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04

Gmail First Anniversary [2005-04-01]. RE: Cyber Life.
2005-04-12t06:26:56Z. RE: Conservation. Cyber Life. Cyber Tech. Faith; Philosophy;. Flow. Food. Health. Martial. Math; Science; Technology;. Medium 2D+text. Medium 2D+time. Medium 3D. Medium 3D+time. Mind. Money. Obituaries. Play. Politics. Quirky [Possibly NSFW]. Rambling. Relations [NSFW]. Words.
2005-04-19t17:06:47Z. RE: Biology. Conservation. Cyber Life. Cyber Tech. Faith; Philosophy;. Flow. Health. Local. Martial. Math; Science; Technology;. Measurements. Medium 2D. Medium 3D. Medium Mixed. Money. Play. Quirky [Possibly NSFW]. Relations [SFW]. Words.
Levels of Exercise. RE: Health. Martial.
2004-04-13 Art Institute field trip. RE: Local. Medium 2D.
2005-04-18 Tesseract House. RE: Faith; Philosophy;. Flow. Life. Mind. Quirky [Possibly NSFW]. Rambling.
2005-04-25 State of Money. RE: Martial. Money. Rambling.
My weekly CSG rapier report. RE: Local. Martial.
Measure and Height-Difference Matches. RE: Martial.
Notes taken at a MS course on ASP.NET 2.0. RE: Cyber Tech.

2005-04-01t20:42:56Z | RE: Cyber Life.
Gmail First Anniversary [2005-04-01]

And Gmail has improved!

The impeding upgrade from 1 GB to 2 GB is trivial to me but it is nice in the sense that stuff like that is good for the free email market. After all Yahoo and hotmail were 4 MB but now they're 250 MB.
The best upgrade I like is now they have WYSIWYG composing, or rich text formatting. Compare and contrast: Yahoo's rtf needs ActiveX so it is only available on IE. Gmail's rtf doesn't use ActiveX so it can run on Mozilla, Firefox, etc.! Sweet!

Complaints:

Their search capability for mail seems OK, but their search capability for contacts is lacking. EG: I can't do a search for "NOT Relatives" or "-Relatives".
In Yahoo, I had some people entered as more than on contact for their different emails. In Gmail, you can enter many emails for one contact. This is nice but once I consolidated multiple contacts into one contact, the alternate emails would not list as you typed in the "To:" box when composing. That is they did not list until after I relogged.
Be careful: There is no confirmation popup when you delete a contact.

I've been letting my Gmail account sit there for months but, I've imported my contact from Yahoo and I'm switching to Gmail today! Gmail is still by "invitation only" but they will supposedly open Gmail to the public soon. If you can't wait, just contact some techie friend because each account gets invite 50 others.

I love their little April Fool's joke. *They had a script running to dynamically grow the MBs at a rate of roughly 0.01 MB per second.

A Google approach to math.

On the eve of Gmail's one-year birthday, our engineers were toiling away furiously. Notes scribbled all over the walls. Complex calculations on napkins and empty pizza boxes. Millions of M&Ms.

The result?... starting today, we're beginning the roll-out of our new and top secret Infinity+1 storage plan. The key features are:

Write, don't worry.
You want to stop caring about storage. We want to keep giving you more. Today, and beyond.

The gift that keeps on giving.
1460.970776* megabytes of storage (and counting) for every user.

No complicated equations. No tough algorithms.
Just this one graph:

2005-04-12t06:26:56Z | RE: Conservation. Cyber Life. Cyber Tech. Faith; Philosophy;. Flow. Food. Health. Martial. Math; Science; Technology;. Medium 2D+text. Medium 2D+time. Medium 3D. Medium 3D+time. Mind. Money. Obituaries. Play. Politics. Quirky [Possibly NSFW]. Rambling. Relations [NSFW]. Words.
2005-04-12t06:26:56Z

