Midsummer break

A variety of family and hobby things are demanding my attention.  Blogging will resume after the weekend.  Probably.

The making of "Fargo"

YouTube link. 

I wouldn't be a true Minnesotan if I didn't repost this documentary about the making of this movie.  You betcha.

The film earned seven Academy Award nominations, winning two for Best Original Screenplay for the Coens and Best Actress in a Leading Role for McDormand. It also won the BAFTA Award and the Award for Best Director for Joel Coen at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival.

In 2006 it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and inducted into the United States National Film Registry. It is currently the most recently made feature length film in the Registry."

Via Neatorama.

A lamp full of memories

Here's the owner's story, posted at Reddit:

The lamp is a glass jar full of all the things that my mom found in my pockets when doing my laundry as a child. I was born in 1986, and you can tell from a lot of the items in it.

It started off with mostly sticks, rocks, and marbles. But over time it ended up having all sorts of items ranging from Pogs, a Gameboy game (Super Mario Land), a Magic School Bus McDonald's toy, yo-yos, and Laser Quest scorecards. There are also plenty of sticks, springs, rubber-bands, and twist-ties because I went through a phase where I remember telling my parents I was going to build a robot with just those items.

I will admit that there are a few items in there from my early 20s too, as like any lazy college student, I let my mom wash my clothes while staying at home from college between semesters. And clearly, my mom was still collecting my things.

Growing up, whenever I left something in my pockets and put them in the dirty laundry, before she would wash things, she checked my pockets, and if she found anything, she put it in a glass jar on the top shelf in the laundry room. I remember as a kid, wishing soooo hard that I could get some of the items back, but it was forbidden to even go near the jar.

By the time I was old enough to be sneaky about it and get into it, I had just learned to accept that that was how it worked and I wouldn't get those things back.

Years went by and I had completely forgotten about it, until this last May. I got married, and at our rehearsal dinner, when my mom and dad stood up to give their thank you speech, my mom pulled a large gift bag out from under the table. She started by giving a short speech explaining that over the years she had collected stuff from my pockets, and it was in that moment that I thought, "I'm gonna get the jar!" I started tearing up before she had finished talking. When she did, I opened the bag and found that not only was I getting the jar, I was getting it back in the form of a lamp (and yes, she has sealed the top of the lamp to it so that I still CANNOT open it).

This has definitely been the best gift I've ever received.

What a wonderful and thoughtful personalized gift.  Closeup photos here.

Natural Language in Voice Search

Posted by Jakob Uszkoreit, Software Engineer

On July 26 and 27, we held our eighth annual Computer Science Faculty Summit on our Mountain View Campus. During the event, we brought you a series of blog posts dedicated to sharing the Summit's talks, panels and sessions, and we continue with this glimpse into natural language in voice search. --Ed

At this year’s Faculty Summit, I had the opportunity to showcase the newest version of Google Voice Search. This version hints at how Google Search, in particular on mobile devices and by voice, will become increasingly capable of responding to natural language queries.

I first outlined the trajectory of Google Voice Search, which was initially released in 2007. Voice actions, launched in 2010 for Android devices, made it possible to control your device by speaking to it. For example, if you wanted to set your device alarm for 10:00 AM, you could say “set alarm for 10:00 AM. Label: meeting on voice actions.” To indicate the subject of the alarm, a meeting about voice actions, you would have to use the keyword “label”! Certainly not everyone would think to frame the requested action this way. What if you could speak to your device in a more natural way and have it understand you?

At last month’s Google I/O 2012, we announced a version of voice actions that supports much more natural commands. For instance, your device will now set an alarm if you say “my meeting is at 10:00 AM, remind me”. This makes even previously existing functionality, such as sending a text message or calling someone, more discoverable on the device -- that is, if you express a voice command in whatever way feels natural to you, whether it be “let David know I’ll be late via text” or “make sure I buy milk by 3 pm”, there is now a good chance that your device will respond how you anticipated it to.

I then discussed some of the possibly unexpected decisions we made when designing the system we now use for interpreting natural language queries or requests. For example, as you would expect from Google, our approach to interpreting natural language queries is data-driven and relies heavily on machine learning. In complex machine learning systems, however, it is often difficult to figure out the underlying cause for an error: after supplying them with training and test data, you merely obtain a set of metrics that hopefully give a reasonable indication about the system’s quality but they fail to provide an explanation for why a certain input lead to a given, possibly wrong output.

As a result, even understanding why some mistakes were made requires experts in the field and detailed analysis, rendering it nearly impossible to harness non-experts in analyzing and improving such systems. To avoid this, we aim to make every partial decision of the system as interpretable as possible. In many cases, any random speaker of English could look at its possibly erroneous behavior in response to some input and quickly identify the underlying issue - and in some cases even fix it!

We are especially interested in working with our academic colleagues on some of the many fascinating research and engineering challenges in building large-scale, yet interpretable natural language understanding systems and devising the machine learning algorithms this requires.

We got your Wiki Back! - Mary Roach

I noticed a post in the Bay Area Skeptic's Facebook group months ago by someone named Chris Parker.  She was looking for someone to give her "must read" material for a college research assignment on psychics she had to present in class.  I contacted her and gave her some ideas, and linked her with Mark Edward who is an expert on the psychic business (see Psychic Blues on Amazon).

Chris did her essay and wrote to tell me all about the professor and the other students reactions.  I thought she was a terrific writer and felt that a blog would be in order.  She worked it up and Mark decided that he wanted to post the story on his blog, and did so in July.

In the mean time Chris shared that she was not taking college classes this summer and liked to keep busy, wondered about this Wikipedia project she kept seeing me yammer on about all over Facebook.   We exchanged emails for awhile and I asked her if she could pick a Wikipedia project what would it be?  So she spent a day and wrote me back with the suggestion that Mary Roach's current Wikipedia page was a stub and how sad that was.  She had been to one of Mary's lectures being that they both live in the Bay Area, and thought that if I showed her how, she would work on that page.

So, Chris and I went back and forth for a couple weeks, and then a few other editors from the project helped with ideas and how to cite some sources when I was at TAM.  Chris asked really great questions which helped me learn a lot about the gaps in my blog instructions and the reality of what I actually mean.  When you live and breathe this Wikipedia project daily, you tend to forget that others aren't as "connected" to the project and not reading and memorizing every word I write.

