RTFA: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1912485…

Albert Hofmann was born at Baden, Switzerland, on January 11 1906, the elder of two children. Having graduated from Zürich University with a degree in chemistry in 1929 he took a doctorate on the gastro-intestinal juice of the vineyard snail.

After leaving university, he went to work for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals where he researched the medicinal properties of the Mediterranean squill (Scilla maritima), before moving on to the study of Claviceps purpurea (ergot).

Albert Hofmann RIP

RTFA: http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/l…

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Nice numbers, and an astute observation.

RTFA: http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/0…

Kids as young as 10 were posing as predatory paedophiles on Bebo and MSN to frighten schoolmates they had fallen out with.

The rozzers started investigating what they thought was just another case of a local nonce trying to groom children by befriending them online and arranging to meet up. But an anonymous tip-off revealed that kids were trying to settle playground rivalries by posing as perverts to frighten their victims.

A spokesman for Devon and Cornwall police told the Manchester Grauniad:

“Information from the public has highlighted a possibility that the offenders could be children aged 10 and over, masquerading as a paedophile.

Ha! Rag posing as newspaper uncovers children posing as paedophiles.

RTFA: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120942873506551291…

Mazda saw no easy way to guard against these outcomes. So it decided to destroy approximately $100 million worth of factory-new automobiles. “We couldn’t run the risk of damaging the brand name that Mazda worked so hard over the years to develop,” says Jeremy Barnes, the company’s corporate-affairs director for North America.

It turns out that wrecking cars isn’t a simple matter. “We had to create a disassembly line, basically,” says Bob Turbett, the Mazda executive overseeing the destruction process.

It took more than a year to devise a plan that satisfied everyone. The city of Portland wanted assurance that nearly 5,000 cars’ worth of antifreeze, brake fluid and other hazardous goop wasn’t mishandled. Insurers covering Mazda’s losses wanted to be sure the company wouldn’t resell any cars or parts — thereby profiting on the side. So every steel-alloy wheel has to be sliced, every battery rendered inoperable, and every tire damaged beyond repair. All CD players must get smashed.

The new fad that’s sweeping the world: destroying things!

RTFA: http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/470

Even the clumsy, rudimentary risk pricing using Annualized Loss Expectancy (ALE) that estimates the projected cost of recovery using the number of likely occurrences makes worm defense worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for a bank, hospital or large enterprise. When the costs of recovery projected by risk models for IT security are compared with the amounts being paid for 0-day vulnerabilities, there is a big scary gap that shows one of the following:

1. according to the market prices for 0-day exploits, the security risk from 0-day vulnerabilities is vastly overestimated,
2. according to IT risk models, vulnerabilities are completely underpriced, or
3. most 0-day developers lack basic negotiation skills.

Totally wild concept: the damage from software vulnerabilities costs dramatically more than the labor that uncovers those vulns. Therefore, should undisclosed vulns sell for more?

RTFA: http://mobile2.wsj.com/device/html_article.php?id=…

According to the 2006 General Social Survey, which has tracked gun ownership since 1973, 34% of American homes have guns in them. This statistic is sure to surprise many people in cities like San Francisco - as it did me when I first encountered it. Growing up in Seattle, I knew nobody who owned a gun.

Who are all these gun owners? Are they the uneducated poor, left behind? It turns out they have the same level of formal education as nongun owners, on average. Furthermore, they earn 32% more per year than nonowners. Americans with guns are neither a small nor downtrodden group.

Nor are they “bitter.” In 2006, 36% of gun owners said they were “very happy,” while 9% were “not too happy.” Meanwhile, only 30% of people without guns were very happy, and 16% were not too happy.

In 1996, gun owners spent about 15% less of their time than nonowners feeling “outraged at something somebody had done.” Its easy enough in certain precincts to caricature armed Americans as an angry and miserable fringe group. But it just isnt true. The data say that the people in the approximately 40 million American households with guns are generally happier than those people in households that dont have guns.

Hell yea! I own a gun (finally) and I have to admit that since getting it, I’m much happier and richer. In fact, it’s solved all of my problems…

RTFA: http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/90325#post

Following in the wake of Februarys news that customs agents were seizing electronics and making copies of all the files on cell phones and laptop hard drives, a federal appeals court has ruled on the legality of such searches. The result: Yeah, customs can do whatever it wants to your computer when you come across the border, without a warrant, and without cause.

The ruling extends to all electronics: In addition to laptops, feds can seize phone records and even digital pictures on your camera as they hunt for evidence. The ruling was unanimous among the three appellate judges.