Conservation

No Joke: Animals Laugh, Too
- The hypothesis is funny.
- 'Studies by various groups suggest monkeys, dogs and even rats love a good laugh. People, meanwhile, have been laughing since before they could talk.'
- 'Importantly, various recent studies on the topic suggest that laughter in animals typically involves similar play chasing. Could be that verbal jokes tickle ancient, playful circuits in our brains. More study is needed to figure out whether animals are really laughing. The results could explain why humans like to joke around. And Panksepp speculates it might even lead to the development of treatments for laughter's dark side: depression.'
'In an effort to undermine California's vehicle global warming law, the auto industry has been running an ad claiming today's vehicles are virtually emission free. The Union of Concerned Scientists says "poppycock on that!" and is seeking a FTC false-advertising investigation. Fortunately, no matter who's bullshooting, you can help wipe away the problem. ' [MeFi]
- Poppycock indeed.
New Photovoltaics Made with Titanium Foil [/.]
- There has been steady progress in solar and Titanium solar is not new but this is an improvement. I imagine solar tech will reach a critical state and accelerate. The oil and utility companies must surely be aware of this.
- 'A company called Daystartech has released a new type of photovoltaic cell which, unlike almost all the cells currently in use, does not silicon. This is based on a thin titanium film. Given the current shortage of solar-grade silicon, and all-time high oil prices, maybe titanium solar panels are here at the right time. The questions are, will they release it as a consumer solar product, and what will be the price per kilowatt hour? '
- The /. thread has a fair discussion on the topic plus some nice links in it:
  - NanoSolar.com. Bio-based solar!
  - LiquidMetal.com. After steel and plastic, the third modern material is "liquid metal" that is cheaply shapeable like plastic but stronger than steel!

Cyber Life

Wikipedia.Mozdev.org. I just stumbled upon this Firefox extension that helps making editing Wikipedia pages easier.
'Illustrated Notes from Computer Science: Tom Murphy VII gets more bored in class than you. And thanks to his free fonts, your boredom can look just as snazzy. (Previous Tom7-related action here. This guy keeps busy. I blame the 80/20 rule.)' [MeFi]
Maps.Google.com now has satellite imagery. It's almost as if you have control over your own satellite.
2005-04-08t22:40:38Z: My first Wikipedia article edit! In the article on Timeline of evolution, the arrival of Homo erectus was listed as "1.8 kYA" and I corrected it to "1.8 MYA". It's a minor edit, but I'm still very, very, happy about it.
Just Say No to Microsoft [Microsoft.ToddVerBeek.com]
- Yes there's a lot of anti-MS rants out there but this has a large compilation of alternatives to MS software.
- 'Microsoft isn't evil. But it is too powerful, and consumers are being harmed by it. They're limiting the available software, and charging us more and more for it. '
Geek Etiquette [GeekEtiquette.infotrope.net]. Some of it is for non-geeks (EG: "no big sigs" and "don't touch other people's monitors") but some of it is for geeks (EG: "Business casual does not mean jeans, T-shirts, or seakers").
An Interview with the OpenOffice.org Team
- Timely since OpenOffice.org has OpenOffice 2.0 beta out.
- The /. thread has one fellow saying that his company of 7000+ employees switched over to OO from MS Office just fine (after some initial grumbling).
- Personally, I don't use either except for Excel on occasion. Excel opens up a few seconds faster than OO Calc but perhaps I should try using OO Calc more.
- Since OO is no-cost and F/OSS, then it should be an obvious choice for many companies: new & old, domestic & foreign.
- Note that OOv2 makes more use of Java so this version is less open than before.
Firefox Eats More Microsoft Market Share
- Yay! Hurrah for no-cost and F/OSS!
- 'Firefox continues to steal market share from Microsoft Internet Explorer, according to Net Applications, a maker of Web-monitoring software. According to the company's February figures, use of Firefox rose to 6.17% from 5.59% in January. Firefox's gain comes at the expense of Internet Explorer, which dropped to 89.04% market share, from 90.31% in December. Net Applications reports that other browsers maintained their user base.'
A Directory Of Programs Designed For USB Drives [/.]. I don't have a need for this but it could be good for "emergencies". Just have Linux, Portable Firefox, and OpenOffice and you're good to go.
Forbes Predicts 5% Desktop Share for Apple in 2005 [/. with 1000+ comments]
- 5% seems to be the magic number these days.
- Of course Mac is awesome: An OS with a powerful Unix (FreeBSD) backend and a beautiful Mac frontend. Plus all the software and hardware is strong and well designed. Even Linus Torvalds is on a Mac.
Students Do Better Without Computers [/.]. I think I posted about this before but the /. thread has some nice comments. I stick to my point that you can't blame computers, the Internet, TV, DVDs, video games, etc., etc.
The Apple Motion Sensor As A Human Interface Device [/.]. Interesting. It'll be good for playing marble mazes or remotely navigating a Segway, but they need to come up better uses.
Print.Google.com [/.]
- Google is starting to scan books in and make them searchable. This effectively puts scanned copies of books online.
- You don't even have to go to Print.Google.com --you can just go to regular Google.com and type in something like book "Pride and Prejudice" at the Google search bar. The Google result will have some links by an image of some books. Note that at this point in time, the non-Print.Google search results return more usable pages. EG: Online-literature.com/austen/prideprejudice/ or Ocrat.com/ocrat/biling/pridprej/chap0201.html (to see it in Chinese as well).
Ask Slashdot: BitTorrent Inherently Illegal? [/.]
- 'Today I received a letter from my university's network administration advising me that my network access would be terminated due to 'illegal P2P activity.' The P2P activity that the e-mail cited was BitTorrent and the file being transferred was an update to the Azureus BitTorrent client. The letter stated, 'Until the courts decide that student P2P activity is permitted we will continue to block this activity on our network,' implying that BitTorrent is inherently illegal. It seems such misunderstandings are common, but it is particularly frustrating when coming from people in the IT field. How can a student respond to such an accusation in order to defend the validity of BitTorrent and continue to benefit from its legitimate uses?'
- The /. thread is good. The first response on the /. thread hit it right on the head:
  - 'I don't have any advice in particular. It's unfortunate because this really amounts to censorship and stifling academic freedom. Who's to say that the content you're accessing with a network tool - say, even a web browser - is appropriate? Sure, you can say that downloading pirated software or movies is inappropriate, but, in my opinion, academic institutions should have as hands-off an approach as possible. Illegal content can be accessed via the web, or email. Most would say it's absurd to suggest blocking port 80, or port 25. Why? Why is that any more absurd than blocking something such as BitTorrent, especially as BitTorrent's legitimate applications are increasing?'