Want to point out that until this re-write I don't think Chris had ever edited Wikipedia.  I also don't suggest brand new people start with re-writes, but in Chris's case she was so excited and motivated that I thought "why not?".  She communicated with me clearly, asked lots of questions and we sent emails many times a day.  We started with the very basics, and once I pointed her in the right direction, she just took off.  I'm totally self taught, and Chris seemed to be learning the same way with only a bit of guidance.  One reason why I felt that Mary's page would be okay for a beginner was because her current page had a lot of external links to interviews and videos that only needed to be watched and quoted to expand into the article.  I knew Chris wasn't going to be searching for months trying to turn up secondary sources. 

We made a brand new user page for Chris's rewrite and made it "un-searchable", and on that page we had constant conversations about what should go where, and what to expand on and so forth.

Only after Chris was almost done did I approach Mary to get further citations we were missing, and had her upload some personal pictures (which warm my photographer's heart) they really make the page extra special,  I'm reminded of Lei Pinters's re-write of Kendrick Frazier's WP page a couple months ago. 

There was so much info on Mary Roach out there and Chris watched every video and read every link she could find.  (and yes, she even had a Google alert on her for incoming items) Now if Chris ever gets on Jeopardy and the category is Mary Roach, Chris will clean up.  One comment I remember from Chris, was she was surprised that interviewers always asked Mary the same questions over and over again. I suppose, now that if they start by reading Mary's new Wikipedia page they will be able to have a much well rounded interview. 

Okay, I know you have waited long enough.  Time to show you the before and after.  Hold your breath.

Mary Roach before

Mary Roach after

So wondering, Chris what's next?

As usual, if you would like to help with this project, I will keep you more than busy.  You don't even need to do as much work as Chris did, I have many tasks that await you, I will train.  Just please contact me at susangerbic@yahoo.com and lets get to work. 

A mashup of The Lion King and The Dark Knight Rises

YouTube link. 

Visuals from The Lion King, audio from the trailer for The Dark Knight Rises.  Very well done.

In part, this may be an illustration of the concept of "the basic plots of literature."   See also this interesting exploration of the concordances between The Lion King to Kimba The White Lion.

The colors of the Olympic rings

Is there a hidden significance?  Officially, the answer is no...

The following is quoted directly from the IOC: "The five rings represent the five continents. They are interlaced to show the universality of Olympism and the meeting of the athletes of the whole world during the Olympic Games. On the Olympic flag, the rings appear on a white background. This flag translates the idea of the universality of the Olympic Movement. At least one of the colors of the rings, including the white background, can be found on the flag of every nation in the world."... Baron Pierre de Coubertin conceived both the symbol and the flag. Not coincidentally, Coubertin was the founder of the modern Olympic Movement. 

But... note this in the Wikipedia entry:

Prior to 1951, the official handbook stated that each colour corresponded to a particular continent: blue for Europe, yellow for Asia, black for Africa, green for Australia and Oceania and red for America (North and South considered as a single continent); this was removed because there was no evidence that Coubertin had intended it...

Here's the cited 1951 reference*:

We probably will never know for certain whether Coubertin's committee intentionally chose "yellow for Asia, black for Africa" (and red for the Americas) and that position was later "walked back" when such stereotyping became less popular, or whether the attributions of ring color to regions were just a creation of some enterprising writer or reporter.

*"Decision adopted by the Executive Committee". Bulletin du Comité International Olympique ( Olympic Review ) (Lausanne: IOC) (25): poo. January 1951.

Our unseen world

Rotifer Floscularia ringens feeding.  Photo by Mr. Charles Krebs.

Stink bug eggs.  Photo by Mr. Haris Antonopoulos.

Both images from the Olympus BioScapes International Digital Imaging Competition, 2011.

"Suicide bombers" of the termite world

From a report in Science:

When trekking through a forest in French Guiana to study termites, a group of biologists noticed unique spots of blue on the backs of the insects in one nest [see lower termite in the embedded photo]. Curious, one scientist reached down to pick up one of these termites with a pair of forceps. It exploded. The blue spots, the team discovered, contain explosive crystals, and they're found only on the backs of the oldest termites in the colony. The aged termites carry out suicide missions on behalf of their nest mates...

Back in their labs, scientists led by biochemist Robert Hanus of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague went on to show that the blue termites always had shorter, worn-down mandibles than others from the same species, indicating that they were older. Then, the researchers removed the contents of the blue pouches and analyzed them. They contained a novel protein that is unusually rich with copper, suggesting that it's an oxygen binding-protein. Rather than being toxic itself, it likely is an enzyme that converts a nontoxic protein into something toxic.

"What happens is when the termites explode, the contents of the back pouch actually interact with secretions from the salivary gland and the mixture is what is toxic," explains Hanus. It's the first time two interacting chemicals have been shown responsible for a defense mechanism in termites..."

From the context of the article, my interpretation is that the "exploding" referred to is not an expansive force, but rather a "rupturing" of the termite.

Embedded photo cropped from an image by R. Hanus.  Via Neatorama.

Addendum: Danack found a video of the rupturing termite.  Warning:  not very exciting.

Huge treasure hoard found in Jersey

YouTube link. 

Thirty years ago, a farmer found a few Iron Age silver coins while working on his land in the island of Jersey, off the coast of Normandy. Now, after combing the soil with metal detectors for three decades, two treasure hunters have found a hoard of silver and gold coins, the biggest of its kind, valued at $15 million.

The treasure was inside a large block of clay. It contains 30,000 to 50,000 silver and gold Celtic coins dating from the 1st Century BC. The coins—which could have been buried to prevent Roman troops from getting them during Julius Caesar's invasion of the British Islands—come from Armorica. They have been buried for more than 2,000 years. According to numismatic experts, each coin is worth 100 to 200 British Pounds ($156 to $311).

Text from Gizmodo; see also Yahoo.  Photo credit SWNS.

Re Armorica.

Addendum: More information from The History Blog:

Most of the hoards found in Jersey have been coins from the Coriosolite tribe, a Celtic tribe from what is now Brittany on the northwestern coast of France. First century B.C. hoards are the most common because the populations were under pressure from Julius Caesar’s legions. Caesar describes his encounters with the coastal tribes of the area he called Armorica in The Gallic Wars...

...the Veneti, the most prominent of the Armorican tribes, along with their Armorican neighbors captured some of Caesar’s officers to exchange them for hostages the Romans had taken... When they fled to the sea, Caesar had his troops build ships, but they couldn’t compete with the locals’ heavy navy and sailing expertise in the treacherous waters of the Channel and Atlantic.

He did it in the end, though. He destroyed the Veneti fleet using giant billhooks to sever the lines used to hoist the mainsails. With the sails on the deck, the Celtic ships were entirely out of commission. They couldn’t even row because the huge sails cloaked the deck. Caesar then went from coastal town to coastal town and killed everyone...

