Index Animi Mei

2006 Mar 30 (Thu)

BBC had an article about two weeks ago telling how some scientists have announced the possibility of life on Titan. Because of the meteors that crashed into to Earth, "material" could have been ejected off Earth into space. The material could have contained living organisms, and scientists, using models, have shown that the trajectory of the jettison could have brought the material to moons of Saturn, specifically Titan and Europa. Scientists don't have real hope for Europa to have been seeded (because of the velocity at which the material would be entering its atmosphere). As Dr. Gladman is quoted to have said:

"It's frustrating if you're a microbe that's been wandering the Universe for a million years to then die striking the surface of Europa."

Apparently I don't know anything about the life expectancy of organisms, because I thought that the trip outside the Earth's atmosphere, or even floating around in space for millions of years, would have obliterated any chance of survival. Guess I need to read bio when I get the chance. :-)

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swimmery

There's dwimmery, and now it looks like there's swimmery. I think it's a good idea to look at timing when trying to disambiguate meaning in searching, but I'm curious how effective it can be in general, interactive scenarios. Cool idea, tho'.

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2006 Mar 26 (Sun)

Firefox Enhancements

I am finally catching up with some of my blog reading, and looked more into the extensions Ricardo Signes mentions. These are the ones I hadn't heard of before, and I just installed:

These are the ones I have heard about, but never got around to installing when moving up to 1.5:

And these are the ones I already have installed, that are quite useful:

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2006 Mar 24 (Fri)

Whose Frustration?

Via The Register, an incident that makes me think how stubborn and ignorant a person (or I) can be at times.

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2006 Mar 23 (Thu)

Chip on a molecule

Cool article on The Register about researchers at IBM who have created a working processor on a molecule. The scientists explain that the purpose for the research "isn't about making the circuits smaller, it�s about making them faster." The author, however, comments:

This latest experiment was a proof of the principle that nanotubes can be used as a basis for electronics. The technology is a long way off doing useful computation - the nanochip achieved a 52MHz crawl.

52MHz might seem a "crawl" to the author, but I remember the 8088, 80286, etc., and the "blazing speed" that Windows booted on my dad's 386SX 16MHz with a whopping 4MB RAM. ISTM that a nanochip running faster than what the top-of-the-line was ten years ago is by no means "a long way off", unless there are other issues involved with using these nanochips. Just my $0.02.

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2006 Mar 21 (Tue)

Now if only I could think of a use for it...

An article was mentioned on the YAPC::NA 2006 site, and what it describes looks so freakin' cool! I especially like the Tux example, since I haven't forgotten how I loved my linux box before I got a Mac. Hopefully I can think of an interesting thing to use it for...maybe I'll mention it to a BSERC member or something...

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2006 Mar 15 (Wed)

Awe-inspiring photo

I noticed this article on The Register, and thought I'd share. Creation is amazing.

2006/03/21 15:19
Margret

No David, YOU'RE amazing.

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2006 Mar 13 (Mon)

Religion Science

I've recently added the Mind Hacks blog to my bloglines, and I find practically every post an interesting read. A couple weeks ago, there was post mentioning two professors discussing the interplay between religion and science. A scientist who is an adamant evolutionist, but also Christian, criticized another philosopher who is attempting to persuade others that evolution and atheism are interdependent. As can be supposed, the Christian evolutionist doesn't think that is the case, and the disagreement has escalated into more of a heated debate, with mean words exchanged by both sides (survival of the meanest?). I don't think either of the philosophers are to be taken lightly, and I think a good is to read both sides with an attempt to understand what is elemental to each of their worldviews, and what elements are shared (and not shared).

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2006 Mar 09 (Thu)

moment of truth

Man, I'm really getting a lot out of irc.perl.org#catalyst (and not just concerning Catalyst either). Here's something else that someone put up on the channel that just made me go, "Oh my gosh": Denial of Skywalker

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OS X Security

Again from The Register, an article about the security of a Vanilla OS X on a Mac Mini with open SSH and HTTP ports.

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Small Ambiguity

Reading an article online, I came across the following sentence, and thought of a few different ways of parsing it:

Prosecutors say Stone pleaded guilty to four abuse counts after Hatcher got involved and was jailed for 14 years.

The two of the more viable options I see are:

Stone pleaded guilty and for 14 years was jailed
Hatcher got involved and for 14 years was jailed

There is another option,

Hatcher, for 14 years, got involved and was jailed

but that doesn't jive with me at all. I know I'm rusty with my understanding of what is telic and what is atelic, and the Wikipedia article didn't help me decide. From what I remember, telic describes when an action is inherently instantaneous (e.g., scored a goal), whereas atelic describes when an action is inherently durational (e.g., building a house). In this case above, I see "got involved" is essentially instantaneous. However, the "was jailed" is not inherently atelic or telic, but with "for 14 years" tagged after it, there must be duration to to it and therefore it is atelic. Anyway, the two first options are disambiguated because of the context of the article: Teri Hatcher is the Hatcher being referred to, and Stone is the only one being charged with a crime. This instance of ambiguity in a narrow context, but disambiguity in the surrounding context enforces my interest in pragmatics :-)

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2006 Mar 07 (Tue)

Gibson to speak Maya(n)?

Not quite sure how this is going to work out, and the news article doesn't give much information besides a simple statement. I remember Mark Liberman was disappointed with the trailer for Apocalytpo not even having one syllable of Mayan, so maybe Mel's making up for it by speaking it at the Oscars

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