Subliminal Images

Sachost.Exe Removal Instructions

Are here.

The only good thing about this infection is the amount of e-mails I've received from all over the world from people that have been helped. I got a particularly nice one from Chile this morning.

And to the people using the German version of Google who have been finding this page, Schoen Gutten tag, Wie Gehts?

Ah, Spit

Maybe in another 30 years.

From the soon-to-be-extinct Cooperative Research Centre for Satellite Systems :

The Cooperative Research System for Satellite Systems has been advised by the Department of Education, Science and Training that its preliminary business case for the Ninth Round of the CRC Program has not been successful.
[...]
"...we believe that the program of space research and development which we had developed with over twenty organisations over the past few months has immense potential for the Australian community. We proposed targeted research in the areas of satellite-based navigation, better communications, improved methods of predicting weather both on Earth and in space, and developing advanced space technologies for applications in Australia and around the world. After the stunning success of our first space project, the research satellite FedSat, we had hoped that our team of engineers and scientists would stay together and devote their talents to this new program. We will vigorously investigate other funding options, because we believe that a basic level of national capability in space technology is vital for Australia 's future. In a world in which the vantage point of space is crucial for social, environmental and economic health, a country which has no other option but to buy or source from off-shore all the space technology it needs will one day face a very unpleasant shock."

The team that built FedSat has already broken up - but it could have been re-formed.

In the meantime, FedSat:
Weathered the largest solar storm ever recorded
Demonstrated for the first time that automatic hardware "Self-Healing" from radiation damage was possible
Is the longest-lived Australian satellite ever
Was the first non-Japanese payload ever launched from a NASDA booster
Earned an Engineering Excellence award - though that and $2 will buy you a cup of tea (at a cheap teashop)

And as far as I know, is still the most complex and capable satellite of its size ever built, running half-a-dozen major complex experiments in one small 50kg box.

The CRCSS is the closest thing Australia has to a Space Agency. With its closure, ends yet another chapter in the sorry saga of Australian Space Program that almost was. Perhaps the Australian Space Network will take up the slack - but as the CRCSS was probably its backbone, that's unlikely. BLUESat is going well technically, but the funding still isn't there. JAESat is stalled due to lack of cash.

Few people know that Australia was only the third country in the world to design, build, and launch a satellite from its own spaceport (and the fifth to make a satellite of any kind) . This was the WRESAT in 1967. Build before WRESAT, but launched afterwards, was the world's first remotely-controlled amateur satellite, Australis (Oscar 5) in 1970.

There is an excellent history of this whole sad and sorry tale, how we as a nation started so well, then did nothing for 30 years.

From another history page, Australia in Space - A History

In 1 April 1947, the United Kingdom / Australian Joint Project came into existence and marks the commencement of Australian Space Program(s). In a memo to PM JB Chifley, 20 Sept 1946, it is stated that ".. this project ... without question put Australia in the very forefront of the most modern developments in ... Science." The project essentially came to an end with the launch of WRESAT in 1967. With the launching of WRESAT, Australia did indeed join the big league of nations launching satellites from their own territory, of which the US and the USSR were the only members at that date. But there was no ongoing Australian Space Program for over thirty years. The only exception to this statement was the launch in 1970 of the very modest Australian satellite, Australis, given a free launch by NASA, which called it Oscar-5. Australis was a simple beacon satellite, like Sputnik-1, with on-board receivers to control powering down (to conserve its alkaline batteries.)
But over thirty years, while communication satellites became commonplace, there were no further Australian developmental or scientific satellites. However, at the start of the next millenium, this dream of fifty years ago may yet come true. CRCSS Chair Tony Staley has prophesised that "the FedSat project would generate a new spirit of national confidence and encourage young Australians to set their sights on the stars."

He was right. But it seems they'd be better off looking towards Tennis Stars or Football Stars; that's where the money is.

I can't help thinking that we've missed out on a nice little money-earner though. With the FedSat bus, we've proved that we have the ability to integrate experimental payloads with a wildly diverse set of architectures. We were able to solve all the complex managerial problems of dealing with different academic groups and international space agencies. We were able to resolve all the problems inherent in integrating very different CPUs with different Floating-Point formats and Endianism, including Field Programmable Gate Arrays, and have it all talking to the ground via a standard European Space Agency communications protocol. We would be a very price-competitive, and an even more risk-competitive option, for any university wanting to orbit a low-power-consumption experiment of high complexity, reliably and cheaply. We have the infrastructure to do all the vibrational and structural analysis, we have military-grade software reliability.... or at least we had. Once upon a time.

Maybe in another 30 years.

September 23rd 1916

An article about my Grandfather's experiences on that day, at a place called Thiepval, during the Battle of the Somme.

More about my Grandad's service in World War I here.

Thiepval Today.

A Bit of a Worry, This

Dirty work at the Crossroads in Europe. From The Spectator :

Mr Tillack is a respected German reporter who has written extensively about the Eurostat scandal. This convoluted affair really deserves a column to itself but, briefly, it involves allegations that millions of euros have been diverted from the budget by Commission officials. More recently, Mr Tillack had started to investigate the broader failure of EU authorities to act on tip-offs. It was this that triggered the reaction. Last month police swooped on his flat. He was questioned for ten hours without a lawyer, while his laptop, files and address book were confiscated. Even his private bank statements were ransacked.

The raid was ordered by Olaf, the EU's anti-corruption unit. Needless to say, no such treatment has been meted out to the alleged fraudsters. In the looking-glass world of Brussels, it is those exposing sleaze, rather than those engaging in it, who find themselves in police custody. Mr Tillack was implausibly accused of having procured some of his papers by bribery. No formal charges have been brought, and he is now planning to sue. In the meantime, though, the notes he had built up over five years of meticulous work have been seized and his sources put at risk.
[...]
In the Tillack case, we see perhaps the EU's most worrying tendency: its belief that its cause is self-evidently right, and that this justifies virtually any action against its critics. If you think I am exaggerating, cast your mind back to an article in this newspaper by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard a couple of years ago. It concerned the legal case brought by Bernard Connolly, who had been sacked from the European Commission for opposing the euro. In giving his judgment, the EU's Advocate-General pronounced that freedom of speech was not an all-encompassing right; criticism of the European Union, like blasphemy, lay outside its remit.

Obligatory Cat Post

I'm a Dog person, not a Cat person. Cats know this, and so make a beeline for me. One particular Moggy in the Netherlands would walk up to me as I was just going to work, then just flop, waiting to be given a tummy rub. How could I refuse? When I was about Andrew's age, I used to ride on our huge ginger tomcat, called Spuffles. (Mum wanted to call him Tibbles, my sister wanted to call him Fluffy, and my Father wanted to call him Sputnik. So they compromised.)

I've seen a picture of Spuffles sitting on my Mother's lap, both with backs straight. His eyes were about level with hers. Yes, he really was as big as I remember, 30+ pounds of whalebone, gristle, muscle and fang. Alsatians used to cross the street to avoid him. Yet he was very gentle with me, even when I did the usual things a Toddler does.

So here's an Epic Poem for all cat-lovers out there. The Story of Schroedinger's Cat.

And remember : Dogs have Masters, Cats have Staff.