Walking on the moon - 1972

From NASA's Astronomy Photo of the Day website:

In December of 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent about 75 hours on the Moon in the Taurus-Littrow valley, while colleague Ronald Evans orbited overhead...

Now forty years later, Cernan and Schmitt are still the last to walk on the Moon.

"Fear of everything" driving financial markets

When large institutional investors are fearful, they move money into U.S. Treasuries, driving down the yield on those instruments.  This past week, the yield on the 10-year treasuries reached an all-time low:

Investors afraid the European Union might unravel, after Spanish bond yields spiked and talk of a Greek exit returned to the table, fled for the apparent safety of U.S. government debt... Valeri also acknowledged the weakening of the U.S. economy.  In what has been a mixed earnings season, several U.S. companies have indicated they are suffering from the global economic slowdown.

The international business editor at The Telegraph echoes these sentiments:

Europe is “sleepwalking towards disaster”, according to the 17 experts, who warned that over the past few weeks “the situation in the debtor countries has deteriorated dramatically... This dramatic situation is the result of a eurozone system which, as currently constructed, is thoroughly broken. The cause is a systemic failure."

In a veiled rebuke to hard-line politicians in Germany, the economists said the root cause of the crisis has been the boom-bust effect of rampant capital flows over the past decade – not delinquent behaviour by feckless nations... they said the current course had become hopeless. Deepening recession is “tearing at the social fabric of the deficit states”. The lack of any light at the end of the tunnel is leading to a populist backlash in both the debtor and creditor states.

And earlier this month, Nouriel Roubini spoke of a "perfect storm" coming in 2013:

Mr Roubini, the New York University professor dubbed "Dr Doom", said a number of unpleasant factors would combine to derail the global economy in 2013, including an escalation of the eurozone crisis.

Other factors included further tax increases and spending cuts in the US that may drive the world's largest economy into recession; a hard landing for China's economy; a further slowdown in emerging markets; and war with Iran. 

"Next year is the time when the can becomes too big to kick it down [the road]...then we have a global perfect storm," he told Reuters. 

Economic and market predictions are a dime a dozen, but I do credit Roubini's comments for getting me out of the equity markets before the crash of 2007, so I am paying some heed to his words.

Warren Buffett famously has said that he became rich by being fearful when others were greedy and greedy when others are fearful.  That sounds logical, but it's a challenging philosophy for the average person to follow in real life.

New Challenges in Computer Science Research

Posted by Jeff Walz, Head of University Relations

Yesterday afternoon at the 2012 Computer Science Faculty Summit, there was a round of lightning talks addressing some of the research problems faced by Google across several domains. The talks pointed out some of the biggest challenges emerging from increasing digital interaction, which is this year’s Faculty Summit theme.

Research Scientist Vivek Kwatra kicked things off with a talk about video stabilization on YouTube. The popularity of mobile devices with cameras has led to an explosion in the amount of video people capture, which can often be shaky. Vivek and his team have found algorithmic approaches to make casual videos look more professional by simulating professional camera moves. Their stabilization technology vastly improves the quality of amateur footage.

Next, Ed Chi (Research Scientist) talked about social media focusing on the experimental circle model that characterizes Google+. Ed is particularly interested in how social interaction on the web can be designed to mimic live communication. Circles on Google+ allow a user to manage their audience and share content in a targeted fashion, which reflects face-to-face interaction. Ed discussed how, from an HCI perspective, the challenge going forward is the need to consider the trinity of social media: context, audience, content.

John Wilkes, Principal Software Engineer, talked about cluster management at Google and the challenges of building a new cluster manager-- that is, an operating system for a fleet of machines. Everything at Google is big and a consequence of operating at such tremendous scale is that machines are bound to fail. John’s team is working to make things easier for internal users enabling our ability to respond to more system requests. There are several hard problems in this domain, such as issues with configuration, making it as easy as possible to run a binary, increasing failure tolerance, and helping internal users understand their own needs as well as the behavior and performance of their system in our complicated distributed environment.

Research Scientist and coffee connoisseur Alon Halevy took to the podium to confirm that he did indeed author an empirical book on coffee, and also talked with attendees about structured data on the web. Structured data is comprised of hundreds of millions of (relatively small) tables of data, and Alon’s work is focused on enabling data enthusiasts to discover and visualize those data sets. Great possibilities open up when people start combining data sets in meaningful ways, which inspired the creation of Fusion Tables. An example is a map made in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, that shows natural disaster data alongside the locations of the world’s nuclear plants. Moving forward, Alon’s team will continue to think about interesting things that can be done with data, and the techniques needed to distinguish good data from bad data.

To wrap up the session, Praveen Paritosh did a brief, but deep dive into the Knowledge Graph, an intelligent model that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another-- things, not strings-- which launched earlier this year.

The Google Faculty Summit continued today with more talks, and breakout sessions centered on our theme of digital interaction. Check back for additional blog posts in the coming days.

Amazing facts about the Carboniferous

 

YouTube link. 

Yesterday, this headline at Reddit caught my eye:

TIL, upon the advent of wood [400mya], it took fungi 50mil yrs to evolve a way to decompose it. Until then, wood just piled up, never to decay. It is this single fact that led to the Carboniferous period [BBC doc.]

That was the first time I had ever heard of this, so I browsed through the BBC video above (it's good, with excellent production values).  The Carboniferous is discussed briefly at about the 28 minute mark, but not in detail.

I found those sentences to be absolutely stunning, and couldn't get out of my mind the image of a never-decaying forest.  I should mention here that one of my "hobbies" for years has been clearing underbrush in woodland in northern Minnesota.   I can't conceive of the tangled mess that would accumulate if no fallen wood decayed for even a thousand years.  Then extend that to millions of years...

And think of the fire hazard.  Nobody in Colorado or California needs to be reminded of the risk of accumulated deadwood.  Plus, the atmosphere in the Carboniferous had high levels of oxygen (in part because that wood was not decaying).

Today, a geology student added to the Reddit thread some confirming and explanatory notes:

1) This period of elevated oxygen levels (30-35%, versus the 21% of today) lasted from the Carboniferous through the end of the Cretaceous, 65M years ago. It is extremely likely that the large-type dinosaurs simply cannot exist in our current atmosphere. They probably needed these increased oxygen levels to reach the energy production density that these massive creatures are estimated to require.

2) It is because of A) These elevated oxygen levels, and B) the lack of a fungi capable of breaking down lignin, the structural molecule of plant material, that forest growth back in the day was completely rampant. A very large amount of the solid biomass preserved in the entire fossil record came from this one 65-ish million year timespan.