Cyber Tech

Google and the Coming Search Wars, Revisited
- 'On the one hand, my research on open source reconfirmed my view that standardization, platforms, and APIs and will prove just as important in the future, and in the search industry, as they have in traditional PC software and many other sectors. On the other hand, I also found strong reasons to think that the open source movement is changing the nature of standardization contests, and represents a powerful threat to Microsoft's control over mass market software. Consequently, as new standards emerge, Microsoft may not be the one to control them.
  Several people responding to my Google article argued that I had simply overestimated Microsoft, which, they said, was now at best mature and possibly in decline. I increasingly feel that they were correct. By relying too heavily on its monopoly control of Windows and Office, Microsoft has painted itself into a corner. Both Microsoft and its products are now large, aging, complex, and very expensive, rendering them vulnerable to attacks from below. Open source software, with its low cost, transparency, and decentralized development model, threatens the very foundations of Microsoft's power.'
- 'There seem to be three reasons for this [Microsoft having lost its edge].
  - First, Microsoft has gotten addicted to the money derived from repeated forced upgrades. As a result, it is now a high-priced incumbent with large, aging products -- an inherently poor position when faced with a less expensive, newer competitor such as Linux.
  - Second, Microsoft has become a large, politicized, often complacent company. Many of its senior employees are now so wealthy that they don't have to work hard, take orders, or worry. The CEO is a former Procter & Gamble brand manager, not a technologist, and the company is so large and complex that politics inevitably distorts information flows.
  - Third, in growth markets such as the Web, Microsoft cannot afford to be as leisurely as it was in the 1980s when it faced slow-moving competitors with flawed business models such as IBM, Lotus, Novell, Apple, and Sun. Now it is chasing Google and Yahoo, who are growing much faster than Microsoft, and whose combined revenues in 2005 will exceed $10 billion.'
Tiny drives set for space boost
- 'Hard drives for mobiles and other portable gadgets could store up to a terabyte of data in the next few years, using a century-old recording process. Hitachi has said it can fit 230 gigabits of data per square inch on a disk using "perpendicular recording". The storage industry currently makes hard drives using longitudinal recording, which is reaching its limit. Hitachi's work means we could see one-inch hard drives holding 60GB instead of up to 10GB currently.'
- 'Hitachi said it would start using perpendicular recording in the next generation of its products, in 2007, but it said its true potential would be realised in the 200 plus gigabit per square inch range. Over the next five to seven years, it said, perpendicular recording could mean a 10-fold increase in data densities over longitudinal recording. ... Hitachi expects to ship its first perpendicular recording product in 2005 on a 2.5-inch hard drive, used in notebook computers and handheld devices. '
- Related: Perpendicular Recording
JavaScript: DHTML API, Drag & Drop for Images and Layers [MeFi]. I love the stuff people can do with JS and DHTML.
Regular Expression Recipes [/.]
- This should be a convenient book for many programmers.
- Regular Expression Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach by Nathan A. Good [Amazon]
A History of Icons [/.]
- 'The GUIdebook has a great page illustrating the history of icons. Of course, they have the Lisa/Mac/OS X paths, but there's the Windows progressions, along with entries for NeXT, OS/2, BeOS, and yes, Linux. Would you call it progress? '
- The link is a lot of fun and the /. thread has nice info about making icons. It's been a long time since I've bothered to make my own icons.
Comprehensive Guide to the Windows Paging File [/.]
- This may come in handy but the bottom line is the same as I've always said: real memory is much better than virtual memory.
- 'Adrian's Rojak Pot has a nice article about the internals of the Windows paging file. It explains what a paging file is and lists the differences between a swapfile and a paging file. But first and foremost, a large part of the article deals with the various methods of optimizing the Windows paging file, thus yielding a notable performance gain for people who are not overly blessed with RAM. '
Java Fallout: OO.o 2.0 and the FOSS Community [/., 700+ comments]
- Here come the complaints about making OpenOffice more Java reliant because while OO is still free-cost, Java itself isn't open source. C++ is open source and nice but too low level and hence too complicated for many jobs. Java is uses a cross platform virtual machine (VM) but it's closed source and too slow for some. .NET has a great class library but it's high-cost, closed source, and is does not have a cross platform VM.
- So why doesn't the F/OSS community just make a new, fast, free-cost, open-source language with an awesome library, that can run with or without a cross platform virtual machine, that can make apps rapidly or with greater granularity, and is very popular? It's not the same question as "Why don't people speak Esperanto?", because all programming languages are "artificial" and none are centuries old.
- I like the suggestion in the /. thread: 'Fork OO.o. The source is out there. Create a Free Software-correct fork of OO.o, call it "Free And Open Office" and go to town. Replace the database module with MySQL or PostgreSQL or whatever database you want. Hack out anything and everything that you don't like. F/OSS sees proprietariness as damage and routes around it.'
  - This follow up was cute: 'Heheh - I love that the acronym would become FOO.org. That ought to win over the geek crowd at least.'
Hardware: How Long Do You Want Digital Media To Last?
- Silly question. Forever, like stone, if you appreciate history and archaeology.
- 'CNET asks 'Would you like your digital-storage media to last 20 years, 25 years, 30 years, 35 years or 40 years?' If you're an organization or government agency, the U.S. government and an optical-disc industry group would like you to answer that question in a quick survey. I would think that we would like our data to last forever, but maybe it's just me. '
'Most Important Ever' MySQL Reaches Beta [/.]
- Excellent news!
- ' The open source database company says it is 'fixing 10 years of critcism in one release', and is aiming at boosting enterprise take-up." Stored procedures. Triggers. Views. It's like it'll be a real DB!'
- 'MySQL is the most widely used open source database, according to a Evans Data Corporation survey released in January. It accounted for 40 percent of open source database deployments, while Firebird and PostgreSQL accounted for 39 percent and 11 percent of deployments respectively. Axmark believes this number will increase when the final version of MySQL 5.0 is released this summer.'
- The /. thread has a lot of whining along the lines of "well MySQL should have had this stuff gradually all along just like PostgreSQL". I appreciate that and I understand that data is gold and must be reliable. Transactions, foreign key constraints, etc. are important, but it is fair to "cut corners" for speed. DBAs and developers you should try these systems out and design solutions as needed.
High School Kids Beat MIT at Robotics Competition [/.]
- Way to go dudes! The young are supposed to keep us old folks on our toes.