UPDATE : Looks like Tim Blair is a Dog Person too.

Sachost.exe Removal Instructions

Are still here.

I'm still getting 3 hits/hour from search engines looking for sachost.exe, and as long as the major vendors don't give any information on it, I'll keep on providing easy-to-find links.

My apologies to at least one searcher who needed it translated into Spanish. Feel free to e-mail me if you need help.

Avast There, Me Hearties

Oh wait, it's not International talk Like a Pirate Day yet.

Belay that.

Still, in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson, and courtesy (again) of Utterly Boring, I give you.....THE BLACK SPOT. Arrrr. (Sorry).

Urban Legend? Not any more.

Seen via Utterly Boring comes an article about a student so poor he really did live in the library.

China's Moon Program Updated

Courtesy of the eminently readable Cumudgeon's Corner comes this article in Space Daily about China's plans for the moon.

China will take three steps to develop its space transportation system. For the first step, the existing carrier rocket will be improved. Second, a new generation of carrier rockets will be developed. And thirdly, an innovative space transportation system will be in place to meet the needs of China's space technology strategy and strengthen China's space power.

This is unveiled by Long Lehao, academician of China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology under China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation on April 27.
[...]
The seminar, which was concluded on April 27, also disclosed that the timetable for the three stages, orbiting, landing and returning, of China's moon probe project had been set up.

The project, called "Chang'e ", will send a satellite "Chang'e I" to the moon in the first phase which will explore the lunar surface environment, topography, geologic structure and physical field. The second phase will develop and launch a spacecraft to the moon to take on exploration and auto-inspection, which will provide chemical and physical parameters for the selection of the site of the lunar base in the future.

The third phase aims to make and lift up small sampling re-entry cabin, lunar surface sampling apparatus, and robot operation arms. Data offered by the samples and explorations taken by these equipment will be very useful to the manned moon probe and site location of a outpost station on the moon.

Previous posts on the Chinese Lunar Programme :
Space Station announcement
Lunar Probe announcement
China Shoots the Moon
Lunar Colonisation

Today's Brain Link

Thanks to The Eternal Golden Braid, I bring you.... the Martian Brain!

Sachost.Exe Removal Instructions

Are still here.

For an awful example of the rubbish that can accumulate on an unprotected system, and (unlike myself) a guy who really knows what he's doing when it comes to cleaning up the mess, have a look at Tech Support Guy. In the Horrible Example, sachost.exe was just one of the many problems he managed to clean up.

Meanwhile, the major anti-virus vendors still don't have it on their scopes. But as the result of a kind reader giving me details on GriSoft's AVG Free Virus-Scanner, I now have another line-of-defence installed. No, it didn't detect sachost.exe, but neither did any of the others. And the price was right. Being a less-than-trusting-soul, I did a Google search on "AVG", just in case it was malware, before I even thought about installing it. Having checked its bona fides, the installation of the latest version was relatively straightforward, and the scanning time was comparable to PC-Cillin's Housecall. It's too early for me to recommend it, but after giving it a trial for a few months, I'll see how it goes.

[Thanks to reader Alan Murdoch for the data on AVG]

This Takes the Cake

Courtesy of Rocket Jones, I bring you... the Anatomically Correct Thorax Cake!

I've also added two links that should have been on the linklist since day one.

First, Intel Dump.

Near real-time analysis and commentary from Phil Carter -- a former [US]Army officer, journalist and UCLA law student.

In other words, a someone who knows what he's talking about, a pearl beyond price.

Second, Doggerel Pundit, a source of Filksongs for young and old. Example:

I am the very model of a modern Media-Journalist,
I've information biased, bogus, banal and paternalist,
I know the talking heads and every bureau puke and oracle
from A-B-C to C-N-N in order categorical;
I'm very well acquainted, too, with schedules for sabbatical,
I live to write a sentence that's both simple and grammatical,
I'm good at leading questions, and my team puts out a lot o' news,
With many damning facts for which, at times, fact-checking's not in use!.....

Though my personal favourites, "Sharia" and "I Feel Pity" are from "Press Snide Story".

Apropos of the example above, the song "I am the very model of a Modern Major-General" ( from Gilbert & Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance) is of course a Filk in its own right.

...
GENERAL:
In fact, when I know what is meant by "mamelon" and "ravelin",
When I can tell at sight a Mauser rifle from a javelin,
When such affairs as sorties and surprises I'm more wary at,
And when I know precisely what is meant by "commissariat,"
When I have learnt what progress has been made in modern gunnery,
When I know more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery--
In short, when I've a smattering of elemental strategy,
You'll say a better Major-General has never sat a gee.

ALL:
You'll say a better Major-General, etc.

GENERAL:
For my military knowledge, though I'm plucky and adventury,
Has only been brought down to the beginning of the century;
But still, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.

ALL:
But still, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
He is the very model of a modern Major-General.

The song is a biting satire on the Military of the time, whose more senior officers were supposedly Academically gifted Gentlemen, but knew nothing whatsover about the state-of-the-art of Military Science. (The link is to an annotated version, explaining just what the heck a "ravelin" is, amongst other things.)

UPDATE : From Reader C.Mahaffey : Major General" is, iiirc, pointed directly at (then) Major General Wolseley, a military reformer, favoring (among other reforms) a more professionally educated officer corps. Officers (classically educated) were not considered academically gifted. Officer education (RMC and Staff College) had been reformed 1871-78, focussing on military science.

Another, particularly good annotated version is The Buff Barbarian, the song of Xena:

I am the very model of a heroine barbarian;
Through Herculean efforts, I've become humanitarian.
I ride throughout the hinterland -- at least that's what they call it in
Those sissy towns like Athens (I, myself, am Amphipolitan).

I travel with a poet who is perky and parthenian
And scribbles her hexameters in Linear Mycenian
(And many have attempted, by a host of methods mystical,
To tell if our relationship's sororal or sapphistical)....

I'm only quoting parts of the songs, if you want to know what "Parthenian" means in this context, you'll have to Read The Whole Thing.

Sachost.Exe Removal Instructions

Are here.

The Grauniad

<satire>

A Galaxy even further away...

As European-PacRim relations sink to a new low, Alan E. Brain goes to deepest Denmark to discover what the average European thinks about people at the other side of the world.

The Australian Steak House Restaurant looks a little more promising than the dozens of other eating places along the narrow, twisty little alleyways in Copenhagen, Denmark. The discreet hint of sunshine in the decor and the lack of any wine list disguise the fact that there are dozens of other Australian Steakhouses across Europe, all with precisely the same menu. This means, presumably, that everyone ordering a steak sandwhich anywhere in this tiny "continent" will receive the same miniscule cut of marbled, grain-fed beef swimming in an unsubtle mixture of tomato paste and fat.

The diner on the next table turns out to be friendlier, and indeed more cosmopolitan, than the food. His name is Bjorn Thorvaldson, and he's in the Butter Agribusiness. "You're from Australia?" he says. "My mother's cousin emigrated there. Well, New Zealand, actually. My nephew's in Los Angeles. And my half-sister lives in Perth." "Have you been over to see her?" I ask. "Vell, no," he replies. "I don't like flying." "What do you think of Australia?" "Well," he says, "they were good to us in 1945." He pauses. "You know, it's a long way away."