3) Nearly all of the coal beds we exploit today came from the Carboniferous and the other periods with elevated oxygen levels. Guess what? Most of the coal has been judged to have been originally deposited as charcoal. Here's the kicker. Most of the solid biomass from the time period is believed to have lived in wet marshes/semi-permanently raining rainforests. Coal beds from the same (originally rainforest) bed formations have been found on continents separated by entire oceans. Some of these beds have been hundreds of meters thick. These factors imply that global-scale firestorms were a very common occurrence during the Carboniferous, and that these fires occurred in very wet conditions that would be simply impossible during the modern day. This and the lack of a fungal decay mechanism (also, charcoal basically cannot be broken down by fungi even today) is why so very much coal comes from the Carboniferous.

4) This here is the cool piece of information. The Cretaceous ends, geologically, at something called the K-T boundary, which is the few-millimeter thick layer of space dust that marks the Yucatan Peninsula impact. As most of you know, a rare platinum group element, iridium, is found in this thin layer (Iridium is only found in decent amounts in asteroids...). But, recently, investigators have found that a very large amount of soot is also in this layer, to the tune of several weight %. One investigator did some simple projections and calculated that the deposition of this amount of soot worldwide would imply that 25% of the entire biomass of the planet Earth burned after the meteor strike. The asteroid has been found to have caused a global firestorm, a holocaust in the truest sense of the world - one that would not have been possible were it not for the elevated oxygen levels. 

There's more at the link.

In this blog I do try to be tolerant of different viewpoints, especially religion-based ones.  I will sometimes express incredulity or speak out against intolerance, but I do try not to mock - except for "young-earthers."  And when I post something like this, I actually have to kind of feel sorry for them - that their worldview cuts them off from some of the most magnificient and spectacular concepts that the mind can encompass.  I'm going to be thinking about the Carboniferous and Cretaceous forests and firestorms for a long time.

This is an Olympic 1% gold medal

The 2012 "gold medal" is 92.5% silver, 6.16% copper and 1.34% gold. 

Details at BoingBoing.

It's a log

A 13-meter (40-foot) log was dug up in Cambodia.  Thousands of people have flocked to see it.  And...

"They believe the log has magical powers," he said, adding that visitors were coming loaded with offerings such as pig heads and boiled whole chickens after some locals who touched the wood won money in the lottery.

"At least one hundred people a day visit the log to ask for lottery numbers and to cure their illnesses," he said. "They believe in superstition."..

Hun Nov said some believers rubbed talcum powder onto the wood, hoping to see lucky lottery numbers, and others drank water from the pond and smeared nearby mud onto their bodies in a bid to cure their ailments. 

Education in the Cloud

Posted by Andrea Held, University Relations

In the last 10 years, we’ve seen a major transition from stand-alone applications that run on desktop computers to applications running in the cloud. Unfortunately, many computer science students don’t have the opportunity to learn and work in the cloud due to a lack of resources in traditional undergrad programs. Without this access students are limited to the resources their school can provide.

So today, we’re announcing a new award program: the Google App Engine Education Awards. We are excited because Google App Engine can teach students how to build sophisticated large-scale systems in the cloud without needing access to a large physical network.

Google App Engine can be used to build mobile or social applications, traditional browser-based applications, or stand-alone web services that scale to millions of users with ease. The Google App Engine infrastructure and storage tools are useful for collecting and analyzing educational data, building a learning management system to organize courses, or implementing a teacher forum for exchanging ideas and practices. All of these adaptations of the Google App Engine platform will use the same infrastructure that powers Google.

We invite teachers at universities across the United States to submit a proposal describing how to use Google App Engine for their course development, educational research or tools, or for student projects. Selected proposals will receive $1,000 in App Engine credits.

If you teach at an accredited college, university or community college in the US, we encourage you to apply. You can submit a proposal by filling out this form. The application deadline is midnight PST August 31, 2012.

Big Pictures with Big Messages

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

Google’s Eighth Annual Computer Science Faculty Summit opened today in Mountain View with a fascinating talk by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, leaders of the data visualization group at our Cambridge office. They provided insight into their design process in visualizing big data, by highlighting Google+ Ripples and a map of the wind they created.

To preface his explanation of the design process, Martin shared that his team “wants visualization to be ‘G-rated,’ showing the full detail of the data - there’s no need to simplify it, if complexity is done right.” Martin discussed how their wind map started as a personal art project, but has gained interest particularly among groups that are interested in information on the wind (sailors, surfers, firefighters). The map displays surface wind data from the US National Digital Forecast Database and updates hourly. You can zoom around the United States looking for where the winds are fastest - often around lakes or just offshore - or check out the gallery to see snapshots of the wind from days past.

Fernanda discussed the development of Google+ Ripples, a visualization that shows how news spreads on Google+. The visualization shows spheres of influence and different patterns of spread. For example, someone might post a video to their Google+ page and if it goes viral, we’ll see several circles in the visualization. This depicts the influence of different individuals sharing content, both in terms of the number of their followers and the re-shares of the video, and has revealed that individuals are at times more influential than organizations in the social media domain.

Martin and Fernanda closed with two important lessons in data visualization: first, don’t “dumb down” the data. If complexity is handled correctly and in interesting ways, our users find the details appealing and find their own ways to interact with and expand upon the data. Second, users like to see their personal world in a visualization. Being able to see the spread of a Google+ post, or zoom in to see the wind around one’s town is what makes a visualization personal and compelling-- we call this the “I can see my house from here” feature.

The Faculty Summit will continue through Friday, July 27 with talks by Googlers and faculty guests as well as breakout sessions on specific topics related to this year’s theme of digital interactions. We will be looking closely at how computation and bits have permeated our everyday experiences via smart phones, wearable computing, social interactions, and education.

We will be posting here throughout the summit with updates and news as it happens.

If you have a clothes washing machine, read this

How old are the hoses that connect your clothes washing machine to hot and cold water?  It is a question I had not thought about until reading a column in my favorite home-improvement blog:

Burst washing machine hoses have to be one of the most common causes of catastrophic water damage in homes. When I find rubber hoses used to connect the washing machine, I often mention to my clients that it's a good idea to replace them...

Every time a washing machine shuts off the water, a shockwave is sent through the water pipes... As rubber ages, it loses its flexibility. After being subjected to water hammer over and over for many years, the rubber washing machine hose is eventually going to fail, and it's going to be one heck of a mess...

I've heard that a good rule of thumb is to replace rubber washing machine hoses every five years. That sounds good, but how do you remember? Another tip I've heard is to replace your washing machine hoses every leap year. Not a bad idea.

After reading that, I realized that the hoses to our washer are twelve years old.  I shuddered to realize what would have happened had a hose burst when we were out of the house.  It would be the equivalent of taking a garden hose and leaving it on in the house.