Faith; Philosophy;

Wikipedia:Neutral point of view [W]
- This is a great read. I love it whenever philosophical ideas slam right into reality. Beyond basic architecture and finances, math was thought to be entirely theoretical with no practical applications, but once science kicked in, it turns out that almost every kind of math had unforeseen practical applications.
- 'There's no such thing as objectivity. Everybody with any philosophical sophistication knows that. So how can we take the "neutrality" policy seriously? Neutrality, lack of bias, isn't possible. This is probably the most common objection to the neutrality policy. It also reflects the most common misunderstanding of the policy. The misunderstanding is that the policy says something about the possibility of objectivity. It simply does not. In particular, the policy does not say that there even is such a thing as objectivity, a "view from nowhere" (in Thomas Nagel's phrase)--such that articles written from that point of view are consequently objectively true. That isn't the policy and it is not our aim! Rather, we employ a different understanding of "neutral" and "unbiased" than many might be used to. The policy is simply that we should characterize disputes rather than engage in them. To say this is not to say anything contentious, from a philosophical point of view; indeed, this is something that philosophers are doing all the time. Sophisticated relativists will immediately recognize that the policy is perfectly consistent with their relativism.'
  - This is particularly relevant to me since recently I have been thinking about objectivism and subjectivism. Although I would like to think of myself as objective, the more I explored it, the more I realized that there is much more subjectivism in myself and in others. It's embarrassing because this concept is so glaringly obvious.
    - The Scientific Method is based upon everything as hypothesis (and subject to peer testing and review of course). It is very important to distinguish between statements of fact (EG: "I dropped a feather and a lead balls from a height of 10 m") versus statements of opinion (EG: "Lighter objects fall more slowly.).
    - "He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing." -The Apology of Socrates, paragraph 10. This is often paraphrased as "The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing".
    - It seems contrary, but it is actually more objective to be subjective. And yet when it comes to style, it becomes cumbersome to constantly use phrases such as "I believe", "my interpretation", "in my humble opinion", etc.
  - I believe that this issue of people realizing their subjectivism is a key issue. The details and validity of the subjectivism of any entities are moot in comparison to an entity acknowledging that they are subjective and that others have their own subjective views. Once this acknowledged, then entities that do not resort to brute force (physical, financial, social, religious, military, etc.) can then work to find ways that their systems overlap or find some objective means of discourse.
  - I prefer the term "subjectivists" over "relativists" because the latter term has a connotation of belittling objectivism or any common ground.
'The End Of Faith. A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person's life. Are you a scientist? A liberal? A racist? These are merely species of belief in action. Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings. If you doubt this, consider how your experience would suddenly change if you came to believe one of the following propositions: 1. You have only two weeks to live. 2. You've just won a lottery prize of one hundred million dollars. 3. Aliens have implanted a receiver in your skull and are manipulating your thoughts.' [MeFi]
- The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason [Amazon] is a book by Sam Harris.
- Excerpts of chapter one
- 'Harris argues that in the presence of weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely. Most controversially, he maintains that "moderation" in religion poses considerable dangers of its own: as the accommodation we have made to religious faith in our society now blinds us to the role that faith plays in perpetuating human conflict. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris draws on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and Eastern mysticism in an attempt to provide a truly modern foundation for our ethics and our search for spiritual experience. '
- The title is too sensationalist for my taste. I'm still very wary of Subjective v Objective --the two need to work together instead of fighting.