And from the Australian Steakhouse it does seem very distant. Indeed, the whole messy and diverse concept of the Pacific Rim seems very distant. Around Copenhagen, there is nothing but the Baltic and the mud flats of Jutland. Beyond that, there is only Poland, Germany and Belgium, where the speed limit, the price of petrol or the sales tax might vary by a percentage point or two but in essence everything would be entirely familiar to a Dane, even down to the (minute) size of the portions in the local Australian Steakhouse.

"Where do most people round here come from?" I ask Bjorn. "Round here, probably." And he's right. Mass migration around Europe ceased almost twenty generations ago. In Copenhagen, there is as little to remind the blonde population of its Teutonic roots as the darkhaired population has to remind it of the Tartars: Stolichnaya Vodka, Carlsberg Beer and Olaf's Vrische Seafood, where each table has a miniature mug of Genuine Viking Mead nestling between the ketchup and the mustard. That's about it.

Of course, Copenhagen has an elite who travel all over Asia. But less than one-one hundredth of all Europeans have been east of Bangkok, and in Denmark the proportion is much lower. One suspects the Pacific Rim geography of many people here goes no further than the Ice Creams:

Tahitian Delight
South Sea Fruit Ice

That morning, the Kristeligt Dagblad has one paragraph from Australia. Indeed, major disasters aside, foreign news generally consists solely of inter-European interaction. And Copenhagen is a chunky-sized city, far more worldly than the other towns in the area, such as Aalborg, Glostrup and Svendborg. In all of them, an Australian visitor can expect a warm welcome, because Denmark is like that. But the locals might be just as charming to a visitor from outer space, who would be only a fraction more exotic.

Is this just how it is in the hinterland, far removed from the more sophisticated dinner tables of Brussels and Starsbourg? Not necessarily, when Brussels is run by Georges Chirac of France, Tim Blair of England, Gerhard Schroede of Germany, not to mention Hanne Severinsen., from Denmark herself, and "Gorgeous George" Galloway, hero of the Red/Green Coalition, who is sometimes suspected of coming from outer space. You may not feel comfortable with the fact that the future of the planet should be decided by the representatives of voters who know so little about it. A good many senior PacRim politicians share that concern.

At times over the past few weeks, Brussels has seemed almost like an enemy capital, certainly less comfortable for an Australian than Copenhagen, where people do not follow the nuances of international diplomacy. Last month, the EU President coined the phrase "Coalition of the Lackeys" for his unholy trinity of the US, Australia and England. The Copenhagen papers may not have fully reported the reaction of the PacRim's foreign ministers. Goh Chok Tong of Singapore said it was "simplistic"; Alexander Downer of Australia said alliance partners could not be characterised as obedient satellites; America's own Donald Rimsfeld said the speech had more to do with the European Parliament elections than intercontinental politics; Eugene Chien, the Taiwanese Foreign Minister, called it "absolutist" as well as simplistic.

The response was brisk. The Paris Match reported that the EU President was fuming about "People missing an opportunity to keep their mouths shut". Chancellor Schroeder accused Americans of "Texas Cowboy Vigilantism". Jean-Marie Le Pen stated that the American Zionists and Australian Convicts should stay out of European Internal Affairs. The French PM Jacqes Chirac baffled Chinese interpreters last week by using the phrase "Anglophone Conspiracy" in a private meeting in Beijing, though it was not entirely clear who was the phoney.

The kennel of leftwingers who snarl daily in the Franfurter Allgemeine have frothed more rabidly: "It is usual for parents to control their offspring. But in the instance of global geopolitics, the situation has been totally reversed. Our mature - if somewhat brash - children against Father Europe again rebelling are," wrote Martin Gruss, in tortuously teutonic tenses. Alain Bayeaux accused the Australians, in particular, of "arrogance and anger" born of an inferiority complex. Chirac's attack, said Juan Diego y Garcia, "might have been taken as a declaration of war except that the Australians, concerned with selling wool and wheat, are too busy raping Mother Earth and engaging in unashamed Capitalism". Willhelm Krystalnacht, editor of Der Speigel, summed up the differences more elegantly: "Well, the Anglophones do believe that there is an axis of evil in the world. It's just that they believe the axis of evil is our Fraternal Socialist Allies, North Korea, Syria and Iran.."

PacRim embassies have been playing all this down, which is their job. With a world-weary air, they say that intercontinental relations have often been touchy, most recently in the 1980s over the Soviet gas pipeline and over the Balkans in the early days of the Clinton administration. And it is true that as late as 1998, which nostalgists now regard as a sunlit era of Euro-Pacific amity, an article in Foreign Affairs moaned: "Antisemitism and America-Bashing are back in fashion all over Eirope."

"Iraq policy is in process at the moment," said one Thai diplomat. "And during the process there are always arguments. What matters is that we agree on the end product. And there is every sign that we will." One experienced Brussels source described this view as "Merde", adding, "Relations now are worse than anyone can ever remember. It has become very fashionable in the middle reaches of government to beat up on the Americans as being uncultured barbarians. That's especially true in the Quai D'Orsay, but it's true in most of the European Parliament too."

"We're on the edge of the abyss," said Dr Strabismus of the Council of Europe. "Whether we step into it remains to be seen. I think a lot of Anglophones have underestimated the paradigm shift that has taken place in Europe since September 11. I think even most Christian Democrats now see the internal debate as solely one about method and tactics, Sharia now or Sharia later."

There is a fundamental dichotomy between the two sides that in some ways dates back to the very founding of the European Union, when the Second World in general, with the exceptions of Quebec and New Orleans, was uncultured and materialistic. Brussels politicians are especially conscious that Anglophone armies had to come across the Atlantic twice in the 20th century to settle Europe's quarrels. Those living on the Pacific Rim are inclined to think that the Europeans, having mainly surrendered in the last two world wars, are still determined on a course of "Peace at any Price".

In Denmark, the Pacific might seem like a distant fairyland. PacRimmers in Brussels, even New Caledonians, are inclined to see the notion of Pacific Rim unity more positively than they might at home; exile, however benign, breeds a sense of solidarity. And perhaps no single group of people outside Singapore has been as enthusiastic about the idea of South-East Asian unity as the traditional liberal-minded Canberra elite clustered round the Department of Foreign Affairs and restaurants a great deal fancier than the Australian Steakhouse.

Yet in reality the Pacific Rim Treaties seem to harden European colonial attitudes. When Fischer initially responded to the massed ranks of foreign ministers, he was genuinely sorrowful that his friends Colin and Alexander should have misunderstood things so. His tone of voice when referring to Downer implied that the ASEAN was not a significant enough player to be worth considering.

For the past half-century, American disunity has been the European elite's favoured solution to ensure that they could peacefuilly surrender to dictatorship a third time. After all, it works on this continent, doesn't it? Now that the Pacific Rim has attained a sort of political and economic reality, the Europeans are having even more trouble taking it seriously than the Americans. Antenne 5 News recently described Singapore as "un isle picturesque dans le Straits du Malac". So much for a vibrant industrial economy in a country with a per-capita income exceeding France's.