Be assured that the ruling has little to do with thwarting terrorism. The appeal was actually part of an ongoing trial of a man named Michael Arnold, who returned from the Philippines and had his laptop scoured by the feds. They found purported images of child pornography on the laptop and later arrested him. In his trial, the evidence was suppressed for probable cause issues, as the court said that customs had no reasonable suspicion to search his laptop in the first place. That ruling has now been overturned.

As Wired notes, the court did not rule on whether you have to help agents access your hard drive. If you use a password or encryption, the court was mum on whether you can be compelled to provide information on bypassing that security in order to access materials on the drive.

I recommend sticking a thumb(drive) up your ass

RTFA: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/04/28/no.body.ca…

OAKLAND, California AP — A jury has found an Oakland software programmer guilty in the death of his estranged wife.
Hans Reiser was convicted Monday of first degree murder in the death of his wife, Nina.

RTFA: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe…

A NEWSPAPER that defied the Kremlin by reporting that President Vladimir Putin was planning to marry an Olympic gold medal-winning rhythmic gymnast half his age was shut down yesterday.

The closure of Moskovski Korrespondent, whose editor Grigori Nekhoroshev was forced to resign, was a sharp reminder of the perils of invoking Kremlin displeasure.

Rumours of a romance between Putin, 55, and Alina Kabaeva, 24, who is also an MP in his party, have been circulating in Moscow for months, but until last week no one had dared to print them.

The paper admitted there was no factual basis for its claim that Putin had already divorced Ludmilla, 50, his wife of 24 years, and would marry Kabaeva in June, shortly after standing down as president and becoming prime minister. It cited information from a party planner who claimed to be bidding to organise the lavish reception.

Both Putin and Kabaeva denied the report, which was followed up by European newspapers but ignored by Russia’s media, which do not delve into the private lives of politicians.

“I thought we should run the story to help break the taboo,” said Nekhoroshev. He paid a swift penalty for his daring: the paper, owned by Alexander Lebedev, the billionaire tycoon, ceased publication immediately.

Its parent firm blamed “costs” and “conceptual disagreements with the newsroom” but insisted in a statement that “this has nothing to do with politics and is solely a business decision”.

Few in Russia will believe that. The closure came a few hours after Putin had said during a visit to Sardinia that there was not a word of truth in the story and derided the “snotty noses and erotic fantasies” of the journalists concerned. So protective is the president of his private life that the Russian public has not seen his daughters since he came to power eight years ago.

Here are some pics of the ladies mentioned:

Cowboy Putin!

RTFA: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080424/ap_on_bi_ge/we…

COLUMBUS, Ohio - After at least two rejections, billionaire Nelson Peltz has finally succeeded in landing Wendy’s in a $2.3 billion deal that would add the chain known for its square burger and chocolate Frosty dessert to his ownership of Arby’s and its roast beef sandwiches.

Now, the investor known for agitating corporations to boost their stock price has to figure out how to make both profitable while the economy slumps

RTFA: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7358868….

The Genographic Project’s findings are also consistent with the idea - held for some years now - that modern humans had a close brush with extinction in the evolutionary past.

The number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again in the Late Stone Age.

Wow, interesting read and I learned a couple of new things. I hope you enjoy it too.

RTFA: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story…

When tourists weren’t visiting Rwanda, gorillas there didn’t reproduce as much. Some think the gorillas were depressed.

In other news, HUMANS affected by GENOCIDE. What the fuck is this bullshit. I’m supposed to care gorillas are depressed about genocide? I’m depressed that NPR posted this.

RTFA: http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2008/0…

Robert Hensing linked to a post by Thomas Ptacek over on the Matasano Chargen blog. Thomas (who is both a good hacker AND a good writer) has a writeup of a “game-over” vulnerability that was just published by Mark Dowd over at IBM’s ISS X-Force that affects Flash. For those that don’t speak hacker-speak, in this case, a “game-over” vulnerability is one that can be easily weaponized (his techniques appear to be reliable and can be combined to run an arbitrary payload). As an added bonus, because it’s a vulnerability in Flash, it allows the attacker to write a cross-browser, cross-platform exploit - this puppy works just fine in both IE and Firefox (and potentially in Safari and Opera).
This vulnerability doesn’t affect Windows directly, but it DOES show how a determined attacker can take what was previously thought to be an unexploitable failure (a null pointer dereference) and turn it into something that can be used to 0wn the machine.
Every one of the “except not quite” issues that Thomas writes about in the article represented a stumbling block that the attacker (who had no access to the source to Flash) had to overcome - there are about 4 of them, but the attacker managed to overcome all of them.
This is seriously scary stuff. People who have flash installed should run, not walk over to Adobe to pick up the update.

Seems there’s been a lot of discussion about this the last few days… and it’s not clear to me that a single SWF could be made to target multiple operating systems at a time… but it does look like a Windows target can be pwned through IE or Firefox, irrespective of the flash build.