Flow

Marker Board Walls. Dry erase, magnets, tape. Cool! And it's really cheap! I'm sure they have stuff like this at Pixar, Google, NASA, etc. I am going to make this happen.
Inside Look at Pixar HQ
- You get glimpses at Pixar HQ from the DVDs but it's fun to read about an actual tour. A Pixar tour would be even more fun than the tour I had of Playboy HQ.
- 'Aintitcool's moriarty has taken a tour of Pixar's Headquarters in Emeryville, California and it just looks astounding. It instantly makes you wanna work there, or at least pimp up your cubicle... Which they don't have at Pixar, no they have cottages! Looks like Pixar created the optimal work condition for such a creative company, which leaves you no choice but to enjoy your job at Pixar every damn minute you work there. '

Food

Thoroughly Modern Millet: How to eat whole grains
- An excellent article: It reads well and is well researched. Plus how could I resist an article that mentions Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai?
- 'Although whole grains like millet have had a certain recherché chic for a while now, we don't eat very much of them: According to the Whole Grains Council, a bran-friendly lobbying group, whole grains represent only about 10 percent of grains sold in supermarkets. But the USDA's recent suggestion that at least half of the grains we eat each day should be whole ones, and the cereal industry's parallel scramble to cash in on a possible health-food boom, mean that whole grains--millet, whole wheat, brown rice, oatmeal, and the rest of the gang--are in for a very good year. Which makes you wonder: If whole grains are so tasty, hip, and good for us, how come they occupy such a tiny sliver of our diet?
  
  For centuries, practically since people have been writing about food, refined grains have been preferred to their heavy brown counterparts. Go-to food-science writer Harold McGee quotes Archestratus, a foodie contemporary of Aristotle's, kvelling over "bread so white that it outdoes the ethereal snow in purity." Back then, white grains were more expensive than brown, because it took more labor to produce a smaller yield. Scarcity, of course, made refined grains more desirable. "White bread has always been higher status than dark bread," says food historian Harvey Levenstein. "As soon as [people] could afford it, they switched." In late 19^th century, roller mills that isolated the endosperm with amazing speed and thoroughness suddenly made white flour, rice, and cornmeal cheap and plentiful. By the turn of the 20^th century, when heebie-jeebies about germs started driving American food purchases, flour, bread, and crackers that were sanitarily packaged and snow-white seemed like a much safer bet than anything flecked and brown.
  There are practical reasons, too, why refined grains were valued over history. With less fat to go rancid, white flour has a much longer shelf life than wheat flour, which must be more carefully stored. The particles of germ and bran that circulate in whole grain flours also mess with the magic of gluten, which allows baked goods to rise and pasta to stretch. Gluten provides what's known in the hairspray industry as "elastic hold": It lets dough stretch around, but capture, carbon dioxide bubbles generated by yeast or other leaveners. (Which helps explain the sodden whole-grain muffins and doorstop loaves of bread I've occasionally had the misfortune to encounter.)'
Fried Doughs from Around the World [MeFi]. Praise be the donut!