There is an emergency toggle switch (back right in my photo above) that can be used in an emergency - if you're at home.  It's not a bad idea to shut this off when you go away on a trip.  As the link indicates, the washing machine manuals say to shut off the water supply whenever you're not using the washer.  Nobody ever does that.

At the link are other recommendations re automatic-sensing shutoff kits and using stainless-steel flexible hoses.

If you can connect a garden hose to a faucet, you can replace your washing machine hoses.  Just use a wrench to loosen the old hoses, and give the new hoses an extra 1/4 turn with a wrench after you have them hand-tightened.

I'm replacing ours this week.

"Parts is parts"

Excerpts from articles about the harvesting of human body parts for reuse, from a four-part series by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

In the US alone, the biggest market and the biggest supplier, an estimated two million products derived from human tissue are sold each year, a figure that has doubled over the past decade.

It is an industry that promotes treatments and products that literally allow the blind to see (through cornea transplants) and the lame to walk (by recycling tendons and ligaments for use in knee repairs). It's also an industry fuelled by powerful appetites for bottom-line profits and fresh human bodies...

In contrast to tightly monitored systems for tracking intact organs such as hearts and lungs, authorities in the US and many other countries have no way to accurately trace where recycled skin and other tissues come from and where they go...

The Slovaks export cadaver parts to the Germans; the Germans export finished products to South Korea and the US; the South Koreans to Mexico; the US to more than 30 countries. Distributors of manufactured products can be found in the European Union, China, Canada, Thailand, India, South Africa, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand. Some are subsidiaries of multinational medical corporations.

The international nature of the industry, critics claim, makes it easy to move products from place to place without much scrutiny.

“If I buy something from Rwanda, then put a Belgian label on it, I can import it into the US. When you enter into the official system, everyone is so trusting,” said Dr Martin Zizi, professor of neurophysiology at the Free University of Brussels.  Once a product is in the European Union, it can be shipped to the US with few questions asked.

“They assume you've done the quality check," Zizi said. "We are more careful with fruit and vegetables than with body parts.”..

Because of the ban on selling the tissue itself, the US companies that first commercialised the trade adopted the same methods as the blood collection business.

The for-profit companies set up non-profit offshoots to collect the tissue — in much the same way the Red Cross collects blood that is later turned into products by commercial entities.

Nobody charges for the tissue itself, which under normal circumstances is freely donated by the dead (via donor registries) or by their families.

Rather, tissue banks and other organisations involved in the process receive ill-defined “reasonable payments” to compensate them for obtaining and handling the tissue.

That's one reason some people argue that you shouldn't sign your organ donor card; your body parts are sufficiently valuable that if you die in a hospital, representatives may negotiate with your loved ones to reduce or eliminate your hospital bill in exchange for harvesting your tissue; if your consent is pre-signed, they may not make such offers.  I don't know whether such arguments are valid; it may be country-dependent.

Other articles (here, here) in the series detail the morbid and often unethical methodology used in tissue procurement:

“On the way to the cemetery, when we were in the hearse, one of his feet — we noticed that one of the shoes slipped off his foot, which seemed to be hanging loose,” his mother, Lubov Frolova, told ICIJ.

“When my daughter-in-law touched it, she said that his foot was empty.”

Later, the police showed her a list of what had been taken from her son’s body.

“Two ribs, two Achilles heels, two elbows, two eardrums, two teeth, and so on. I couldn’t read it till the end, as I felt sick. I couldn’t read it,” she said...“  I was in shock,” Rahulina said. She never signed the papers, she said, and it was clear to her that someone had forged her approval.

Why do some people want to squish turtles ?

YouTube link. 

The data in this video may be soft, but there certainly is evidence that some drivers purposely swerve out of their lane in order to kill animals.

When I lived in Texas and drove to Oklahoma for rockhounding trips, I remember swerving on rural roads to avoid tarantulas.   I guess I can understand locals wanting to eliminate them.  But turtles???  Can someone explain?

Addendum:  Larry has reminded me about post turtles.  Question for readers in Texas - are they real, or apocryphal?

Some Brits dread the Olympics

Image by Smuzz, via Charlie's Diary and BoingBoing.

A Norwegian prison island

If you're unfamiliar with Norwegian prisons, you might want to start with some background reading.  Here are two old posts -

Norwegian prisons (2008)
Norwegian prisons vs. American prisons (2010)

- before tackling today's subject matter, which is Bastoy Prison Island, as described by Der Spiegel:

No bars. No walls. No armed guards. The prison island of Bastøy in Norway is filled with some of the country's most hardened criminals. Yet it emphasizes self-control instead of the strictly regulated regimens common in most prisons...

The inmates on Bastøy have been convicted of crimes such as murder, robbery, drug dealing, fraud, violent crime and petty theft. "We don't pick out the mild cases," says Nilsen. Some inmates serve their entire sentences on the island. Murderers can only apply to be transferred to the island once they have served two-thirds of their sentences elsewhere. Some 115 prisoners live on Bastøy, and those who wish to stay are required to work and integrate into the community. Anyone caught drinking alcohol or fighting is thrown out...

During the group meal, which is served once day, the inmates in the room include a man with an iPod, who stole two paintings by Edvard Munch from a museum, "The Scream" and "Madonna." There is also the boy with dreadlocks, who raped two women...

This paradise has been around for 20 years -- and has a warden who loves statistics. The numbers, after all, prove him right. Only 16 percent of the prisoners in this island jail become repeat offenders in the first two years after leaving Bastøy as compared with 20 percent for Norway as a whole. In Germany, where recidivism is measured after three years, the rate is 50 percent.

The warden also feels vindicated because there has never been a murder or a suicide on the island -- and because no one left Bastøy last winter even though the sea ice was frozen solid...

His neat room is furnished with a desk and a bed covered with flowered sheets, and there are colorful curtains in front of the window, like in all the rooms. But there are no family photos on Hanssen's walls, and there are no men's magazines on the nightstand, just books. Hanssen is studying history and philosophy at the University of Oslo. He takes his exams on the Internet.

Hanssen is permitted to pursue a degree while on Bastøy, but he also has to contribute to the community. Every day, he sweeps and mops the floors of the group house and dusts the shelves. Then he returns to his room...

Locking people up doesn't do any good, he is convinced, because you can't lock people up forever in a liberal democracy. Reintegration is the important part, not punishment, he believes.

Via Neatorama.

