Hulleye Comes By!

flash game of the day. The objective of the game — to launch the ‘hog into space — is so beside the point the first time around that you forget all about it until it actually happens. My best time at the moment is standing strong at eight days.

A hand-drawn physics puzzle game that looks simple … but it’s maddeningly hard (and a lot of fun!)

The concept is simple: stack the boxes until they reach the line … how high can you go?

Update: Okay I can’t get past level 10. It’s annoying me now.

A “mind-boggling” crop circle has been spotted in a barley field in Wiltshire, England. The design is a code that represents the first ten digits of pi. The inner circle goes around in segments with each digit represented by tenths of the circle, or 36 degrees, with a radial jump to advance to the next digit. There is even a dot representing the decimal point.

It can also be argued that every circle represents pi.

YES!

The Dark Knight is coming soon, but the straight-to-DVD anime Batman: Gotham Knight is thankfully coming sooner. Feeding Bruce Wayne’s superego through the animated filter of Pacific Rim cinema so far looks very sweet indeed, and new pics and news confirm that comics nerds and late adopters alike are probably going to be impressed.

On the nerd front, animated Batphiles should be pleased to know that Kevin Conroy is returning to voice Wayne, as he has for the last couple of decades in various iterations of the mythology. Adam West would probably not be pleased to know that it is Conroy’s pipes that have ruled Batman’s tech-noir corner of television, proving that an animated Batman is truly a resonant one. For his part, Conroy says he believes the multiple-narrative Gotham Knight movie will resonate more than any other when it hits store shelves July 8.

As reported by the Dallas Morning News, this badge was found available for sale at a Republican state convention.

There were other pins that weren’t necessarily conveying the positive, inclusive, united front that has been portrayed during the convention. One said, “Press 1 for English. Press 2 for Deportation” and another, “I will hold my nose when I vote for McCain.”

A short list of new features in Windows Server 2008

* Read-only DCs

* Read-only DNS

* You add and remove services very explicitly now through “roles” and “functionality”

* You can now restart Active Directory services without restarting the box

* Password policies can now be applied to security groups and users (but not OUs)

* Enhanced ADFS: the ability to authorize DMZ web clients to a backend AD

* SSL-based Terminal Services

* The ability to run apps remotely over SSL-based Terminal Services.

* Much Improved Event Viewer: You can now view events based on the role of your server

* Simplified Server Management: (it just feels more organized and mature)

I’ve been running my home DC on Server 2008 for the last month or so and I’m really impressed with the release.

If you’re interested in running Server 2008 (or SQL 2008 or Exchange 2007 or ISA 2006, etc.) you can do so for only $300/year through the Microsoft Action Pack Subscription. You basically sign up, complete a few online training classes, pay your fee, and you’re sent a massive binder full of their latest software.

It’s not quite MSDN, but it’s also only $300 a year.

Being woken in the dead of night by noisy neighbours blasting out music could soon be a thing of the past.

Scientists have shown off the blueprint for an “acoustic cloak”, which could make objects impervious to sound waves.

The technology, outlined in the New Journal of Physics, could be used to build sound-proof homes, advanced concert halls or stealth warships.

Scientists have previously demonstrated devices that cloak objects from microwaves, making them “invisible”.

“The mathematics behind cloaking has been known for several years,” said Professor John Pendry of Imperial College London, UK, an expert in cloaking.

“What hasn’t been available for sound is the sort of materials you need to build a cloak out of.”

Scientists confirm that parts of earliest genetic material may have come from the stars.

The finding suggests that parts of the raw materials to make the first molecules of DNA and RNA may have come from the stars.

The scientists, from Europe and the USA, say that their research, published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, provides evidence that life’s raw materials came from sources beyond the Earth.

The materials they have found include the molecules uracil and xanthine, which are precursors to the molecules that make up DNA and RNA, and are known as nucleobases.

The team discovered the molecules in rock fragments of the Murchison meteorite, which crashed in Australia in 1969.

They tested the meteorite material to determine whether the molecules came from the solar system or were a result of contamination when the meteorite landed on Earth.

The analysis shows that the nucleobases contain a heavy form of carbon which could only have been formed in space. Materials formed on Earth consist of a lighter variety of carbon.

