Hulleye Comes By!

It seems that the western media can’t get enough of Hugo Chavez, especially considering the recent decision by his government to not renew a broadcast license for a major media outlet. Almost every news outlet has a story on the topic in google news

For perhaps the only rational explanation of the situation I highly recommend reading this Znet article

Once again, it seems, the warnings of a move from democracy to dictatorship in Venezuela have been loud but lacking in evidence.

KPT

a long while ago, i had posted about the economics of splitting cab fares which got into the intricacies of game theory. there’s a similar setup in the traveller’s dilemma.

Lucy and Pete, returning from a remote Pacific island, find that the airline has damaged the identical antiques that each had purchased. An airline manager says that he is happy to compensate them but is handicapped by being clueless about the value of these strange objects. Simply asking the travelers for the price is hopeless, he figures, for they will inflate it.

Instead he devises a more complicated scheme. He asks each of them to write down the price of the antique as any dollar integer between 2 and 100 without conferring together. If both write the same number, he will take that to be the true price, and he will pay each of them that amount. But if they write different numbers, he will assume that the lower one is the actual price and that the person writing the higher number is cheating. In that case, he will pay both of them the lower number along with a bonus and a penalty–the person who wrote the lower number will get $2 more as a reward for honesty and the one who wrote the higher number will get $2 less as a punishment. For instance, if Lucy writes 46 and Pete writes 100, Lucy will get $48 and Pete will get $44. What numbers will Lucy and Pete write? What number would you write?

keep reading at scientific american.

so where have i been lately? well, for the most part, getting a bunch of people converted to ubuntu and giving them user support for the most part. seems like that post made an impact. i recently read a review of vista at paktech site, and honestly, the more i read, the more happier i kept feeling about not having to use the damn OS. all the “WOW” factors that the reviewer speaks about kept me scratching my head going, HOW?

anyway enough ramblings about ubuntu. hopefully most people reading here are convinced that windows isn’t the way to go anymore. anyone reading this blog should realize that their OS needs are not so dumbed down. back to blogging.

in related news, if anyones looking to shop from dell, slashdot is reporting that Dell is now offering three of their laptops pre-installed with ubuntu.

Today by 4:00 PM CST Dell will start selling three machines with Ubuntu 7.04 pre-installed. The two desktops (XPS 410n, $899 and Dimension E520n, $599) and the notebook (Inspiron E1505n, $599) will be the first three machines with the popular Linux distribution installed by default. There is little or no price differential between the Linux and Windows models; in fact, the entry level E520 Windows desktop is cheaper. Dell has announced that they will provide hardware support, and they’ve created a new site devoted to give further Linux support and updates. At the moment the offer is only available in the US.

In the latest AIP Physics News Update there is a summary of a “soon to be released” physics paper that describes how measurements made with the new Large Hadron Collider could affect big-bang nucleosynthesis models. Evidently the LHC has the potential to create a supersymmetric particle that would have only existed at the dawn of the universe, providing a seed around which heavier nuclei could have formed.

The full update follows…
Read the rest of this entry »

so i guess my post finally inspired someone to convert. here’s his account of what he went through to get everything up and running. ahsan is an old friend of mine, and anything but a geek with very little knowledge of operating systems and hardware. as he has mentioned, all you need to know is how to use google. he forgot to mention some issues that he had with his power management and battery life, which he has also figured out using google. he actually tracked down a copy of ubuntu at www.ping.com.pk, so if anyone needs one they can get in touch with them or at linuxpakistan.net. the rest of you high bandwidth users outside of pakistan can just download a copy for free. and as mentioned, you guys can bug me about any issues or any reasons you all are hesitating to switch over.

