I’ve heard for years that smoking enhances the effects of alcohol, so I am quite surprised to hear that smoking ‘reduces alcohol effect’.
I think I’ll have to go back to Jellinek for some facts.
It’s a sad day for open source, OSX and mac fanboyz everywhere
Me ol’ muckers at OpenDarwin are shutting up shop, so to speak, and shutting down.
As one of the few who contributed towards OpenDarwin, and had to put up with Apple’s schizephrenic attitude to both open source and Darwin, I have to say it is a real shame, OpenDarwin had a lot of promise, but little to show for itself, combined with the frustration many developers felt as we were left shiverring out in the cold by Apple.
Hopefully great projects like Xar and DarwinPorts will continue on, though what the future holds for DarwinBuild is anyones guess.
I guess the last great bastion of Apple’s open source may still prove to be WebKit, the rendering engine for Safari and Dashboard.
Aloha to all the great people I met during my time hanging around OpenDarwin and best of luck in the future.
UPDATE : /. coverage
UPDATE : The hackers@ posting
UPDATE : Arse Hat post of the week
“Open Source is and always has been a Communist canard. There is yet to be a pure open source business model that is profitable.
The only successful open source projects are ones that use open source as a *basis* for closed systems such as OS X does (there are others).
Steve probably got tired of hackers creating security problems for OS X. Sure the upside is many contributors but there are many downsides such as giving created value away for free and opening one’s code to attack because malicious programmers can freely and analyze the sources to look for ways to exploit weaknesses.”
The story of the first webcam.
In true hacker style, it conception was due to the need for said hackers to get their caffeine fix.
“There were about fifteen of us involved in related research and, being poor, impoverished academics, we only had one coffee filter machine between us, which lived in the corridor just outside the Trojan Room. However, being highly dedicated and hard-working academics, we got through a lot of coffee, and when a fresh pot was brewed, it often didn’t last long.”
“Some members of the ‘coffee club’ lived in other parts of the building and had to navigate several flights of stairs to get to the coffee pot; a trip which often proved fruitless if the all-night hackers of the Trojan Room had got there first. This disruption to the progress of Computer Science research obviously caused us some distress, and so XCoffee was born.”
“Few of us had heard of HTTP then, and it would have been of limited use because Web browsers could only display text. But when the Mosaic browser was introduced in 1993, with its ability to display images, Web pages could include diagrams, equations, and pictures of loved ones. We soon realized something that now seems obvious: when your browser requests an image from a server, the server doesn’t have to return the same image every time. For us, the most convenient source of constantly changing images was the coffeepot camera, so Daniel Gordon modified the server to respond to HTTP requests, and the first Web cam was born.”
As this knowledge is now public I thought I’d share it with you, not of too much interest to those who have little or no interest in Astronomy or British Politics, but I’m going to tell you all the same.
PPARC, the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council in the UK is to merge with CCLRC, Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, and become a new organisation known unfortunatly as the Large Facilities Council.
PPARC provides the British part of the funding for the telescopes I work for, however I am not a PPARC employee.
PPARC’s press release
CCLRC’s announcement
For some background it is worth reading this BBC article.
From Stuff.co.uk
Parents are told that smacking can be a “10-to-15-minute process” and that if a child reacts angrily, such as by slamming doors or “pouting”, they should be smacked again.
“Smacking is meant to drive the foolishness, the sinful manifestations, out of the child’s personality so that they do not become permanent fixtures”
Ruby Harrold-Claeson, who arrives in Auckland today, claims Swedish children have been out of control since smacking was legally removed nearly 50 years ago.
Out of interest, many countries around the world DO NOT have a ban on the corpoal punishment of children in place and STILL have out-of-control children ( so to speak. )
I like this though :
“The idea that children are sinful and that they need to be beaten in order to be moral beings is fundamentally wrong.”
I have so much to say on this issue, but for now I’ll just seethe for a while.
By way of a follow up to a previous article, lock up your heads of state when Dubya’s in town.
Of course, another approach is to be open about who you work for and write “sensibly”, says Mr Robertson.
Not all companies are against blogging - in fact some see it as an effective PR tool, giving a human face to their firm, and encourage staff to write by providing server space.
But Mr Robertson has a word of warning: companies must set out their blogging policy clearly.
Computer services firm IBM - where more than 3,000 employees have now set up a blog - consulted the company’s own blogging community before drawing up its guidelines.
“If you publish a blog… use a disclaimer,” is one of the firm’s 10 principles. Another tells writers: “Don’t pick fights.”
And if a member of staff does raise hackles by criticising their boss?
“The employer needs to be careful,” warns Mr Robertson.
“The employee has to understand that they are breaking the rules - and the employer shouldn’t just sack them… or they could face a claim for unfair dismissal.”
From the BeeBeeCee
Nematode worms are less than 1mm long and live in the soil feeding on bacteria.
Through receptors in their nerves, they can detect and avoid harmful chemicals in their environment.
Scientists from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK, and the Erasmus Medical Centre, the Netherlands, modified the worms to contain human receptors.
Drugs are often designed to bind to receptors, to either block or activate them, so detecting whether a potential medicine interacts with the receptor is key.
From news-medical.net
Scientists now say that Cannabis, the third most popular recreational drug after alcohol and tobacco, could boost brain power.
Canadian researchers found that experiments on rats which were given a potent cannabinoid, showed the drug stimulates the growth of new brain cells.
It appears that the drug caused neurons to regenerate in the hippocampus, an area that controls mood and emotions, after one month of treatment.
Apparently its effect was similar to that of the antidepressant drug Prozac, which also stimulates nerve growth in the hippocampus. The rats were less anxious and more willing to eat in a novel environment that would normally make them fearful.
The new research suggests that the size of the dose may be crucial. The results showed that regular injections of high, but not low, doses of the artificial cannabinoid HU210 were associated with anti-anxiety and antidepressive effects.
The researchers from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, say that most drugs, including alcohol, heroin, cocaine and nicotine, have been shown to destroy nerve cells in the hippocampus. This study suggests that cannabinoids are the only illicit drug that can promote adult hippocampal neurogenesis following chronic administration.
This new finding does of course contradict previous research highlighting the risks of cannabis use, including a heightened degree of psychosis in vulnerable users, and an increased risk of lung cancer similar to that in tobacco smokers.
The authors agree that regular cannabis users are known to suffer acute memory impairment, as well as dependency and withdrawal symptoms, but the new research suggests that the size of the dose may be crucial.
The results showed that regular injections of high, but not low, doses of the artificial cannabinoid HU210 were associated with anti-anxiety and antidepressive effects.
The scientists say that these complicated effects of high and low doses of acute and chronic exposure to cannabinoids may explain the seemingly conflicting results observed in clinical studies regarding the effects of cannabinoid on anxiety and depression.
The study emerged from the recent discovery that, unlike other parts of the brain, the hippocampus can generate neurons throughout the lifespan of mammals, including humans.
The team says that natural selection has conserved cannabinoid receptors in animals that have been separated by evolution for 500 million years, suggesting they have an important biological role.
Cannabinoids appear to alter the effects of pain, nausea, tumours, sclerosis and other disorders in both animals and humans.
In the experiment the rats were given regular injections of HU210 for a month. At the end of this time, hungry animals showed significantly less reluctance to eat in a novel environment. Rats are normally neophobic - wary of new situations.