The cadet version of the Quai D'Orsay is at the Sorbonne, Paris's most famous hall of Academe, where the school for foreign service offers degrees that are a traditional route into the Corps Diplomatique. The undergraduates there are clever, worldly, well travelled, and completely uncritical of the thrust of European policy. I talked to some the other day and asked them to play word association.

They responded very readily to the USA and Americans: "MacDonalds, Hollywood, Cadillacs....Berkeley... Michael Moore... Gore Vidal... Michael Jackson... Jerry Lewis.. Ku Klux Klan...Cowboys...Capitalists!" They were just as quick shouting out about Japan and the Japanese: "Sushi... Kung Fu(sic)...Tea Cermonies...Hari-Kiri....Cars... Geisha...". But they seemed almost Denmark-vague when asked about the Pacific Rim as a whole: "Kangaroos... Rice.. Desert Islands...". Someone added, "They enjoy life more," then the answers petered out.

In Denmark, people might imagine that Australia and New Zealand are much the same thing. But in Brussels, the Pacific Rim's pretensions to unity seem to be treated with some contempt. Long before De Gaulle came to town, it was commonplace here to say that the Pacific does not matter to the Europeans any more - except as a convenient place to let off Atomic Bombs so no radiation will reach Europe.

It is, in part, a problem of success. Europeans have turned away from the Pacific Rim because the end of the cold war has enabled them to do so. "We're drifting apart because the relationship has achieved its fundamental purpose," says Uwe Daalder of the Bruecken Institut. "For the past 50 years, America has been the focus of European attention. We now have an Interventionist and Democratic Hyper-power. From that perspective, Europe is Finished." But there is a second part to this. "September 11 confirmed the world-view of the European Union," says Daalder. "They believed that they could hide behind America's military umbrella and that proved it. Apart from Madrid. (a long pause) America thinks the threats are more imminant and immediate. Furthermore, America emphasises Democracy and Human Rights, partly because they see Dictatorships as breeding-grounds for Terrorism. The Europeans emphasise collaboration and bribery. Making out like bandits. Swiss Bank Accounts."

It is, however, easier to claim that the Pacific Rim does not matter than to claim that America or China or Australia don't matter. Europe may not care about the Pacific. But the parts of the Pacific Rim are still greater than the whole. When it comes to it, would the Europeans really surrender meekly to Islamic Extremism without the US cavalry being ready to rescue them from their folly? The Americans insist that the need for action is fully accepted not only in the European Parliament, but also in NATO.

Militarily, Europe can now take on Upper Volta, or possibly the Central African Republic, but it would be a difficult fight. But the colonial psychology is different. One influential Euro-MP (not from Denmark) was musing the other day: "Sure, we can adopt Sharia. But people still think of Winston Churchill. I think it would be politically difficult and perhaps impossible." It might, in short, go down badly at every one of the dozens of branches of the Australian Steakhouse.
</satire>

The original Guardian Article is even more hilarious, as the names and quotes are real.

BTW the Australian Steakhouse chain in Copenhagen really wasn't that bad when I last visited one of them. Just steer (sorry) clear of the meat (quite easy, it's finding it on the plate that's difficult). One of the better Northern European Nosheries.

Sachost.Exe Removal Instructions

Are here.

There's other stuff on the site too -
Mr Picasso Head
Design Your Own Hell
Brain Short-Circuiters
"Blue Suede Shoes" in Klingon
The Hamas Charter and other political articles.

But if you have a case of the sachosts, you'd better go here first.

The Last of the First People - 20 years on

It's been 20 years since a tribe of 9 people first contacted the rest of Humanity, here in Australia. Their story is told in The Bulletin.

On October 24, 1984, Melbourne's The Herald – as it was then known – announced the discovery of the Pintupi nine with an understandably hysterical front-page screamer: "We find the lost tribe." The newspaper had a journalist who happened to be in central Australia and was handed the scoop. But The Herald did not find the tribe and, more particularly, they were anything but lost. Lost people do not survive in a desert, successfully raising children to adulthood, initiating their boys, wandering among claypans and soaks, and literally, in the words of Warlimpirrnga, "chasing the clouds" to stay beneath the precious rain.
[...]
Theirs is a story of pride and survival, not disgrace: they can rightly be called the last of the First People.
[...]
At night, the nine slept by four separate campfires, divided along gender and age lines. Helping keep them warm at night, says Yukultji, was a "big mob of dingoes, full dingoes, might be 12 of them or something". They used their own hair or cat fur to make nimpala, short skirts that served as belts in which to keep lizards – the group's staple – rather than offering concealment.
[...]
Yukultji remembers seeing an aeroplane and a helicopter cross the sky. "We were too frightened," she says. "We hid under a tree." Such visions were not associated with any recognised Dreaming story and impossible to explain.
[...]
Kiwirrkurra's leaders decided to find Warlimpirrnga's group and bring them in. Their main motivation was a sense of pity for what the elders called "the naked ones". It was a prescient move. By then, the group was in real danger – not from the desert, which they had mastered, but from themselves. The gene pool was running dangerously low and inbreeding – which Aborigines avoid with their complex skin classification system – was imminent.
[...]
By 1984, this wandering band numbered nine. Papalya and Nanu, as the group's widow-matriarchs, were both aged in their mid 50s. There was Takariya, then 24, nowadays sometimes known as Doris, and the girls Yalti, 14, and Yukultji, 12. Of men and boys there was Piyiti, then about 26, Warlimpirrnga, about 25, Tamayinya, 15, and Walala, 12. The group's only modern tool was an axe-head that Joshua had brought from Balgo. It was said to be so handled and valued that it was polished to a mirror-finish. Warlimpirrnga had grown into the role of big-game provider. "I would spear mala [kangaroos], emus, pussycat, rabbits, snake," says Warlimpirrnga. "It was easy to catch them. I made my spear sharp with a limestone rock."

Read the whole thing. You'll be alternately proud to be a human being like these nine, and amazed at humanity's folly, no matter how technologically primitive or advanced.

Weird Wide Web

I refuse to comment on this story.

The Earth is Officially Flat

...at least, in Saudi Arabia.

To see why, have a look at The Platygaen Qu'ran.

It was not always so.

At the peak of their culture the Muslims did not believe in a flat earth; owing to their extensive translation of Greek materials, they accepted the Ptolemaic spherical-earth view.

But the rise of Islamic Fundamentalism has caused such innovative, modernistic notions to be discarded.

In 1993, Sheikh Al-Azeez bin Baaz, the supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia, declared that the earth is flat, and that anyone saying otherwise is an atheist deserving of punishment.[1]

Few Judeo-Christian theologians - even fundamentalist ones - still credit the view that the Earth is disc-shaped, and separated from waters above and below by a hemisphere of beaten metal (see illustration), rather like those small paperweights you can sometimes see, the ones with snowflakes in them.

References :
[1] Yousef M. Ibrahim, "Muslim Edicts take on New Force", The New York Times, February 12, 1995, p. A-14. (NYT Online archive only goes back to 1996), quoted in The New Statesman and elsewhere.

