14. november 2004

Westwrite I have read some of the very informed articles by Bing and Owen West in the past, but I was recently made aware of their website: Westwrite. It includes the articles and also a wealth of other stuff. Worth a read and a bookmark. 10:56:26 PM    comment []  trackback []

British soldier survived failed parachute jump Lieut Charlie Williams in the Irish Guards is one of the few people who experienced, 3,500 feet (~1000 meter) above ground, that his parachute failed to open propely, and lived to tell the tale. High above hard Kenyan ground, he thought he would never see his 26th birthday. In his first interview since the accident, Lieut Williams said: "I was completely helpless, there was nothing I could do. I said to myself 'this is it' and I prepared to die." As it happened, he had the astonishing luck to hit a house, crashing through the corrugated iron roof, only cracking three vertebrae in the lower part of his back and dislocating a finger. "The next thing I knew, was that I had smashed through the corrugated iron roof of somebody's home and I was lying on the ground with a crowd of puzzled Kenyans looking at me. My immediate thought was 'Oh my God, I'm alive'" Lucky guy. 8:05:38 PM    comment []  trackback []

Tabloid politics Whoever writes the headlines at CNN doesn't really understand the British term shadow minister: Minister fired over sex scandal. The Observer's David Aaronovitch thinks the decision to fire popular Boris Johnson over his extramarital affair will backfire for the Tories. He also uses the opportunity to remind his readers that it's the Americans that are supposed to be the puritans, not the British. 6:30:32 PM    comment []  trackback []

Hand me a beer - the hurricane is coming When hurricane Frances was approaching hurricane-battered people in Florida, Wal-Mart used its vast databases to predict what customers would stock up on. Of course, when you wait for a hurricane, you stock up on beer. The experts mined the data and found that the stores would indeed need certain products - and not just the usual flashlights. "We didn't know in the past that strawberry Pop-Tarts increase in sales, like seven times their normal sales rate, ahead of a hurricane," Ms. Dillman said in a recent interview. "And the pre-hurricane top-selling item was beer." Thanks to those insights, trucks filled with toaster pastries and six-packs were soon speeding down Interstate 95 toward Wal-Marts in the path of Frances. Most of the products that were stocked for the storm sold quickly, the company said. Such knowledge, Wal-Mart has learned, is not only power. It is profit, too. The other secrets of pre-hurricane customer behaviour Wal-Mart keeps to itself. 3:07:31 PM    comment []  trackback []

God made me an atheist A molecular scientist says that a person's genetic make-up has a significant influence on religious belief: Dr Dean Hamer, the director of the Gene Structure and Regulation Unit at the National Cancer Institute in America, asked volunteers 226 questions in order to determine how spiritually connected they felt to the universe. The higher their score, the greater a person's ability to believe in a greater spiritual force and, Dr Hamer found, the more likely they were to share the gene, VMAT2. Studies on twins showed that those with this gene, a vesicular monoamine transporter that regulates the flow of mood-altering chemicals in the brain, were more likely to develop a spiritual belief. Growing up in a religious environment was said to have little effect on belief. Dr Hamer, who in 1993 claimed to have identified a DNA sequence linked to male homosexuality, said the existence of the "god gene" explained why some people had more aptitude for spirituality than others. Hmm. Very Calvinist. I am sure there is a gene somewhere explaining that I am skeptical to all these "gene for" claims. I am not suggesting that Dr Dean Hamer's research is unsound, I just suspect this is just a coincidental correlation between some other human trait and religious faith. And, no, I don't mean "gullibility" though it is tempting to say... 1:44:03 PM    comment []  trackback []

Gotcha indeed Microsoft is a very aggressive member of the anti-piracy hordes, but on occasion feels free to use the services of the "other side": An anonymous reader writes "German PC-Welt magazine reports that Microsoft used an illegal copy of SoundForge 4.5 (Google translation) for editing Wave files shipped with Windows Media Player. You can check that yourself by opening any file in the [Windows location] HelpToursWindowsMediaPlayerAudioWav folder in notepad or other editors of your choice and looking at the last line. There you will find a reference to SoundForge 4.5 and also a user called 'Deepz0ne' who happens to be one of the founders of an audio software cracking group called Radium." Yup. I just checked. Someone at Microsoft used a pirated tool to create sound files for the official release of Windows. Oops! Via MacRaven 12:04:06 PM    comment []  trackback []

Mormon offshot on the move Members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a secretive sect known for being polygamous, have set up camp in Eldorado, Texas, and the natives are nervous. I feel most sorry fot the children growing up in that sect, cut off entirely from the rest of the world. 9:06:43 AM    comment []  trackback []

© Copyright 2004 Jan Haugland. Last update: 01.12.2004; 07:25:35.