Battlestar Galactica presents a problem for me and my Star Trek-fan friends. Why do we love it so much? We call each other up after each new episode and ramble in nervous high-pitched voices, batting back and forth theories and questions and “OH MY GOD” moments… all the while feeling vaguely guilty that no Star Trek clash with the Borg or tampering with the time-space continuum ever engaged and obsessed and haunted us to such a profound extent.

Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica have wildly different aesthetics and ideologies, and both aspire to very different goals. Fundamentally, it boils down to this: Star Trek is about who we want to be, and Battlestar Galactica is about who we are.

* * * * *
Star Trek takes place in a world where all the ugly things about human existence have been erased. Interstellar globalization has brought us new technologies to make transportation and translation effortless. Machines called replicators can produce absolutely anything you want, so the economics of inequity are gone. The injuries of race and class and gender have been surmounted, if not forgotten altogether. Scarcity, borders, money, and culture have all ceased to exist. Interpersonal tensions are relics of a more savage age. No destructive love affairs, no chafing under authority, minimal arrogance to put your fellow crew members at risk. There’s something nice about visiting a world like that—just like it’s nice to pretend that institutional racism and violence against women and poverty are getting better instead of worse. Much of mainstream fiction is built on this kind of wish-fulfillment.

That’s why the world of Battlestar Galactica feels so fresh, and so challenging. People still drink too much, and beat their spouses, and work too hard, and hate their bosses, and distrust the government, and fear death. The crew of the Galactica is not boldly exploring the universe for exploring’s sake, learning about fascinating new cultures and inviting alien species to join the benevolent Federation of Planets. It’s running away from a race of genocidal robots bent on their complete annihilation, while trying to maintain some shred of humanity and civilization.

Star Trek revels in its geekiness. Physicist in-jokes and gleefully incomprehensible technobabble are found in every episode. People say things like “The secondary gyrodyne relays in the propulsion field matrix have just depolarized.”

As a nerd, I find this fun.

….Keep reading.

From Nature:

Cancercells Some cancers can release a protein that awakens dormant cancer cells throughout the body, studies in mice suggest. The discovery could help doctors understand and prevent the spread of cancers through the body. The results provide a possible explanation for why high levels of the protein, called osteopontin, in cancer patients have already been linked to an increased risk of death. Researchers are working to develop a drug that blocks the protein as a possible tool in the battle against the disease. Most patients who die from cancer do not succumb to the initial cancer, called a primary tumour, but rather from the disease’s spread to other parts of the body. Although the importance of this process, called metastasis, is clear, there is no currently available therapy that can specifically block this sinister march throughout the body.

McAllister and her colleagues, led by the Whitehead Institute’s Robert Weinberg, co-implanted two kinds of cancer cells in mice. The first, which they termed an ‘instigator’ tumour, was made of fast-growing breast-cancer cells cultured in the lab. They also injected other cancer cells, called ‘responder’ cells, which were known to grow slowly and metastasize only rarely. They found that the presence of the instigator tumour was enough to speed development of the responder, which then spawned up to nine times as many metastatic tumours as when the instigator was absent. They found similar results when they repeated the experiment using colon cancer cells collected from cancer patients as the responder tumours. Subsequent analysis showed that the osteopontin protein is crucial for this instigator effect.

the emperor’s workstation….!!!

africa is big.

yay there’s going to be a remake of the prisoner. if you don’t know what the show is, go hide under a rock and don’t come out until you’ve seen it.

be seeing you.

On the chilly Isle of Thanet in Kent, England, farmers are placing 220 acres of land under glass so they can grow vegetables all year round. The greenhouse, when completed, will house 1.3 million plants and increase the UK’s crop of green vegetables by 15%. Called Thanet Earth, the project will be a series of 7 connected grenhouses with a relatively small carbon footprint. And nothing grown inside Thanet Earth will ever touch soil.

i guess this means we can have tomatoes again.

I’m reading SpyCraft: The Secret History of the CIA ’s Spytechs From Communism to Al Qaeda right now. I can’t put it down. I highly recommend you read it. Will review it when I complete it.

Spymasters have long sought special technology to enhance security of agents risking their lives to steal and communicate secrets. Application of advanced U.S. technology to espionage focused by America’s entrance into the “spy game” during World War II, transformed intelligence operations forever. Unfettered by clandestine tradition, the boundless wartime ingenuity of American engineers and scientists launched a technological revolution in espionage.