Health

Hospital Compare [HospitalCompare.hhs.gov]
- The government just announced this site on 2005-04-02. I happen to work in data analysis in health care so it's good to see such a public usage of the healthcare data. This is just the tip of the iceburg.
- 'This website was created through the efforts of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) along with the Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA). The HQA is a public-private collaboration established to promote reporting on hospital quality of care. The HQA consists of organizations that represent consumers, hospitals, doctors, employers, accrediting organizations, and Federal agencies. The information on this website can be used by any adult needing hospital care. Hospital Compare has quality measures on how often hospitals provide some of the recommended care to get the best results for most patients. You will see some of the recommended care that an adult should get if being treated for a heart attack, heart failure, or pneumonia. '
- Related: Site reports hospitals' quality
'Female X chromosome 'cracked' - "The discovery, by an international consortium of scientists, shows that females are far more variable than previously thought and, when it comes to genes, more complex than men." Nature reports two new studies; one on the complete sequencing of the X chromosome for humans, which sheds some light on how sex evolved and how women differ from men, and another on how women express many genes from X chromosomes previously thought dormant. ' [MeFi]
- Clearly men are just second-rate rejects.

Martial

'Ramadi Madness. Unfiltered video of the Bush war in Iraq, shot by a soldier with a digital minicam.' [MeFi]
How Has War Changed Since the End of the Cold War?
- 'With the arguable exception of the strategically outstanding al Qaeda, since the Berlin Wall came down all of America's enemies have been belligerents of the third-rate or less. And, as enumerated above, strategic success has by no means been achieved elegantly and definitively. Every exercise of American arms since 1989, with the exception of the war against al Qaeda, was an example of warfare that the country could not lose. Nonetheless, defeat somehow was contrived in Somalia, as the newly installed Clinton Administration failed to take a proper grip on the poisoned chalice bequeathed by President Bush the elder.'
- 'Where Is the Balance of Power? The short answer is that the United States is the balance of power. Militarily, though not economically or culturally, America is the hegemon by default. It is the last great power still standing, at least for a while. This is strictly a temporary condition. ... Let there be no illusions. America's guardianship role, its performance as global sheriff, rests solely on its unbalanced power.'
- 'The Strategic Potency of a Transforming Military Will Be Disappointing. "The Big Story" about US defense policy of recent years, a story that is certain to run on for a long time to come, is of course the drive to "transform." The process is unstoppable. It is driven by cultural impulse, by technological opportunity, and by a narrow, but understandable and praiseworthy, determination to perform more efficiently. Whether it is inspired by strategic need is another matter. American strategic and military culture is incapable of offering much resistance to the seductive promise of a way of war that seeks maximum leverage from the exploitation of information technologies. This is a trend that will continue. Indeed, it would be amazing if it did not, given the long history of American machine-mindedness. Foreign observers, the most acute of whom at present are the Chinese, long have noticed America's love affair with technology. ... We can predict that although the transformation push may well succeed and be highly impressive in its military-technical accomplishments, it is likely to miss the most vital marks.'
- 'The British historian Jeremy Black provides food for thought for those among us who are in danger of becoming overexcited about the military, and just possibly, the strategic, benefits of transformation. Black writes:
  
  In its fundamentals, war changes far less frequently and significantly than most people appreciate. This is not simply because it involves a constant--the willingness of organized groups to kill and, in particular, to risk death--but also because the material culture of war, which tends to be the focus of attention, is less important than its social, cultural and political contexts and enablers. These contexts explain the purposes of military action, the nature of the relationship between the military and the rest of society, and the internal structures and ethos of the military. Having "high-tech," the focus of much discussion about the future of war, is not the same as winning particular wars, and, anyway does not delimit the nature of conflict.
- 'Four arguments will serve to conclude this brief exploration into what about war is changing and what is not.
  - First, the "objective" nature of war, as Clausewitz put it, is not changing at all. His theory of war will apply to all modes of armed conflict in the future. An understanding of that theory is vastly more important than is a grasp of the latest military possibilities enabled by technological, organizational, and doctrinal change.
  - Second, it is essential to appreciate the significance of the several contexts of war additional to the military. Above all else, the leading driver toward, and in, war, is the political context. Military performance in the conduct of warfare frequently is affected by the cultural context.
  - Third, war is about the peace that will follow; it is not a self-validating occurrence. A heavy focus on military transformation tends to obscure the enduring fact that war is about a lot more than warfare. Preeminently, warfare always should be waged with as much regard to the character of the subsequent peace as immediate military necessity allows.
  - Fourth and finally, one should never forget that over time all trends decline and eventually expire. More accurately, perhaps, trends influence each other and, particularly when under the shock influence of some great surprise, they change their character radically, indeed in an apparently nonlinear fashion. The challenge to the defense planner is not to spot the trends of this era, but rather to make an educated guess what their consequences may be. As if that were not difficult enough, history suggests that a major source of trouble lurks beyond the power of prediction in Secretary Rumsfeld's concept of the "unknown unknowns." Certainly the task is daunting.'