I was very careful to check out the bona fides of this fatwa. There's already too much misinformation on the net. I've yet to find a copy in English of the good Sheik's Magnum Opus "Evidence that the Earth is Standing Still" published by the Islamic University of Medina in 1974, (the ones with the lines

If the earth is rotating as they claim, the countries, the mountains, the trees, the rivers, and the oceans will have no bottom and the people will see the eastern countries move to the west and the western countries move to the east.

on page 23 ) but the fatwa seems pretty much proven.

More discussion on the Islamic Flat Earth (or not) is at the Al Bawaba, Islamic, and TakingITGlobal Fora (Forums).

For what it's worth, the few Muslims that I know personally are more like this guy:

This style of "keep-your-mouth-shut", suppress other opinions, islam could never produce such a Golden Age of diversity and over-all tolerance as too many good-hearted people are too quickly finding out.

When Good Rockets Go Bad

Five of the most spectacular movies of rockets (at least some with live nuclear warheads) not behaving quite according to specifications.

And a list of miscellanea that's uncategorisable.
Examples include:

• The Banned Dr Seuss Book
• Estimates of World GDP, from 1 million BC to the present
• Fungus Of The Month
• Audio Out-Takes from Casey Casem, Larry King, Col Sanders.. and my favourite, Connie Chung
• Scans of Galileo's Notes on Motion

Moonbat of the Year Award

In the Left Corner ( and I do mean Left...) Trots In Space
And in the So-far-Right-he's-past-Alpha-Centauri corner, Joe "The Joos Nuked Bali" Vialls

We report, you decide.

Sachost.Exe Removal Instructions

Monitoring the referrals to this site, I'm getting an increasing number of hits per hour from Google, people looking for sachost.exe or sachost.exe removal. I've also had some e-mails thanking me for the help. Anyway, if you're a visitor looking for help on disposing of this trojan, the instructions are here.

I suppose I should put in a disclaimer about "use these instructions at your own risk", but won't. Use common sense. If you're not sure you can follow the instructions ( editting the register is open-heart surgery on your computer, it's really easy to kill the patient by one small slip ), then go find a tame geek. They'll be glad to help, if only to show off their prowess.

I've also received a second e-mail that attempted to infect me with a Trojan - but now my defences are a little better ( there was a Microsoft patch from April 13 I didn't know about), and I don't even know which trojan it was, it didn't penetrate far enough for me to ID it. Be very careful of any e-mail whose header is Question for seller -- Item #nnnnnnnnn where nnnnnnnnn is a 9-digit number.

More details on people's experience with sachost.exe are available on an e-bay forum.

If this has been any help to you at all, please consider hitting the Tip Jar, as it's been 4 months since my last pay cheque. All major credit cards and Pay Pal accepted. But it's purely voluntary.

Memo to Telstra

From the ABC comes an article about just one of the world's daily tragedies.

The South Australian Coroner Wayne Chivell has heard a young mother dialled 911 when she discovered her infant son unconscious in the bath.

Coroner Chivell today delivered his findings into the death of seven-month-old Christopher John Smith at Elizabeth East, in Adelaide's north, in November 2002.

He referred to evidence from Amanda Hamlyn who said she dialled 911 when she found her son Christopher in the bath.

This is the emergency number used in the United States.

She had no success with that number.

In Australia the emergency number is 000.

A suggestion : bearing in mind that in real emergencies, people tend to panic - to act instinctively rather than calmly and rationally; and bearing in mind that a lot of people may not actually know the 000 number, nor have a phone book handy to look it up (on the first page in BIG FRIENDLY LETTERS); and bearing in mind that we have a lot of Americans visit the joint; and finally, bearing in mind that due to Coca-Colonisation of the airwaves, most kids are likely to know 911 as an emergency number; then wouldn't it be an idea to route all calls to 911 to the 000 service? And maybe the 999 ones as well, to cater for all our Pom visitors? Even a recorded message telling them to dial 000 in case of emergency would do the job.

Just a thought.

Roo awarded Purple Cross

Updating a previous post about a most remarkable Roo. From the ABC :

A kangaroo that helped save the life of a Gippsland man has been awarded the RSPCA's [Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals] highest honour for bravery, the Purple Cross.

Len Richards was knocked unconscious by a falling tree branch on his Tanjil South farm last year.

His pet kangaroo, Lulu, came to his rescue by barking to attract his family's attention.

Mr Richards says it also seems Lulu applied some first aid.

"My nephew when he got to my side said she'd actually tipped me on my side and vomit was coming out of my mouth so she'd actually saved me from choking," he said.

He says Lulu has shared a strong bond with his family since they rescued it from its dead mother's pouch by a roadside.

"We proceeded to bottle feed it with a proper formula and that's how Lulu the kangeroo came about," he said.

"Pet" Kangaroo seems a bit of a misnomer.

"She's a free ranging kangeroo, she visits around at different farms and then she comes back to our house at 6:00 o'clock on the dot, taps on the door for a teddy bear biscuit.

"If it's cold outside she'll walk in and go and lie right in front of the open fire."

Virussed by sachost

Darn, my unbroken record of "never having had a virus on my machine" is now Kaput. None of the standard virus-checkers I've used (including Symantec and Trend Micro) can detect it - yet. It sliced through my first few lines of defence like they weren't there. It got caught by my Firewall before it could do any damage, but that line of defence is well beyond the tolerable boundary.

It appears that all you have to do to get it is to a) Use a Microsoft Operating System ( Yes, I know, that's my first mistake), b) Use Outlook Express as the mail client, and c) Attempt to read the wrong e-mail. You don't have to open an attachment, and I don't think you even have to click on a hyperlink - if you can receive html mail, it could do an immediate re-direct to the malware site.

I'm still trying to track down the exact sequence of events causing infection, and make sure that no damage was caused to the system.

It's not properly a Virus, but a Trojan, and from looking at its internals, it probably originated in Russia. It logs keystrokes, and reports things like your password files to a 3rd party site. Until it gets a proper name, I'll call it "sachost". It's a variant of the Ibiza Trojan, so will probably be called "Ibiza-something" when it finally gets named.

How can you tell if you've been infected?

First, use your task manager ( or on Win98, hit CTRL-ALT-DEL once ). If you see the processes sachost, sachosts, sachostc on the list, you've got troubles. If you haven't got a Firewall installed, then ALL YOUR PASSWORDS MAY HAVE BEEN COMPROMISED. You must change all the ones you care about, be it to eBay, Amazon, PayPal, or whatever (but not just yet!). If you change them now, they'll be logged, and sent to the Mafya sometime in the next five or ten minutes (I haven't tracked down when it sends the data, there's quite a few candidate IP addresses in the code, plus proxies).