No technology has played a larger part in the way digital media - including games - is distributed and consumed than the Internet, and its effect on piracy and the efforts to counteract it has been profound. In its earliest days, ‘Net connectivity allowed those who knew how to use it to connect via BBS, putting hackers and crackers in touch with each other and allowing them to share ideas. Now, of course, most PC owners have some form of Internet connection, many at speeds that would have been ludicrous even as recently as the mid-’90s, giving them access to entire copies of cracked games that have been made available via IRC or peer-to-peer network.

The industry is certainly facing its most serious challenge in its long fight against piracy, and it’s been interesting to see what stances have been taken in the past few years. EA’s efforts with Mass Effect and Spore are not all we’ve heard of server-side copy protection; Valve links copies of its games - store-bought or downloaded - to its Steam service, while massively-multiplayer games like World of Warcraft require unique product keys for login. And it’s certainly not going to be the last we’ll hear of it, either, as more and more users acquire faster Internet connectivity and more and more games make use of downloadable content and other online-specific features.

Read more here about the history of Copyright Protection.

articles about the the big black can never get boring. the new york times does a fairly good job of explaining more about the universe.

Mario Livio tossed his car keys in the air.

They rose ever more slowly, paused, shining, at the top of their arc, and then in accordance with everything our Galilean ape brains have ever learned to expect, crashed back down into his hand.

That was the whole problem, explained Dr. Livio, a theorist at the Space Telescope Science Institute here on the Johns Hopkins campus.

A decade ago, astronomers discovered that what is true for your car keys is not true for the galaxies. Having been impelled apart by the force of the Big Bang, the galaxies, in defiance of cosmic gravity, are picking up speed on a dash toward eternity. If they were keys, they would be shooting for the ceiling.

“That is how shocking this was,” Dr. Livio said.

It is still shocking. Although cosmologists have adopted a cute name, dark energy, for whatever is driving this apparently antigravitational behavior on the part of the universe, nobody claims to understand why it is happening, or its implications for the future of the universe and of the life within it, despite thousands of learned papers, scores of conferences and millions of dollars’ worth of telescope time. It has led some cosmologists to the verge of abandoning their fondest dream: a theory that can account for the universe and everything about it in a single breath.

so the sci-fi channel as you can tell lately plays some terrible programming lately. the same can be said for it’s canadian cousin space. so this guy decided since the sci-fi channel isn’t going to play anything half decent, he’s going to find links to all the classic sci-fi he can and provide links to it. it’s all legal and legit and it’s awesome.

Until recently I was able to ignore the abortion that called itself ‘The SciFi Channel’. At least they were using the less respectable ‘Skiffy’ abbreviation to identify themselves (no insult intended at all towards Mr. Ackerman who coined the phrase: maybe they ought to put him in charge…). But no longer. A few short weeks ago the Suits-In-Charge (SIC) decided that their channel needed to reach an audience wider than the ‘geeky young guys’ that science fiction appeals to (their definition of the market, not mine) and so they’ve unilaterally decided to expand the definition. Now, according to these self-proclaimed scions of the genre, the defintion of SF has been reduced to the all encompassing “What If?”

And somehow, ‘What If?’ includes professional wrestling and paranormal reality shows. (Paranormal reality!? Shoot me now, please!) (What if idiots from another galaxy traveled through a wormhole and seized control of all of our television programming?)

Not that I haven’t given SFC a shot. I’ve dutifully tuned in for almost every new series and have at least started to watch their ‘made-for-television’ in-house fare. To tell the truth, sometimes the stories themselves haven’t been all that bad, but SFC seems to be plagued by the curse of the B-Actors. (I’d rather they went the original Doctor Who route - good actors, minimal budget for effects. See, science fiction fans are used to making pictures inside their heads. They don’t need to be shown everything. A hint, a mere suggestion, is often more than enough.)

Oh yes, I know Battlestar Galactica has been a huge success, a phenomena. One that’s now starting to confuse and disappoint even its biggest fans. Why? I think its easy to explain: once you replace ‘good guys and bad guys’ with tens of characters, all of whom have conflicted emotions, there can never be any really satisfactory resolution. Instead of telling a story, you end up mired in detailed characterizations. Too much detail for a late-arriving viewer to be able to pick up on mid-stream. Too much interpersonal BS for anyone to care about any of it over the long haul. Great concept, reduced to little more than office gossip around the water cooler.

But enough of my personal biases.