The miniature coffins of Arthur's Seat

Arthur's Seat is a peak in Edinburgh, Scotland, on whose summit is an ancient hill fort. In 1836, five boys hunting rabbits found seventeen miniature coffins, described as follows by a report in the London Times:

That, early in July, 1836, some boys were searching for rabbits’ burrows in the rocky formation, near Edinburgh, known as Arthur’s Seat. In the side of a cliff, they came upon some thin sheets of slate, which they pulled out.

Little cave. Seventeen tiny coffins. Three or four inches long.

In the coffins were miniature wooden figures. They were dressed differently in both style and material. There were two tiers of eight coffins each, and a third one begun, with one coffin.

The extraordinary datum, which has especially made mystery here:
That the coffins had been deposited singly, in the little cave, and at intervals of many years. In the first tier, the coffins were quite decayed, and the wrappings had moldered away. In the second tier,  the effects of age had not advanced to far. And the top coffin was quite recent looking.

Here is some additional information, from A Fortean in the Archives:

Fewer than half of them survived; the Scotsman, in the first known published account (16 July 1836), explained that “a number were destroyed by the boys pelting them at each other as unmeaning and contemptible trifles.”..

Several potential explanations were advanced – the most popular were that the burials were part of some spellwork, and the work of witches, or that they represented mimic burials, perhaps for sailors lost at sea...

It is certainly credible that the decayed coffins were actually those that occupied the lower tier in the burial nook, and so were most exposed to water damage. If that’s the case, there is no need to assume that the burials stretched over many years. This matters, because the only comprehensive study yet made of the “fairy coffins” strongly indicates that all postdate 1800 and that the odds favour a deposit or deposits made after about 1830 – within about five years, in other words, of the discovery of the cache...

As to who precisely did the carving, Simpson and  Menefee point out that “the most striking visual feature of the coffins is the use of applied pieces of tinned iron as decoration.” Analysis of this metal suggests that it is very similar to the sort of tin used in contemporary shoe buckles, and this in turn opens the possibility that the coffins were the work of shoemakers or leatherworkers, who would have had the manual skills to make the coffins, but would have lacked the specialist carpentry tools needed to make a neater job of it.

Much more information and speculation at the link.

Photo of coffins from the National Museums Scotland.

Double tragedy for Aurora shooting victim

Caleb Medley was shot in the face during the Aurora tragedy.  He is currently in an induced coma in an intensive care, having lost his right eye and suffered brain damage. His wife has just given birth to their first child one floor away.

Like a number of people injured in the Aurora shooting, he is uninsured. His family has been told that the cost of his medical treatment may exceed $2 million. 

More information at ABC News, via BoingBoing.

Prolonged drought threatens our electricity !

Not a relationship that is a priori obvious, but here are excerpts from a New York Times article:

We're now in the midst of the nation’s most widespread drought in 60 years, stretching across 29 states and threatening farmers, their crops and livestock. But there is another risk as water becomes more scarce. Power plants may be forced to shut down, and oil and gas production may be threatened. 

Our energy system depends on water. About half of the nation’s water withdrawals every day are just for cooling power plants. In addition, the oil and gas industries use tens of millions of gallons a day, injecting water into aging oil fields to improve production, and to free natural gas in shale formations through hydraulic fracturing. Those numbers are not large from a national perspective, but they can be significant locally. 

All told, we withdraw more water for the energy sector than for agriculture. Unfortunately, this relationship means that water problems become energy problems that are serious enough to warrant high-level attention.  

The map comes from The Drought Monitor;  I've embedded a static image, but the one at the source is interactive and allows you to zoom to regional, state, and local conditions.

DNA studies confirm validity of a shrunken head

Not all of them are fakes:

The study, published in the latest issue of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, marks the first successful effort to unveil the genetic make-up of a shrunken head...

For the study, she and her colleagues used DNA testing and other techniques to examine the authenticity and possible cultural provenance of a shrunken head displayed at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv. The head remains in an incredible state of preservation, with the deceased man's hair, facial features and other physical characteristics intact.

Many shrunken heads are forgeries, with some 80 percent suspected to be fakes. The late 19th through the 20th centuries saw a rise in manufacture of such fakes for profit...

"The shrunken head we studied was made from a real human skin," Kahila Bar-Gal said. "The people who made it knew exactly how to peel the skin from the skull, including the hair," she added, mentioning that it was also salted and boiled. 

The researchers determined that the skin belonged to a man who lived and died in South America "probably in the Afro-Ecuadorian population." The genes reveal the victim's ancestors were from West Africa, but his DNA profile matches that of modern populations from Ecuador with African admixture.

More details at Discovery News.

"Obamacare" will reduce the federal deficit

That's the conclusion of the Congressional Budget Office:

President Barack Obama's health care overhaul will shrink rather than increase the nation's huge federal deficits over the next decade, Congress' nonpartisan budget scorekeepers said Tuesday, supporting Obama's contention in a major election-year dispute with Republicans.

About 3 million fewer uninsured people will gain health coverage because of last month's Supreme Court ruling granting states more leeway, and that will cut the federal costs by $84 billion, the Congressional Budget Office said in the biggest changes from earlier estimates.

Republicans have insisted that "Obamacare" will actually raise deficits — by "trillions," according to presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But that's not so, the budget office said...

At the time it was approved in 2010, CBO estimated the law would reduce the deficit by $143 billion from 2010 to 2019. And CBO estimated that last year's Republican repeal legislation would increase deficits by $210 billion from 2010 to 2021. 

That may sound like a lot of money, but it's actually a hair-thin margin at a time when federal deficits are expected to average around $1 trillion a year for the foreseeable future. 

More details at the New York Times.

Site Reliability Engineers: “solving the most interesting problems”

Posted by Chris Reid, Sydney Staffing team

I recently sat down with Ben Appleton, a Senior Staff Software Engineer, to talk about his recent move from Software Engineer (SWE) on the Maps team to Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). In the interview, Ben explains why he transitioned from a pure development role to a role in production, and how his work has changed:

Chris: Tell us about your path to Google.
Ben: Before I joined Google I didn’t consider myself a “software engineer”. I went to the University of Queensland and graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics, before going on to complete a Ph.D. My field of research was image segmentation, extending graph cuts to continuous space for analyzing X-rays and MRIs. At a conference in France I met a friend of my Ph.D. advisor’s, and he raved about Google, commenting that they were one of the only companies that really understood technology. I’d already decided academia wasn’t for me, so I interviewed for a general Software Engineering role at Google. I enjoyed the interviews, met some really smart people, and learned about some interesting stuff they were working on. I joined the Maps team in Sydney in 2005 and spent the next 6 years working on the Maps API.

