Samwise rides again

From Aunty …

Just bees forage some distance away from their hives, so murderers avoid killing near their homes

This “geographic profiling” works so well in bees, the scientists say future experiments on the animals could now be fed back to improve crime-solving.

The scientist is working with colleagues Steve Le Comber and Kim Rossmo, a former detective in the US, to tag bees with tiny coloured numbers and follow them from their nests to flower patches.

The researchers’ analysis describes how bees create a “buffer zone” around their hive where they will not forage, to reduce the risk of predators and parasites locating the nest. It turns out that this pattern of behaviour is similar to the geographic profile of criminals stalking their victims.

“Most murders happen close to the killer’s home, but not in the area directly surrounding a criminal’s house, where crimes are less likely to be committed because of the fear of getting caught by someone they know,”

Understanding the geographic profiles of animals is interesting to biologists as it helps them predict the locations of important feeding grounds, and knowing these areas will inform more effective conservation measures.

This approach works well for very different creatures, from bees and bats to great white sharks.

But what is more unusual is that models used to describe bee foraging can be applied back to human behaviour

Instead of using information about the distribution of flowers visited by bees to explain the insects’ behaviour, criminologists’ models will use details about crime scenes, robbery locations, abandoned cars, even dead bodies, to hone the search for a suspect.

“Bees have much simpler brains and so understanding how bees are recruited to flowers is much easier than understanding the complex thoughts of a serial murderer,”

More broadly, the London-based team hopes its work will lead to a better understanding of how one of the most familiar animals in nature goes about its daily business.

“Bees’ pollination ’services’ account for about one in three mouthfuls of food that we eat as humans. They pollinate a huge diversity of our fruit and vegetable crops.

“If we don’t know how bees forage then we don’t really understand pollination, and that is quite detrimental to how we feed ourselves; which is becoming an increasing problem with bigger populations.”

I appreciate the importance of bees, but I find it a bit of a stretch to think we can derive much about the habits of serial killers from their daily routine, but y’know, whatever brings in the research grant money.

# all we are saying, is give bees a chance #

OH HAI !

While I wait for my plane, and as I haven’t got round to fleshing out my drafts from OSCON08 yet, I thought I’d share with you a little gem I picked up.

LOLCODE !!1!

First the obligatory, “Hello, World !” example


HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE


OK, so far so good (?!) now how about loops and conditionals …


HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
    UP VAR!!1
    VISIBLE VAR
    IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE


OK, OK, how ’bout some IO ?


HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
PLZ OPEN FILE "LOLCATS.TXT"?
    AWSUM THX
        VISIBLE FILE
    O NOES
        INVISIBLE "ERROR!"
KTHXBYE


SRSLY ?

Yup, and like all serious languages it has even been implemented for Parrot. Give it ten, maybe fifteen years and all code will look this way.

RLY ?

Yup

KTHXBYE !

moar funny pictures

A *ahem* private citizen ( who works for RIPE, which I mention as they have a vested interest in IPv6 adoption before IPv4 addresses run out, ) pointed us to to http://ipv6experiment.com/ …

We’re taking over 100 gigabytes of the most popular “adult entertainment” videos from one of the largest subscription websites on the internet, and giving away access to anyone who can connect to it via IPv6. No advertising, no subscriptions, no registration. If you access the site via IPv4, you get a primer on IPv6, instructions on how to set up IPv6 through your ISP, a list of ISPs that support IPv6 natively, and a discussion forum to share tips and troubleshooting. If you access the site via IPv6 you get instant access to “the goods”.

You can hear the excuses now, send your best to the usual address.

Dedicated to the memory of Jun-ichiro “itojun” Hagino, IPv6 Samurai.

To paraphrase .. .

Blah blah blah perl blah blah blah paul vixie blah linux blah linux blah blah at that meeting we agreed to call it open source blah blah blah blah blah cult blah eric s raymond blah blah and at that meeting we voted to call it open source blah blah ghandi blah open free blah blah circle jerk of blah blah sponsored by microsoft blah blah and stallman said blah blah web two point oh ? blah blah blah web web blah blah

UPDATE : Brad took actual notes if you *really* want to know what was said.