RTFA: http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/news_room_deta…

One in 33 homeowners is projected to be in foreclosure primarily over the next two years, as a result of subprime loans made in 2005 and 2006, according to a new report released today by The Pew Charitable Trusts. In some states, the outlook is especially grim; for instance, nearly one in 11 homeowners in Nevada is projected to be in foreclosure and one in 18 Arizona homeowners may face the same circumstance over the next two years. Homeowners being foreclosed upon may not be the only homeowners affected, according to data cited in the report. An additional 40 million neighboring homeowners may see their property values and their municipalities’ tax bases drop by as much as $356 billion, largely over the next two years.

Compassionate Conservativism will create real wealth by putting every American family in a house.

RTFA: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2284065…

Dr. Pande: The CPU clients do a somewhat different calculation (”explicit solvent”) vs. the GPU/PS3 (which do “implicit solvent”). All of this depends on how we deal with water. Do we deal with water as individual molecules (”explicit”) or as a mathematical continuum (”implicit”)? Both have various pros and cons. Implicit solvent maps better to the PS3 & GPUs (at least with today’s hardware).

ET: Obviously everyone is interested in performance. Understanding that the client is still in beta, how is performance shaking out so far, and how does it compare to other popular clients like the SMP client or PS3 (in terms of gigaflops per client, that is)?

Dr. Pande: It’s tricky to compare clients in overall performance (since the GPU and SMP clients are running different calculations), but we are very happy with the GPU2 performance so far. We haven’t done extensive benchmarking vs. the PS3 (which is closer), but qualitatively, the GPU performance is greater than the PS3 on most new ATI GPUs.

ET: That leaves a lot of wiggle room. Is it 5% faster? 2x faster? 10x faster? I know you can’t be exact, but can you give me a ballpark?

Dr. Pande: The problem is that there’s a large range of GPU’s out there (ATI 2400 to 3870) and even their relative speed to each other depends on the Work Unit, so it’s hard to give a single number. However, this isn’t a minor speed up at the fastest GPUs.

Neat - using a 3d card to perform protein folding. Not only can you use an implicit solution, but modern desktop computers will be able to perform this bio-work faster by utilizing different types of processors at the same time. Isn’t it crazy that 50 years ago, people were still working out the clothes washing/folding@home problem?

RTFA: http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html

07/01/07 6,600,411,051
08/01/07 6,606,949,106
09/01/07 6,613,487,162
10/01/07 6,619,814,313
11/01/07 6,626,352,369
12/01/07 6,632,679,520
01/01/08 6,639,217,576
02/01/08 6,645,755,632
03/01/08 6,651,871,878
04/01/08 6,658,409,934
05/01/08 6,664,737,085
06/01/08 6,671,275,141
07/01/08 6,677,602,292

HAH, so someone pointed out that the population will supposedly hit 6,666,666,666 sometime this may.

RTFA: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7349980.stm

A review of 67 studies found “no convincing evidence” that antioxidant supplements cut the risk of dying.

Scientists at Copenhagen University said vitamins A and E could interfere with the bodys natural defences.

“Even more, beta-carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E seem to increase mortality,” according to the review by the respected Cochrane Collaboration.

In short, start smoking and drinking because next year it will be good for you.

RTFA: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/23942736/

McIntyre and fellow band members Donnie Wahlberg, Danny Wood and Jordan and Jonathan Knight have been writing songs and planning their return since last August. They wanted to keep their reunion a secret, but rumors leaked out earlier this year. “We weren’t going to announce this yet, but the story leaked on People.com,” Wahlberg said, his voice barely audible above the shrieks of young women and girls who were barely alive when the band broke up 14 years ago. “We thought we’d better come out and let them know it’s official.
“They’ll be back on the Plaza on May 16 as part of the TODAY summer concert series to perform live for the first time since 1994.”We’ve got some new material. We’re very exciting,”

Recently, any time someone mentioned the Apocalypse, I would make fun of them because of the SIGNS, maaan! Where are the SIGNS of the coming Apocalypse?

But I see it all too clearly now.

RTFA: http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Pope_to_skip_White_H…

The White House has scheduled a dinner next week in honor of Pope Benedict XVI’s first visit to the United States, but one guest will be conspicuously absent from the proceedings: the pope himself.

There are no competing events listed on the pope’s schedule, and the White House was unable to explain Benedict’s absence from the dinner.

Several Catholic overlords will sit in for the Pope during the feast. Meanwhile, the Pope himself will be across town, writing his memoirs: “great dinners are those in honor of one’s self, but the best are those that you need not even attend.”