Chris: Tell us about some of the coolest work you did for Google Maps, and how you applied your research background.
Ben: My background in algorithms and computational geometry was really useful. We were basically making browsers do stuff they’re not designed to do, such as rendering millions of vectors or warping images, inventing techniques as we went. On the server-side we focused on content distribution, pushing tiles or vectors from Google servers down through caches to the user’s browser, optimizing for load and latency at every stage. On the client-side, we had to make the most of limited processors with new geometric algorithms and clever prefetching to hide network latency. It was really interesting work.

Chris: I understand you received company-wide recognition when you were managing the Maps API team. Tell us more about what that entailed.
Ben: In September 2008, when managing the Maps API, my team received an award that was recognized Google-wide, which is a big honor. My main contributions were latency optimizations, stability, enterprise support, and Street View integration. The award was in recognition of strong sustained growth of the Maps API, in relation to the number of sites using it, and total views per day. Currently the Google Maps API is serving more than 600,000 websites.

Chris: So what prompted the move to Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)?
Ben: In my experience, a lot of software engineers don’t understand what SREs do. I’d worked closely with SREs, particularly those in Sydney supporting Maps, and had formed a high opinion of them. They’re a very strong team - they’re smart and they get things done. After 6 years working on the Maps API I felt it was time for a change. In Sydney there are SWE teams covering most of the product areas, including Chrome and Apps, Social and Blogger, Infrastructure Networking and the Go programming language, as well as Maps and GeoCommerce. I talked to all of them, but chose SRE because in my opinion, they’re solving the most interesting problems.

Chris: How would you describe SRE?
Ben: It really depends on the individual. At one end are the Systems Administrator types, sustaining ridiculously large systems. But at the other end are the Software Engineers like me. As SREs get more experienced this distinction tends to be blurred. The best SREs think programmatically even if they don’t do the programming. For me, I don’t see a difference in my day-to-day role. When I was working on the Maps API I was the primary on-call one week in three, whereas in SRE the typical on-call roster is one week in six. When you’re primary on-call it just means you’re the go-to person for the team, responsible for when something breaks or pushing new code into production. I was spending 50% of my time doing coding and development work, and as an SRE this has increased to 80%.

Chris: Wow! So as an SRE in Production, you’re spending less time on-call and more time writing code than you were as a SWE on the Maps team?
Ben: Yes! I’m not managing a team now, but I’m definitely spending more time coding than I was before. I guess the average SRE spends 50% of their time doing development work, but as I said, it depends on the person and it ranges from 20-80%.

Chris: What does your team do?
Ben: In Sydney there are SRE teams supporting Maps, Blogger, App Engine, as well as various parts of the infrastructure and storage systems. I’m working on Blobstore, an infrastructure storage service based on Bigtable which simplifies building and deploying applications that store users' binary data (BLOBs, or "Binary Large OBjects"). Example BLOBs include images, videos, or email attachments - any data objects that are immutable and long-lived. The fact that we're storing user data means that Blobstore must be highly available for reads and writes, be extremely reliable (so that we never lose data), and be efficient in terms of storage usage (so that we can provide large amounts of storage to users at low cost).

Chris: Tell us more about some of the problems you’re solving, and how they differ with those you faced as a SWE in a development role.
Ben: With the massive expansion in online data storage, we’re solving problems at a scale never before seen. Due to the global nature of our infrastructure, we think in terms of load balancing at many levels: across regions, across data centers within a region, and across machines within a data center. The problems we’re facing in SRE are much closer to the metal. We’re constantly optimizing resource allocation and efficiency and scalability of Google’s massive computer systems, as opposed to developing new features for a product like Maps. So the nature of the work is very similar to SWE, but the problems are bigger and there is a strong focus on scale.

Chris: Are you planning on staying in SRE for a while?
Ben: Yeah. I signed up for a six month rotation program called “Mission Control,” the goal of which is to teach engineers to understand the challenges of building and operating a high reliability service at Google scale. In other words, it’s an SRE training program. In my first three months of Mission Control I’ve been on-call twice, and always during office hours so there were SREs to help me when I got into trouble...which I did. I’ve got no intention of going back to SWE at the end of the six months and plan to stay in SRE for at least a few years. Right now the problems seem more interesting. For example, last year’s storage solutions are facing additional strain from the growth of Gmail, Google+ and Google Drive. So you’re constantly reinventing.

Chris: What advice do you have for Software Engineers contemplating a role in SRE?
Ben: SRE gives you the opportunity to work on infrastructure at a really big scale in a way you don’t get to in SWE. Whereas SWE is more about developing new features, SRE is dealing with bigger problems and more complex engineering due to the sheer scale. SRE is a great way to learn how systems really work in order to become a great engineer.

If you’re interesting in applying for a Site Reliability Engineering role, please note that we advertise the roles in several different ways to reflect the diversity of the team. The two main roles are “Software Engineer, Google.com” and “Systems Engineer, Google.com”. We use the term “Google.com” to signify that the roles are in Production as opposed to R&D. You can find all the openings listed on the Google jobs site. We’re currently hiring across many regions, including Sydney in Australia, and of course Mountain View in California.

Juxtaposition

"A visitor looked at a display at the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show..."

Credit: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Image, via the Wall Street Journal.

Rabies

The Sushruta Samhita recommends pouring clarified butter into the infected wound and then drinking it; Pliny the Elder suggests a linen tourniquet soaked with the menstrual fluid of a dog.

From a review of Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy.

Wasik is an editor at Wired and Murphy, his wife, a veterinarian. Together they have coauthored a sprawling chronicle of rabies ... It’s a rare pleasure to read a nonfiction book by authors who research like academics but write like journalists. They have mined centuries’ worth of primary sources and come bearing only the gems.

I've requested the book from the library (3 copies, 25 waiting - so it will be a while...)

A Lichtenberg figure

The result of a lightning strike.  I've blogged this topic before -

Lichtenberg figures,
The path lightning takes through a cow, and
Lightning coming,

- but the subject matter continues to fascinate me.

Water in space

When I was growing up, the conventional wisdom was that life might be unique on earth because there was probably no water in "outer space."  That paradigm sure has changed, as explained at Fast Company:

Researchers found [an amount] of water so large that it could provide each person on Earth an entire planet’s worth of water--20,000 times over...

The water is in a cloud around a huge black hole... and the waves of energy the black hole releases make water by literally knocking hydrogen and oxygen atoms together.

That one cloud of newly discovered space water vapor could supply 140 trillion planets that are just as wet as Earth is... The new cloud of water is enough to supply 28 galaxies with water...

...a distance of 12 billion light years. That means they were also looking back in time 12 billion years*, to when the universe itself was just 1.6 billion years old. They were watching water being formed at the very start of the known universe, which is to say, water was one of the first substances formed, created in galactic volumes from the earliest time.