Math; Science; Technology;

' "A theory that can't predict anything is not a scientific theory," Woit says. That would be string theory, which was going to be the theory of everything, but apparently can't even agree how many dimensions there are. "Those who dabble in alternate-universe speculations might be just modern versions of '16th century theologians (who) speculated that spirits and angels emerge from the extra-dimensional universe,' says Krauss, who is also an outspoken foe of creationist teaching in schools." ' [MeFi]
- People shouldn't give up on string theory and people shouldn't explore other options either. Theoretical physics and math should be pushed as far as it can. Whether theory ever runs into practice and experimentation is moot although we seem to expect the collision.
' A team of scientists at UW-Madison has successfully used single bacterial cells to make tiny bio-electronic circuits. Slipping between the electrodes, the microbes, in effect, become electrical "junctions," giving researchers the ability to capture, interrogate and release bacterial cells one by one. Built into a sensor, such a capability would enable real-time detection of dangerous biological agents, including anthrax and other microbial pathogens. Two mpegs -- 11MB and 35MB -- available here. Related by scale and buzzwords: physorg.com reports scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a way to sneak nano-sized probes inside cell nuclei, where they can track life's fundamental processes, such as DNA repair, for hours on end. Related cool pictures and strange font choices on Nano-Bio Interface Center." ' [/.]
- The route of using nano-sized biological devices is a "short cut". The "long cut" of building nano-devices ourselves from scratch is harder but less dangerous.
- This is so Borg-like for Trekkies.
Classic Math Puzzle Cracked [/.]
- So Karl Mahlburg has done a great job of finally solving Srinivasa Ramanujan nearly 100 year old puzzle of congruencies. The partition function of number theory is so cool because it starts of with such seemingly simple math but leads on to curious patterns.
- 'This is cool - if mind-bending. A century ago, a self-taught math genius from India noticed some patterns in how numbers can be created by adding other numbers. Now a grad student has finished the job showing that the patterns apply to all prime numbers, not just some. There's more on the Indian math guy here." '
- Related:
Startling Scientists, Plant Fixes Its Flawed Gene [NYTImes] [/.]
- Amusingly, it is always startling to discover that we know less than we thought! The suspicions that the backup is in the RNA sounds good.
- 'In a startling discovery, geneticists at Purdue University say they have found plants that possess a corrected version of a defective gene inherited from both their parents, as if some handy backup copy with the right version had been made in the grandparents' generation or earlier. The finding implies that some organisms may contain a cryptic backup copy of their genome that bypasses the usual mechanisms of heredity. If confirmed, it would represent an unprecedented exception to the laws of inheritance discovered by Gregor Mendel in the 19th century. Equally surprising, the cryptic genome appears not to be made of DNA, the standard hereditary material.'
- ' The result, reported online yesterday in the journal Nature by Dr. Robert E. Pruitt, Dr. Susan J. Lolle and colleagues at Purdue, has been found in a single species, the mustardlike plant called arabidopsis that is the standard laboratory organism of plant geneticists. But there are hints that the same mechanism may occur in people, according to a commentary by Dr. Detlef Weigel of the Max-Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany. Dr. Weigel describes the Purdue work as "a spectacular discovery." '
- 'But up to 10 percent of the plants' offspring kept reverting to normal. Various rare events can make this happen, but none involve altering the actual sequence of DNA units in the gene. Yet when the researchers analyzed the mutated gene, known as hothead, they found it had changed, with the mutated DNA units being changed back to normal form.'
Italian, US cosmologists present alternate explanation for accelerating expansion of the universe: Was Einstein right when he said he was wrong?
- 'When in 1929 Edwin Hubble proved that the universe is in fact expanding, Einstein repudiated his cosmological constant, calling it "the greatest blunder of my life." Then, almost a century later, physicists resurrected the cosmological constant in a variant called dark energy. In 1998, observations of very distant supernovae demonstrated that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. This accelerating expansion seemed to be explicable only by the presence of a new component of the universe, a "dark energy," representing some 70 percent of the total mass of the universe. Of the rest, about 25 percent appears to be in the form of another mysterious component, dark matter; while only about 5 percent comprises ordinary matter, those quarks, protons, neutrons and electrons that we and the galaxies are made of.'
- 'The requisite amount of dark energy is so difficult to reconcile with the known laws of nature that physicists have proposed all manner of exotic explanations, including new forces, new dimensions of spacetime, and new ultralight elementary particles. However, the new report proposes no new ingredient for the universe, only a realization that the present acceleration of the universe is a consequence of the standard cosmological model for the early universe: inflation. "Our solution to the paradox posed by the accelerating universe," Riotto says, "relies on the so-called inflationary theory, born in 1981. According to this theory, within a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe experienced an incredibly rapid expansion. This explains why our universe seems to be very homogeneous. Recently, the Boomerang and WMAP experiments, which measured the small fluctuations in the background radiation originating with the Big Bang, confirmed inflationary theory. '
  - Ha ha! It would be so awesome if they "simply" forgot to take inflation into account! They need accountants to work with the scientists.
- ' "We realized that you simply need to add this new key ingredient, the ripples of spacetime generated during the epoch of inflation, to Einstein's General Relativity to explain why the universe is accelerating today," Riotto says. "It seems that the solution to the puzzle of acceleration involves the universe beyond our cosmic horizon. No mysterious dark energy is required." '
  - If this is true then it would be great to get rid of the ugly "fudge factors" of dark energy and dark matter.
Bang But No Splash [/.]
- Fascinating. Dude, this could be used to get, like, a perfect finish on your Camaro man! Seriously.
- 'When a drop of ethanol is dropped on a surface at low pressures (1/5 atmosphere or less), it makes no splash. Science offers a brief synopsis and fascinating pictures of the phenomenon. The results seem to confirm the (perhaps counterintuitive) prediction that more viscous liquids are more likely to splash, not less likely . Links to the researchers' home page at U of Chicago (as of now, the site is timing out) and pdf version of the article on arxiv can be found on the Science page also. '
- 'It seems obvious and inevitable that a fast-moving droplet will splatter when it hits a hard surface. Researchers have studied the distribution of droplet sizes and energies in such splashes, and physicists Lei Xu, Sidney Nagel, and colleagues at the University of Chicago were searching for ways to control those sizes and energies when they discovered something unexpected: By pumping away some of the surrounding air they could eliminate the splatter entirely. Within a tall vacuum chamber, the researchers released droplets of alcohol onto a dry glass plate from heights ranging from 20 centimeters to 3 meters. They recorded the resulting splashes with a high speed video camera as they varied the pressure in their apparatus, sucking it down as low as one hundredth of atmospheric pressure. The droplets struck the surface with speeds ranging from 2 to 7 meters per second, and for a given speed, the researchers found they could eliminate the splash by lowering the pressure beyond a specific threshold.'

