Friday, February 04, 2005

R.I.P., Ernst Mayr. Ernst Mayr dies: Towering figure of 20th century evolutionary biology was 100. By Leslie A Pray, in The Scientist. In his classic 1942 book, Systematics and the Origin of Species, Mayr championed allopatric speciation, whereby new species form only in physical isolation. It was not a new idea, as even Darwin had entertained the notion before settling on the opposite, sympatric view: that speciation does not require geographical separation. But scientists didn't embrace allopatric speciation, said University of Maryland's Kerry Shaw, until Mayr "cogently and forcefully argued" the case. "He had a major influence on our thinking about speciation as a process that occurs in geographic isolation," Shaw said. Mayr believed that behind every good speciation biologist stood a good naturalist. "People without that naturalist experience don't have that feeling," he told The Scientist in 2003. "They don't know species." He encouraged all of his graduate students "to go south," said Ira Rubinoff, director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama. "Not surprisingly, all of his students returned fascinated and exhilarated by their tropical experiences." . . . Having written more than 700 journal articles and 20 books, Mayr wrote just about one book or article every month of his career. Regarding his recent What is Evolution?, University of Massachusetts biologist Lynn Margulis said: "It's marvelous. It's marvelous to give to your mother." S. Bradt, Ernst Mayr, giant among evolutionary biologists, dies at 100, Harvard University Gazette, February 4, 2005. What Evolution Is by Ernst Mayr. 1:45:18 PM    comment []

Rice Says U.S. Won't Aid Europe on Plans for Incentives to Iran. The secretary of state said the U.S. would continue to rebuff requests to participate in offering incentives for Iran to drop its suspected nuclear arms program. By STEVEN R. WEISMAN, ELAINE SCIOLINO and DAVID E. SANGER. [NYT > International] 6:35:19 AM    comment []

Gambling With Your Retirement. President Bush wants Americans to take a loan from the government and use it to buy stocks, and if that turns out to have been a mistake - well, too bad. By PAUL KRUGMAN. [NYT > Opinion] 6:35:05 AM    comment []

BitTrickle. (Posted from Geneva, Switzerland, 10 am local time.) The New York Times has published an odd, unfortunately named article, "Steal This Show," that discusses homebrew personal-video-recording technologies such as MythTV as well as the distributed file-sharing technology known as BitTorrent. Let's leave aside whether time-shifting television with an off-brand counterpart to TiVo is "stealing." A more important problem with the article is that it gives a false impression of the normal user experience of BitTorrent: Created by Bram Cohen, a 29-year-old programmer in Bellevue, Wash., BitTorrent breaks files hundreds or thousands of times bigger than a song file into small pieces to speed its path to the Internet and then to your computer. On the kind of peer-to-peer site that gave the music industry night sweats, an episode of "Desperate Housewives" that some fan copied and posted on the Internet can take hours to download; on BitTorrent, it arrives in minutes. That hasn't been my experience of BitTorrent, and I doubt many other ordinary users routinely experience the downloading of TV programs in "minutes." On the off chance that BitTorrent speeds had suddenly improved since I had last used the application, I conducted an experiment -- I downloaded the latest episode of Showtime's program "Huff," which stars Hank Azaria, within 24 hours of its having aired. (Downloading a program shortly after it has aired, when interest in the episode is at its peak, is the way to maximize download speed on BitTorrent.) The result? Even with the premium broadband service I have at my office, downloading Episode 13 of "Huff" -- the final episode of the season -- took six hours, with download speeds rarely exceeding 30KB/sec. Note that what I succeeded in downloading was a relatively low-resolution version of the episode -- lower in resolution even than regular analog television. An HDTV version of the episode, in full resolution, might have taken ten times longer. (I'd have tried capturing such an episode, but such HDTV files are generally so large that most people don't try to share them over the Internet, even with BitTorrent.) Don't get me wrong: BitTorrent is a significant advance over last-generation file-sharing programs, especially in terms of maximizing use of bandwidth. What it doesn't do, at least for ordinary broadband users, is enable the kind of rapid downloading of TV content that the Motion Picture Association of America believes it must attack. [Godwin's Law - feed.rdf] 6:31:12 AM    comment []

Starting with the basics, feeds.scripting.com has a "River of News" style aggregator, subscribed to all the sites that have ever been in the Top 100 most-subscribed-to feeds. Basically, instead of having to hunt for new stories by clicking on the titles of feeds (the standard way readers work) you just view the page of new stuff and scroll through it. It's like sitting on the bank of a river, watching the boats go by. If you miss one, no big deal. You can even make the river flow backward by moving the scollbar up. [Scripting News] 6:30:49 AM    comment []