While waiting for my room to be ready the other day I spotted an unusual article about a vegan body builder, so I thought I might share it in case anyone was interested as it is rather unusual.

http://www.veganbodybuilding.com/

http://www.veganbodybuilding.org/

And you wonder why Popeye eats spinach ?

From Aunty …

If at least 7,168 of those signatures are found to be valid, the question of whether to rename Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant after the outgoing president will be added to the ballot papers in November.

“In President Bush’s case, we think that we will be cleaning up a substantial mess for the next 10 or 20 years,”

“The sewage treatment facility’s job is to clean up a mess, so we think it’s a fitting tribute.”

a city official stressed that Oceanside offered “extraordinary environmental benefits”

Ever heard of the UNIX command `dsw` ?

No, neither had I, until I read this …

The other day I was, for reasons known only to myself, reading the manuals that came with First Edition Unix. This wasn’t the first time I’d read them, but I noticed something new this time.

There was a manual page for a command known as ‘dsw’. Obviously, this was the command used to interactively remove files (the equivalent, in modern parlance, of ‘rm -i’).

What struck me, however, was this little tidbit from the notes section:

The name dsw is a carryover from the ancient past. Its

etymology is amusing but the name is nonetheless ill—

advised.

Well, obviously, that’s a mystery in need of solving. I’ll admit that not all Unix commands are clearly named, but this one was obscure even by those standards.

I spent some of my time this past weekend looking up the answer. (Hey, what can I say? I know how to party!) The answer came from an old page on Bell Labs’ website discussing Unix history.

It turns out, the name is a loose abbreviation of “delete from switches”. Of course!

But, what are these switches, you ask?

Well, this edition of Unix ran on a machine from DEC called the PDP-11 (with 24KW of memory and no memory protection). The PDP-11, like most machines of that vintage, had a collection of switches on the front of its chassis. These switches were known by various names: “console switches”, “front-panel switches”, and so on.

These switches were used for a variety of purposes. One main use was to deposit values in memory before the operating system was loaded. It was by this laborious method bootloaders were placed into memory that would then read the rest of the operating system from tape or disk.

(The legendary Seymour Cray was famed for being able to switch in a bootloader from memory.)

On machines with a bootloader in ROM, these switches had less of a purpose, usually just for debugging or configuration purposes. The PDP-11 used by the original Unix developers had such a bootloader, and therefore, these switches were woefully underutilized.

The original version of ‘dsw’ didn’t have much of a user interface. Modern interactive file deletion commands do something like the following:

* Get a list of files in the directory.
* For each file, print out its name.
* Wait for the user to confirm deletion of the file.
* Repeat until there are no more files in the list.

‘dsw’ eschewed this obviously over-complicated interface by using the aforementioned woefully underutilized console switches.

To interactively delete files in the current directory, the user would decide how many files appeared in the directory listing before the doomed file. They would then set the console switches to that number (in octal, of course), and run ‘dsw’. The program would then read that number of filenames from the directory, store the name of the last file it encountered in its own process memory, print out that name, and then crash.

The crash would produce a core dump (a raw representation of the contents of memory when the program crashed).

To confirm the deletion the named file, the user could then run the core file. That is, rather than running ‘dsw’ again, they would read the contents of the core dump directly back into memory and jump back to that code.

This would cause the ‘dsw’ instance stored in the core file to read from memory the name of the last file it had encountered and delete it.

In this manner, you could be sure that you would not delete a file unless you really meant to.

This all could be a complete lie, but it is entertaining none the less.

I think I may have just seen everything, well at the very least too much, Yoga Toes, the toe stretcher for people who wear shoes that they really in all seriousness shouldn’t, but hey if you are vain enough to wear them, you are probably vain enough to get your toes straightened again.

This Wikipedia edit shows a particularly cruel Hans Reiser joke.

Admittedly when I say cruel, I mean it is cruel, but if he hadn’t killed his wife it wouldn’t be funny now would it ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrUWFYkbcmg

Please do not try to recreate any of the hilarious antics in this video, this video is for entertainment purposes only, if you hurt yourself as a result of recreating this stunt, we will laugh at you for being a dumb, or should that be numb ass.