Here's how to get rid of the thing (if you're using Win98, anyway):
First, if you're not totally sure what you're doing, disconnect from the Internet and go find a Tame Geek. Otherwise, continue as follows:
a) Terminate the 3 processes sachost, sachosts, sachostc using the Task manager. End them.
b) Use the regedit utility (Start->Run->type in "regedit") to find the line Onlune Sarvice"="%Windir%\sachost.exe or possibly c:\windows\sachost.exe and delete it. (this will stop it from automatically re-starting when you start the computer up again)
c) Restart
d) Now make a note of the timestamp of creation of the files C:\Windows\msrt32.dll and C:\Windows\sachost.exe. Then delete them. msrt32.dll is the beast's black heart, the invisible process that logs keystrokes. If you're curious, open C:\Windows\sysini.ini using Notepad to see what the nasty little trojan was going to report back to base. Then blow it away, delete it too.
e) Finally, delete C:\Windows\System\sachostc.exe and C:\Windows\System\sachosts.exe

After step c), it should be safe to go change your passwords, but I'd wait till step e)'s finished just to be certain. Send e-mails to the appropriate sites, saying that any transactions after the timestamp you noted in step d) should be treated as suspect/fraudulent. If you used your Credit Card on the net since that time, go cancel it now. If you did any on-line banking since that time, get your account frozen immediately, and inform the bank what has happened. Hopefully, you still have some money in them. Of course if you have a Firewall, it should have stopped any data from escaping, and you don't need to change any passwords. etc. Assuming it's a good Firewall, that is. ZoneAlarm is fine.

The first mention of this Trojan "in the wild" that I've found is on the 22nd, and I repeat, none of the standard virus checkers appear to be able to recognise it yet. Perhaps Ad-Aware could have, but by the time I ran that, I'd already cleaned up the infection.

I feel like a homeowner who's come home to find the front door lock jemmied open, the burglar-alarm disconnected, the whole place turned over, and signs where the thieves have attempted (and failed) to open the safe.

UPDATE : The Symantec on-line scanner does detect the presence of the beast. It recognises parts of the sachost.exe file as being a Backdoor Trojan. But the rest of the stuff isn't detected.

UPDATE : From reader Orlando Colamatteo :

Symantec Corporate AV Def 5/5/2004 rev. 8 recognised sachost.exe as trojan and quarantined it.

He also corrected some typoes in the instructions for editing the registry. Thanks, Orlando.

As far as I know, no anti-virus system as at 5/5/2004 recognises the sachosts.exe, sachostc.exe and msrt32.dll files as well. I've seen a report that Ad Aware doesn't recognise them as malwear either, but haven't confirmed that.

If you find this advice useful, well, the Tip Jar takes Paypal and all major credit cards, should you wish to make a donation of a dollar or two. But it's strictly voluntary.

Today is ANZAC Day

Please read my article in The Command Post.

Weird Wide Web

From the AP, via The Australian :

SOUTH ORANGE, New Jersey: A 12-year-old student has been suspended after school officials accused him of threatening a teacher with a deadly weapon -- peanut butter biscuits.

Jules Gabriel has been banned from class since April 2 after allegedly threatening to use the biscuit on a teacher who is highly allergic to peanuts.

His father, Loubert Gabriel, admitted his son had a packet of Nutter Butter brand biscuits and made a comment about having "something dangerous". But he added: "They mishandled this."

School superintendent Peter Horoschak said several classmates said Jules waved a biscuit over his head and said he would use it against the teacher to prevent being put on detention.

It could have been worse... he could have threatened to use Pork Brains in Milk Gravy.

A Palestinian Week

From Victor Davis Hanson :

The Palestinians will, in fact, get their de facto state, though one that may be now cut off entirely from Israeli commerce and cultural intercourse. This is an apparently terrifying thought: Palestinian men can no longer blow up Jews on Monday, seek dialysis from them on Tuesday, get an Israeli paycheck on Wednesday, demonstrate to CNN cameras about the injustice of it all on Thursday — and then go back to tunneling under Gaza and three-hour, all-male, conspiracy-mongering sessions in coffee-houses on Friday. Beware of getting what you bomb for.

There are signs of hope though. For example, one editorial from Pakistan... Sometimes it's difficult to remember that the vast majority of people on this planet are decent human beings, regardless of cultural differences. Much of History is Tragedy, rather than Melodrama.

Good against Good is Tragedy; Good against Evil is Melodrama

This should not blind us to the fact that some people are just plain Bad to the Bone. And others... Hitler had great affection for his Dog, until he killed him with a Cyanide capsule just to see if it worked. Goebbels loved his five young daughters, but gave them a cyanide capsule each too. No doubt many suicide bombers are absolutely certain that they are doing the Right Thing. No doubt many American attack helicopter pilots are very uncertain of their complete moral rectitude when firing rockets into a building where fire's coming from (but which may contain innocent civilians), even if it saves many lives.

The London Necropolis Company

In keeping with the somewhat macabre mood of the previous post, it's time for me to post an interesting URL : Riding the Death Line :

During the first half of the 19th century, the capital’s population had more than doubled and the number of London corpses requiring disposal was growing almost as fast. Cemetery space in the city had spectacularly failed to keep pace with this growth.
[...]
The man who came up with the answer was Sir Richard Broun. In 1849, he proposed buying a huge tract of land at what is now the Surrey village of Brookwood to build a vast new cemetery for London’s dead. The 2,000-acre plot he had in mind – soon dubbed “London’s Necropolis” – was about 25 miles (40km) from the city, far enough away to present no health hazard and cheap enough to allow for affordable burials. The railway line from Waterloo to Southampton, Broun realised, could offer a practical way to transport coffins and mourners alike between London and the new cemetery.

The idea of using the railways to link London to the new rural cemeteries had been in the air for some years when Broun presented his plan, but not everyone was convinced. Many thought the clamour and bustle they associated with train travel would not suit the dignity demanded of a Christian funeral.

There were other fears too. In 1842, questioned by a House of Commons Select Committee, Bishop of London Charles Blomfield said he thought respectable mourners would find it offensive to see their loved ones’ coffins sharing a railway carriage with those of their moral inferiors. “It may sometimes happen that persons of opposite characters might be carried in the same conveyance,” he warned. “For instance, the body of some profligate spendthrift might be placed in a conveyance with the body of some respectable member of the church, which would shock the feelings of his friends.”

It is worth remembering that, in 1842, train travel itself was still a novelty....

Worth a read. And I wonder just how many of today's burning issue re Genetic Engineering, Gay Marriage and so on will seem as, er, quaint, 160 years hence as the well-meaning Bishop's notions?

Unlike the London Mortuary station, which was destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1941, the Antipodean equivalent (built 1867) survived, and was used until 1948. Fully restored, it's visible from every train that departs Sydney Central if you know where to look.

Some more quotes from the article (which really is worthing reading in toto) :

As people got used to the trains, they gradually came to accept them, even giving them affectionately tasteless nicknames such as “the dead meat train” or “the stiffs’ express”.
[...]
The discrepancy in ticket prices had arisen because LNC’s fares were fixed by the 1854 Act which created the company, and not increased again until 1939. By 1902, when LNC’s replacement terminus opened, this had produced a situation where a First Class return ticket from Waterloo to Brookwood cost eight shillings on L&SWR’s normal service, but only six shillings on the Necropolis trains. Golfers travelling from London to West Hill Golf Club, which stood right next to Brookwood’s grounds, sometimes took advantage of this, dressing up as mourners to ride the Necropolis train down, and so pay a lower fare. The remains of a rough footpath from Brookwood Station to West Hill’s clubhouse can still be seen at the cemetery, and Clarke believes it was cheapskate golfers who originally tramped it down.
[...]
For anyone who could afford it, First Class travel on the Necropolis trains conferred some very definite privileges. First Class passengers were relentlessly pampered at every stage of the journey, and constantly protected from having to mix with the lower orders.