RTFA: http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServle…

Typical sounds of several fish species have been uniquely recognized using an automatic spectrum-matching machine known as SCEPTRON® pattern recognizer. A variety of natural underwater sound recordings from different marine laboratories were used to obtain the samples of fish sounds and to evaluate the SCEPTRON device’s capability in this application. The technique utilizes 2000 narrow-bandpass filters in the form of tiny resonant quartz fibers to provide a highly detailed memory of the sounds in a miniature size. The SCEPTRON memory is self-conforming, and extracts common spectral features from a signal group during the programming process. Operation is in real time, in the audiofrequency range. A description of the SCEPTRON apparatus is presented, together with data showing performance with marine-life sounds. ©1964 Acoustical Society of America

So we’re clear, this is a paper from 1964 using quartz to perform signal detection. Quartz, is in the crystal and its physical properties… as in completely analog (as opposed to digital)… as in it functions because of what it is rather than what it represents.

Follow-up to a previous post, Use BOINC framework to analyze whale/bird songs

RTFA: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080411/sc_nm/olympics…

BEIJING Reuters - China is preparing an arsenal of rockets and aircraft to protect the Olympics opening ceremony from rain, hoping to disperse clouds before they can drench dignitaries at the roofless “birds nest” stadium.

Wow, who knew rain was more dangerous than rockets

RTFA: http://www.space-travel.com/reports/Boeing_Patent_…

Industry sources have told SpaceDaily that the patent is regarded as legal “trite”, as basic physics has been rebranded as a “process”, and that the patent wouldn’t stand up to any significant level of court scrutiny and was only registered at the time as “the patent office was incompetent when it came to space matters”.

SES has decided not to pursue any legal options against Boeing and wants to collect their insurance policy payout. However, their insurance company was not being fully briefed on the options and at this time is planning to pay the policy out.

Separately, another company has approached the insurers about buying the spacecraft for salvage using the lunar flyby option. Initially, the insurers were surprised as they had no knowledge of this option and suggested that they contact SES Americom directly.

While most satellite insurance policies allow the insurer to take ownership of a satellite when they pay a claim, they rarely do this. The default is instead to leave “ownership” with the operators, who are then legally obliged to safely deorbit the satellite or move the satellite into a GEO parking orbit.

At this stage SES Americom is working with a major US space consultancy to rapidly deorbit the satellite - as early as this Friday. SpaceDaily has been told that various attempts by third parties to buy the satellite have been ignored and both parties are “eager to splash the satellite within days”.

This reads like science fiction… and like future-nostalgic reminiscing about good old 2008.

RTFA: http://interactive.usc.edu/viewfinder/

“Viewfinder” is a novel method for users to spatially situate, or “find the pose,” of their photographs, and then to view these photographs, along with others, as perfectly aligned overlays in a 3D world model such as Google Earth. Our objective is to provide a straightforward procedure for geo-locating photos of any kind, and our approach is to engage a community of users for a certain amount of human help. We specify that a 10-year-old should be able to find the pose of a photo in less than a minute, and we are convinced that this goal is achievable. While we are not entirely there yet, we are getting closer. This is our progress report.

April 3, 2008

Wow - quite impressive technology demo.

RTFA: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,348171,00.html

BATON ROUGE, La. - Castration could be a sentencing option for some sex offenders in Louisiana under a bill approved by a state Senate judiciary committee.

The bill by Senator Nick Gautreaux, an Abbeville Democrat, requires a judge to order treatment for certain second-offense sex criminals with a specific drug designed to diminish male sexual urges - if a medical expert agrees that the treatment would be effective.

An offender who doesnt want the treatment could opt for physical castration. Gautreaux says some offenders may indeed want castration in hopes of avoiding the drugs side effects or permanently ending the sexual urges that led to their crimes. His bill goes next to the full Senate.

RTFA: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7331042.stm

A US man has sold the domain name pizza.com for $2.6million £1.3m - after maintaining the site for just $20 a year since 1994.

Chris Clark, 43, accepted the offer from an anonymous bidder after a week-long online auction.

“Its crazy, its just crazy,” Mr Clark, who lives in North Potomac, Maryland, was quoted as saying by the Baltimore Sun newspaper.

“It will make a significant difference in my life, for sure,” he added.

Regret

Mr Clark registered the domain name in 1994, when the world wide web was just starting.

He had hoped that pizza.com would help to get a contract with a pizza firm for his consulting company.

He sold his business in 2000, but kept paying the $20 annual fees for maintaining the domain, which he also used to sell advertisements.

In January, Mr Clark decided to sell it after hearing that another domain - Vodka.com - was sold for $3m in 2006.

“I thought, Why dont I just try to see what the level of interest is?” Mr Clark said.

“If someones willing to pay that much for Vodka.com, maybe theres more interest in pizza.com.”

The online auction was launched on 27 March. The first bid was $100, jumping to $2.6m a week later.