i managed to install ubuntu(fawn), took me all of 15 minutes. which means it was pretty simple, and im a pretty basic pc user, used windows all of my computing life. didnt like the frequent blue screens, antivirus, cracks and so on. went to ubunto on a whim and i dont regret it. its easy to install with the live cd. one thing abbas will tell you is that root should be on a separate partition to home, in case u want to make changes to your os at least your data wont be wiped out. all you really need to know is how to google, and follow instructions, cause on the occasions you do have a problem, chances are there will be a detailed step by step guide on how to solve it. personally, everything worked out of the box bar the wireless, which was a problem, until i googled around, and searched up ubuntuguide,org which is a great resource. apart from that so far so good, i had a problem with the touchpad sensitivity, but i changed the configurations and it seems to be working better now. installing new applications is easy with the add/remove program. programs id recommend are amarok for music, vlc for video, deluge for bittorrents, skype for voice chat and amule for p2p. youll need to install these though. might need codecs, but again easily installed with the add/remove program. itll run all your office documents with open office. has a pdf reader. you can use gaim for msn/yahoo/aol/gtalk. for those who cant do without their windows applications, there is a nifty program called wine which is an emulator that runs well without being a resource hog. finally, i like ubuntu because i can mess around with it and tweak it to my liking with the added adventure of it all blowing up in my face(not really). a decent internet connection is recommended since your going to be downloading all your software. ask abbas for any help, im sure hed be willing. if anyone in pakistan wants ubuntu support they can contact me and i can point them in the right direction. linux isnt for the serious gamers. if anyone brags on about how pretty vista is show them the burning menus and the 3D desktop cube, and that should shut them up: http://youtube.com/watch?v=xC5uEe5OzNQ

so animals from across the kingdom have some pretty weird mating rituals. here’s a list of the top 30 or so oddest rituals. think of it this way, the honey bee’s exploding testicles barely made it to the #30 spot. the list comprises of everything from hyena’s, to bonobo’s, to silverbacks, to garter snakes to the emperor penguins. discover all the goodness of nature here at neatorama.

so very few of you probably remember the japanese themed posts that i did a long while ago, from how to escaping your farts, the japanese toilet, the vending machines, and so on and so forth. i was astounged when i came across this video of this girl showing off her secretarial skills. it’s nuts. i mean i’ve seen some bank tellers count money about that fast, but nothing comes close to this sort of motion.

Following up with the millennium seed project, scientists are now about to write up an encyclopedia of life.

The Encyclopedia of Life project aims to detail all 1.8 million known plant and animal species in a net archive.

Individual species pages will include photographs, video, sound and maps, collected and written by experts.

The archive, to be built over 10 years, could help conservation efforts as well as being a useful tool for education.

“The Encyclopedia of Life will provide valuable biodiversity and conservation information to anyone, anywhere, at any time,” said Dr James Edwards, executive director of the $100m (£50m) project.

“[It] will ultimately make high-quality, well-organized information available on an unprecedented level.”

The vast database will initially concentrate on animals, plants and fungi with microbes to follow. Fossil species may eventually be added.

keep reading at the BBC.

click to make bigger.

click on the image to understand how people fall for the same old movie plots and scenario’s again and again, which is why director’s use them to make good money and great films.

the same news story. two different news sources. one from cnn. and the other one from bbc. i’m not even gonna bother checking out fox. guess which one has the word islam in it and which one doesn’t? it’s no wonder that the entire united states population things that muslims are evil and need to die. what a former communist state had to do with islam is beyond me. this sort of spin doctoring is just hurting the media and makes them look stupid.

Residents of the Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay) are wondering how long it will take to remove a disused Boeing 737 that has been abandoned in a busy road.

The decommissioned aircraft was being driven through the city at the weekend when the driver got lost and then abandoned the plane.

darrell anderson talks about his tour of duty in iraq and speaks about how he was ordered to kill everybody. reminds me of the NOFX song, kill all the white man.

I’ve always been suspect of high-publicity government decisions that tout changes for the better. With the public desire for green policies on the rise in Canada there is ample potential for marketing and political hedging to take advantage of this.

A perfect example is a proposed solar farm that will be built near Sarnia, Ontario. It will only supply 40MW of power (last year we peaked at 21000 MW usage) so this is a drop in the bucket at ~0.2% of our peak usage. Yet it will cost significantly more per unit electricity than any other generation method, and while many lobbyists for the solar energy market will label it as a non-carbon emitter and safe for the environment there is no mention of the impact involved with developing and building the solar cells themselves, which is admittably small but should be stated. The real question to ask though is why there is a rush to develop? Clearly there is a lot of potential in solar energy, but until it becomes cheaper/more efficient maybe we should stick with wind/nuclear/hydro to minimize our CO2 emissions in Ontario. Of course the real motivation may be that people in the business community who have close relations with the government stand to make big gains:

Not much is known about OptiSolar, though many of its private investors are Canadian. It was co-founded by Randy Goldstein and Phil Rettger, who previously founded the Calgary-based oil sands technology and project developer Opti Canada Inc.