*not quite correct. See embeetee's comment.

Illustrated philatelic envelopes

Created by Edward Burne-Jones, and now in the collections of the British Museum. 

Via A London Salmagundi.

What do firefighters do all day?

One has to tread carefully when presenting information that can be interpreted as critical of "civil servants," be they policemen, public school teachers, or, as in this case, firemen.  With that in mind, I'll note at the start that the embedded graph is deceptive, because the vertical scale has been truncated.  The trend certainly is valid, but the implied amplitude has been exaggerated.  Now, on to the text, excerpted from Marginal Revolution, via The Dish:

Taxpayers are unlikely to support budget increases for fire departments if they see firemen lolling about the firehouse. So cities have created new, highly visible jobs for their firemen. The Wall Street Journal reported recently, “In Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami, for example, 90% of the emergency calls to firehouses are to accompany ambulances to the scene of auto accidents and other medical emergencies. Elsewhere, to keep their employees busy, fire departments have expanded into neighborhood beautification, gang intervention, substitute-teaching and other downtime pursuits.” In the Illinois township where I live, the fire department drives its trucks to accompany all medical emergency vehicles, then directs traffic around the ambulance—a task which, however valuable, seemingly does not require a hook-and-ladder.

Moreover, most of the time the call is not for a fire but for a minor medical problem. In many cities, both fire trucks and ambulances respond to the same calls. The paramedics do a great job but it is hard to believe that this is an efficient way to deliver medical care and transportation.

I can vouch for the type of incident described, because at the senior living complex where my mother previously resided, both an ambulance and a fire truck responded to all non-fire emergencies.  I never understood the justification for this duplication.

See this link for a more detailed discussion.

Treasure: 48 TONS of silver

Deep-sea explorers have pulled up 48 tons of silver treasure from three miles below the surface of the North Atlantic in what may be the deepest, largest precious metal recovery in history.

The haul was retrieved from the S.S. Gairsoppa, a 412-foot steel-hulled British cargo ship that sank in February 1941.

The expedition, by Odyssey Marine Exploration, a company specializing in shipwreck exploration, recovered 1,203 bars of silver, totaling 1.4 million ounces...

The marine exploration company is also in the process of exploring another British sunken ship, the S.S. Mantola, which is believed to hold an estimated 600,000 ounces of additional U.K.-insured silver.

More details at Discovery News.

"Fun facts"

The sentence "I never said she stole my money" can mean seven different things depending on where the emphasis is placed when the sentence is spoken aloud:

I never said she stole my money.

I never said she stole my money.

I never said she stole my money.

I never said she stole my money.

I never said she stole my money.

I never said she stole my money.

I never said she stole my money.

(There are actually way more than seven possibilities if emphasis is placed on more than one word).  

Here are other items from the Reddit thread:

The triceratops and man lived closer chronologically than a triceratops and stegosaurus.

Cleopatra lived closer chronologically to the moon landing than to the building of the pyramids.

"John, where James had had "had", had had "had had"; "Had had" had had a better effect on the teacher."

What is commonly called "seaweed" is technically not a plant. They are all forms of algae. This includes larger, more complicated forms like kelp, which actually has vascular tissue like most terrestrial plants. To make things more confusing, moss has no vascular tissue, but it is a plant.

The black stripes of a zebra's coat absorb more sunlight and get warmer than their white counterparts. This causes the heat to rise off the black stripes and cold air falls on the white stripes, causing circulation over the zebra, allowing it to stay cool in the direct sunlight.

Wombat scat is cubic in shape [blogworthy after I find a photo].

Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" a capella

YouTube link.

It's not really an a capella performance, of course.  These are the vocal tracks isolated from the instrumentals.  Depending on your enthusiasm for the piece, your brain may be able to fill in the silences with the appropriate music.

But the quality of the vocals by themselves is really rather impressive.

Via Reddit, where there are some relevant links.

Tiger beetle larva

I didn't understand the photo above, posted at the butterfly forum where Wisconsin enthusiasts report their observations.  It was labeled as "tiger beetle larva" - an incidental finding during a North American Butterfly Association field trip.  The photo obviously has some motion artifact - but what is it?

A keyword search yielded this image -

- at Beetles In The Bush ("A Prairie Tiger Beetle larva peers up from its burrow in rocky soil of a dolomite glade in the White River Hills of southwestern Missouri. The head of this 3rd-instar larvae is about the size of a pencil eraser.")  The larva uses its blunt head to block its burrow and then waits for prey like an antlion at the bottom of a sand cone.  The very interesting link also offered a more comprehensible side view -

- along with instructions on how to extract the larva from its burrow (not an easy task, because those little hooks on its lower dorsum hold it firmly in the burrow, and it can retreat a substantial distance (inches/feet) when threatened or annoyed.)

You learn something every day.

"You restrict our freedom"

YouTube link.

"Does something that would limit magazines that could carry 100 rounds, would that infringe on the constitutional right?" host Chris Wallace asked [Senator Ron] Johnson [R-Wisc] on "Fox News Sunday."

"I believe so," Johnson replied. "People will talk about unusually lethal weapons, that could be potentially a discussion you could have. But the fact of the matter is there are 30-round magazines that are just common all over the place. You simply can't keep these weapons out of the hands of sick, demented individuals who want to do harm. And when you try and do it, you restrict our freedom."

I come from a family that has used guns for hunting (pheasants and deer), so I'm not anti-gun per se.  But I frankly do not understand the mindset expressed here.  Perhaps some clear-headed, well-reasoning reader of this blog can offer an explanation.

"Spamflooding"

It was early October 2011, and I was on the treadmill checking email from my phone when I noticed several hundred new messages had arrived since I last looked at my Gmail inbox just 20 minutes earlier. I didn’t know it at the time, but my account was being used to beta test a private service now offered openly in the criminal underground that can be hired to create highly disruptive floods of junk email, text messages and phone calls.

Many businesses request some kind of confirmation from their bank whenever high-dollar transfers are initiated. These confirmations may be sent via text message or email, or the business may ask their bank to call them to verify requested transfers. The attack that hit my inbox was part of an offering that crooks can hire to flood each medium of communication, thereby preventing a targeted business from ever receiving or finding alerts from their bank...

If you run a small business and one day find yourself on the receiving end of one of these email, SMS and/or phone floods, I’d advise you to find a mobile phone that isn’t being blocked and alert your financial institution to be especially vigilant for suspicious transactions.

Further details of this process, which can send 100,000 emails to your mailbox, at KrebsOnSecurity, via BoingBoing.