RTWT (Read The Whole Thing).

This is just... Sick

The Plush Ebola Virus.

Latest product from GiantMicrobes

We make stuffed animals that look like tiny microbes—only a million times actual size! Now available: The Common Cold, The Flu, Sore Throat, Stomach Ache, Bad Breath, Kissing Disease, Athlete's Foot, Ulcer, Martian Life, Beer & Bread, Black Death, Ebola, Dust Mite, Bed Bug, and Bookworm.
[...]
They make great learning tools for parents and educators, as well as amusing gifts for anyone with a sense of humor!

A Sick sense of humour, that is. Like the one I've got.

Time Travel for Fun and Profit

Seen via The Eternal Golden Braid : How to Time Travel for beginners. Unfortunately, because it's a seriously scientific site, you have to start out with a torroidal (doughnut-shaped) rotating black hole the mass of a reasonable-sized star. Tricky, that.
Then there are the problems regarding Hawking Radiation and so on. Though if you can collapse a star to order, I imagine they'd be relatively minor.
Sub-pages contain details about Lorentz Transformations and Dirac's Negative Mass Energy that are about as simple and well-explained as it's possible for them to be. A lot of hard work went into making this subject as easy to understand as possible - which may not be much to those without a degree in Physics, I'm afraid.

Oh yes, when anywhere near a Black Hole, don't forget your Life Preserver.

Zen and the Art of Cascading Style Sheets

Here's a programming post, which hopefully will be both comprehensible and interesting for non-programmers, especially ones who Blog or are thinking of Blogging.

A document, be it an article, a sentence, or a complete blog, can be divided into two parts: the Content, and the Format the content is expressed in.

Here's a simple example: consider the content, Mary had a little lamb.

This could be reified, implemented, published or what you will in a variety of formats, such as:

Mary had a little lamb

Mary had a little lamb
Mary had a little lamb
Mary had
a little lamb

...and so on.

Other content can have the same format, such as

Its fleece was white as snow

So Content and Format are two separate things.

This concept can be extended to much larger documents, such as Blogs. Blogger, for example, provides a number of Templates for anyone blogging to use. These templates provide a number of pre-defined styles. They can be changed at will, but most people don't bother. This is why so many blogs look similar in style. By the way, this blog uses a fairly popular template, but modified a bit so the links go on the left rather than the right. Anyway, all the blogger has to do is specify which template they're going to use when they first create their blog, then just supply content thereafter - the template does all the rest.

The recommended way of doing this in general is with Cascading Style Sheets - css for short. Unfortunately, different browsers - such as Internet Explorer, Opera, and Netscape - interpret CSSs in subtly different ways. But the Gurus of css can make them do miraculous things. Here's some example of exactly the same content, but with different stylesheets applied:

The CSS Zen Garden .....
with the Edo and Tokyo stylesheet applied...
or the 15 Petals stylesheet...
or (my favourite), the Wiggles the Wonder Worm stylesheet.

It's the same content - just expressed in different styles.

We have to touch people

From The Belmont Club :

The most dangerous thing about the Internet from the point of view of those who would create a totalitarian or theocratic state is that it allows people to see others as men -- who may disagree, or who on reflection decide to fight -- but men nonetheless. The average person is never wholly unaware, as some academics are, of the humanity of other people. Nor is the average person wholly indifferent to concrete evil and imminent danger. Both are real and ancient things, ignored by those who live in a bubble of artificial laughter and contrived wit, but alive to those who meet them in the everyday. The Los Angeles Times article on Marine Corps snipers drives home how these marksmen, who live closer to the enemy than the ethereal postmodernist beings who jeer them, can never seek solace in abstractions. They must glimpse the faces of those they are about to shoot, the horror and necessity of the act combining in the single pull of the trigger, doomed to live in a world of specifics: fighting identifiable evils and performing individual acts of kindness. In this strange universe an Italian rips off a hood and with a final shout proclaims himself undefeated. Todd Beamer crashes an aircraft that others might live. Chief Wiggles raises money for children whose names he knows. And somewhere in Riyadh a Saudi makes excuses to his mother.

Only the Grand Inquisitors stand apart, disdainful alike of both kindness and human weakness, full of schemes and plots. And of their false truces and cunning offers we should have no part except to answer it with silence (as in Dostoeveky's parable) and to go get a beer.

When I read this, I recalled the late Jacob Bronowski's words as he crouched in the mud at Auschwitz, and let a handful of it slip through his fingers. We have to touch people.

Cross Contamination

Time for a Space Post.

I've long suspected that there are parts of the Hoyle-Wickramasingh Hypothesis that are more likely correct than not.

OK, WTF is the Hoyle-Whatchamacallit Hypothesis? (Which I'll call the HWH for short).

Basically, look at the conditions on Earth when Life-as-we-know-it is believed to have formed. Water available, Carbon available, unfiltered sunlight available, and a clay or other substrate (floor) with regularities that would encourage formation of complex compounds.

The take a look at the conditions in the Oort cloud, in insterstellar gas clouds, and in infalling comets. A few quick mathematical calculations will show that theres heaps, piles, zillions more places where conditions like this exist in Space than on a planet's surface. The difference between a few flecks of paint on the surface of some very small marbles, and great vats of paint the size of Jupiter. Now whether the difference is mere Billions or Trillions or something much greater really doesn't matter, the weak form of the HWH says that Life more probably evolved "out there" than "down here". The strong form states that we're constantly being bombarded with biochemical material from space, and that there's a correlation between Viral outbreaks and patterns of infall.

I'm not convinced of the latter. The "fossil bacteria" found in some meteors may be exactly that, or they may be unusual non-living crystal growths.

On the other hand, we know from Surveyor 3 that some common earthly bacteria are hardy brutes, capable of surving in space for some years. Though there is some evidence that the initial reports may have been the result of cross-contamination.

But there's another form of cross-contamination: Martian meteors have been found in Antarctica. (Why Antarctica? Because that's the best place they'd be preserved intact. Dark objects on White backgrounds are easy to find, too)

And now it appears that we've found the other part of the puzzle : similar material on Mars.

NASA's Opportunity rover has examined an odd volcanic rock on the plains of Mars' Meridiani Planum region with a composition unlike anything seen on Mars before, but scientists have found similarities to meteorites that fell to Earth.

"We think we have a rock similar to something found on Earth," said Dr. Benton Clark of Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, science-team member for the Opportunity and Spirit rovers on Mars.

We haven't found Earth-formed rock on Mars yet, but the evidence indicates there's been an exchange of material between the Earth and Mars - and a pretty hefty one, otherwise the odds of finding such a rock so quickly would be, er, astronomical. (Sorry).

That means there's likely been a lesser exchange with every planetary body in the Solar System- including Europa.

Put all the clues together, and they indicate that Life-as-we-know-it, carbon-based, water-soluble life, could be incredibly prolific throughout the Universe. Absolutely everywhere it can exist, in fact. And Cross-Contamination means that every bit will have startling resemblances to every other bit, say as much as Botulinum Bacteria does to Elephants, or Tobacco Mozaic Virus does to Goldfish. (Which is quite a lot, from a biochemical viewpoint).

