The Betacantrips Travelogue

Via Suzanne, this article on the sculpture of Ron Mueck.

Seen on Language Log: "John Cleese’s doubletalk neuroscience lecture".

Gus mentioned to me that the USGS collects earthquake data. Among other things, they will tell you the last earthquake in New York (or any other state) and show you a seismic hazard map of New York (or any other state if you follow the link from their by-state index). However, in trying to find a "last five or ten earthquakes in New York" feed, I stumbled on the Earthquake Facts and Statistics page, which contains this gem:

We detect, but generally do not locate, about 50 mine blasts (explosions) throughout the United States on any given business day. These blasts typically occur between noon and 6 PM local time Monday through Saturday. Of these, about one event every two days is large enough that we compute a location for the blast and post it to a separate explosions listing.

(See a map here.)

You guys! You bunch of crazy scientists.

I was browsing this thread on Slashdot and came across a really interesting meme:

I bought an iPhone this year. This is one asset that is so important that I just want it to WORK. I don’t want to worry about viruses, or ongoing maintenance. This is my ONLY TELEPHONE LINE, and so I finally do approve of somebody keeping it locked down and pristine.

—inviolet

The lockdown here is on two devices. You want a laptop or desktop you can do whatever you want with? There’s the macbook, imac and mac pro for that. Want an expandable handheld appliance with a limited (albeit ever-expanding) functionality that’ll have no hidden surprises? There’s your iPad and iPhone.

You may as well criticise arcade machine makers for vetting all the roms you can put in their hardware. Or any of the console makers for vetting what’s available for theirs. Or that kindle can’t do anything but display books. Experience has shown them all, time and time again that as soon as you open up a platform to anyone and everyone, quality and reliability take a hit, not to mention susceptibility to attack. It’s a specific product for a specific market and like the iPhone, will be hated by geeks everywhere, but loved by everyone else who want something that just works. Apple will likely do little to stop people jailbreaking these things, they’ll just make it difficult enough that only determined people do it.

—CrazyBusError (emphasis mine)

First, the FSF needs to convince us average users need to have control. Why should average users have control over their computer? Isn’t this what got us the virus nightmare in Windows?

—Azureflare

The idea that most people don’t want control over their computers, and that having them be locked down offers tangible benefits, is new to me. In particular, a locked down device obviates the need to perform "good houskeeping" sorts of system maintenance. Some commentators respond that you can have a good design that eliminates housekeeping without control, but by definition if a user has the potential to do whatever they want with a device, it’s just a matter of social engineering to turn their computer into a spambot.

Seen on LWN: a fascinating article about static analysis done using GCC plugins.

There are a few interesting plugins in the works. One of them is the LLVM compiler, which can be plugged in to perform the back-end functions for GCC. Another is milepost, which uses a brute-force approach to figure out the optimal settings of the command-line flags for a specific body of code. Then, there are "the hydras," which are Taras’s work. These plugins take an interesting approach, in that the actual analysis work is done in JavaScript scripts. The idea was originally seen as amusing – "wouldn’t it be fun to put Spidermonkey into GCC?" – but it has actually worked out well. JavaScript is a relatively nice, concise language which makes it easy to implement the needed capabilities.

Seen on JWZ:

Seen on Planet Debian: Apparently there’s a thing called termcasting, and some people are doing it.

I’ve hooked one of my laptop’s terminals up to the net, so anyone with IPv6 can telnet in and see it.

I’ve long wanted to be able to broadcast my terminal sessions on occasions when it makes sense. Like when I’m fixing someone’s bug, or closely collaborating with someone distant.

Seen via Slashdot: blessed be the mobile users and those called the children of iPod.

Plow Monday is normally for blessing laborers and their tools; as the name suggests it is aimed at those who work the land. A church service in London, England Monday decided to go after a more modern audience: office workers and their modern communication gadgets. From the Times article: ‘The congregation at St Lawrence Jewry in the City of London raised their mobiles and iPods above their heads and Canon Parrott raised his voice to the heavens to address the Lord God of all Creation. "May our tongues be gentle, our e-mails be simple and our websites be accessible," he said.’"

A fascinating event in the future of religion..

Seen via Suzanne: this intro video for the University of Alaska-Fairbanks’s hockey team.

Alaska Nanooks 2010 Hockey Intro from Szymon Weglarski on Vimeo.

Via Suzanne, this post on BoingBoing about hair ice.

While the term frost is used frequently as part of such names, these ice formations are not a product of frost. Frost comes about by moisture from the air being deposited on surfaces. As such frost is quite amorphous and would never appear as fine needles like we see here. Hair Ice is ice that grows outward from the surface of the wood, as super-cooled water emerges from the wood, freezes and adds to the hairs from the base.