shared memory though.