Quote of the Week

We don’t make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents. Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value. It has no sanctity.

-Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, head of the al Muhajiroun group in London. (Reuters)

Brain Cache Found

From Nature :

The number of things you can hold in your mind at once has been traced to one penny-sized part of the brain.

The finding surprises researchers who assumed this aspect of our intelligence would be distributed over many parts of the brain. Instead, the area appears to form a bottleneck that might limit our cognitive abilities, researchers say.

"This is a striking discovery," says John Duncan, an intelligence researcher at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK.

Most people can hold three or four things in their minds at once when given a quick glimpse of an image such as a collection of coloured dots, or lines in different orientations. If shown a similar image a second later, they will be able to recognise whether three or four of these spots and lines are identical to the first set or not.

But some people can only catch one or two things in a glance, while others can capture up to five.

This very short-term memory capacity is thought to be related to intelligence. In the same way that a computer with a larger working memory can crank through problems more quickly, people with a greater capacity for holding images in their heads are expected to have better reasoning and problem-solving skills.

Two research teams operating independently using different techniques have come to the same conclusion: that this "Short Term Working Memory" is implemented by one small section of the brain, in Humans anyway.
Such a "Short Term Working Memory" is essentially the same as a "Cache" in Computer Science terms. For example, your browser has a "Cache" of recently-visited sites and images, so that if you hit the foward and back buttons rapidly, the data doesn't have to be retrieved again over the Internet, it's available quickly.
What does this mean for research on Intelligence? Bugadifino, as they say in the Classics. But it's a significant step in the journey to a better understanding of how our minds work.

Small is Beautiful

Today's interesting URL is one for the Culture Vultures : Willard Wigan's wondrous artwork.

Willard can create a masterpiece within the eye of a tiny sewing needle, on the head of a pin, the tip of an eyelash or a grain of sand. Some are many times smaller than the fullstop at the end of this sentence.
[...]
Willard, who is completely self-taught has baffled medical science and been the subject of discussions among micro-surgeons, nano-technologists and at universities worldwide. His work is ground-breaking - partly because of the astounding beauty of vision which challenges the belief system of the mind and partly because it demonstrates that if one person can create the impossible, we all have the potential to transcend our own limiting beliefs about what we are capable of.
[...]
When working on this scale he slows his heartbeat and his breathing dramatically through meditation and attempts to harmonise his mind, body and soul with the Creator. He then sculpts or paints at the centrepoint between heartbeats for toTal stillness of hand. He likens this process to "trying to pass a pin through a bubble without bursting it." His concentration is intense when working like this and he feels mentally and physically drained at the end of it.

Low Sense of Humour Part 2

I suspect that there is a strong correlation between belonging to the medical profession and having a Low sense of humour. At the second medical blog I've sampled, I came across some descriptions of events that left me in stitches (figuratively anyway). For example, the post about the cat on the laptop...

(First medical bog mentioned here)

New Search Engine Installed

If you look at the Search box to your left, you'll see that I've installed a new one. The old one was good as long as the site only had a dozen pages, but over the months just couldn't cope.

Still, the price was right ( i.e. free ) so no complaints. Feel free to e-mail me if you strike any problems with the new one (the price on this one was also right). The index should be updated approximately daily, but I might have to set it to weekly instead.

Cyborg Development Report - Braingate

From the New York Times :

The company, Cyberkinetics Inc., plans to implant a tiny chip in the brains of five paralyzed people in an effort to enable them to operate a computer by thought alone.

The Food and Drug Administration has given approval for a clinical trial of the implants, according to the company.

The implants, part of what Cyberkinetics calls its BrainGate system, could eventually help people with spinal cord injuries, strokes, Lou Gehrig's disease or other ailments to communicate better or even to operate lights and other devices through a kind of neural remote control.

"You can substitute brain control for hand control, basically," said Dr. John P. Donoghue, chairman of the neuroscience department at Brown University and a founder of Cyberkinetics, which hopes to begin the trial as early as next month.
[...]
"Among many people in the field, there's a feeling now that the time is here for moving the technology to test in humans," said Dr. Richard A. Andersen, professor of neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology, who is working on his own device for the brain. Still, for the trial, there is trepidation mixed with anticipation.

"A disaster at this early stage could set the whole field back," said Dr. Dawn M. Taylor, a research associate at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center, who is testing similar systems in monkeys.
[...]
Though Cyberkinetics is not the first to try neural control in people, it seems the most intent on bringing a product to market, perhaps by 2007 or 2008, said its chief executive, Timothy R. Surgenor.

Started in 2001 and based in Foxborough, Mass., the company has raised $9 million for the project.

Timeframe pretty much as predicted.

For Background reading, see previous posts:
Cyborg Liberation Front
Upgrade Your Brain to Wireless
More on Cyborgs
Cyborgs and Hybrots and Borg, Oh My!
Today's Brain Links (I)
Today's Brain Links (II)
and of course my article from January on this subject:
Today's Brain Article : Braingate.

Graduation Day

After a hectic 300km-there and 300km-back daytrip to the Wagga Wagga Campus of Charles Sturt University, I can now style myself Alan E Brain, BSc. MInfoTech(Dist).
Actually it's the first and only time I've been physically present at the University where I was studying. Nice to see some of the faces behind the e-mails.

54 Good Reasons

Why we had to go into Iraq.

The first 53 are detailed in this document, courtesy of USAID.

Since the Saddam Hussein regime was overthrown in May, 270 mass graves have been reported. By mid-January, 2004, the number of confirmed sites climbed to fifty-three. Some graves hold a few dozen bodies, their arms lashed together and the bullet holes in the backs of skulls testimony to their execution. Other graves go on for hundreds of meters, densely packed with thousands of bodies.

The 54th is from an e-mail sent by a friend of mine in Israel. It's so that no-one has to hear a radio broadcast like this ever again.

Thanks to TCP reader Ronnie Schreiber, here is a translation:

We all recognize that signal that we have just heard. This is a genuine alert. There is a missile attack on Israel. All Isreali residents should immediately put on their gas masks and should go into their sealed rooms and place their families in the room. The room should be sealed with rags and with adhesive tape. As is known and recognized, stop your normal activities, check on your children and put on their gas masks in the correct manner, and continue to listen to us. This is a genuine alert, a missile attack on Israel and we will have more details as they come in… To review procedures in the sealed room, do not sit near exterior walls or walls adjacent to the exterior walls. Stay near the interior walls. Don’t face the exterior walls. Sit on the floor…If you have a family check on your children, make sure you have the key to the lock so you can lock the door, and proceed to your sealed room. This message will be repeated in Russian.

Beagle Found!

<satire>
At least, according to one report found via Google News. And it looks like sabotage by the Americans.

The Americans, wishing to avoid the ignominy of the British upstaging their Mars lander missions have been under suspicion for some time by the British Beagle 2 team and a chance discovery of a pile of empty Budweiser beer cans outside the Jodrell Bank fence, was the first clue in their dastardly plot.
[...]
Tony Blair is said to be fuming at the Americans, because he was promised that there would be no transatlantic intereference in this mission, unlike the previous 33 British attempts at putting a man on the moon.

</satire>

From the Universe Next Door...

A Book Review.