Medium 2D+text

P.I.S.S.E.R. (Product Information & Safety Superhero Education Rangers) COVER GALLERY. It makes me feel young again. Kids love free comic books even if they're shoddy.
' "Man, I DO love a good album cover!" -- Dana Countryman ' [MeFi]

Medium 2D+time

Sin City
- 2005-04-01 release. Directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez. Cast includes Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba. IMDB. Official [SinCityTheMovie.com]. Trailer. Hilarious review at MovieGuide.org. Not to be confused with SinCity.com [some porn site]!
- I bought the comic when it first came out. I'm loving how so many movies are based on comic books these days. It's pretty cook that Frank Miller himself is getting billing as director.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- 2005-04-29 release. Directed by Garth Jennings. Based upon a sci-fi "classic" comedy. IMDB. Official [Hitchhikers.Movies.go.com]. W.
- Geez, it's been ages since I've read the trilogy in five parts.
'Delivery a short film by Till Nowak, is a dystopian, Escheresque daydream, digitally animated.' [MeFi]
- Beautiful.
How to hypnotize a man [activity, NSFW] [MeFi]
- Yes a wagging woman's bottom is eye catching. I think they could have achieved a similar effect even with a clothed bottom.
- The MeFi thread wags wonderfully as well.
'Remember Lejo? He's got the funk now. From the guys who brought you Shitty Bum (and who are now probably living it up with #1 down in Austin for SXSW), here is C-Mon & Kypski vs. Lejo (Flash). [via] ' [MeFi]
- Sweet music videos: Fresh creative stuff made without a big budget.

Medium 3D

New Sharp 3D Notebook Available with Linux [/.]
- Ignoring the Linux and laptop factor, the 3D technology itself is totally cool! From my understanding, it doesn't need special glasses (it's autostereoscopic) and it can display 3D in full color. The only thing is that your eyes would have to be at just the right spot in relation to the device so each eye would get the right image.
- I think that the /. folks got distracted by the Linux/laptop and didn't pick up on the potential of this 3D technology.
- 'Ea rlier this month, Sharp released the Actius AL3DU, the second generation laptop in its line of autostereo display products. EmperorLinux, Inc. is distributing it with Linux pre-installed, dubbing it the Molecule. '

Medium 3D+time

Sand Animation [video]. Obviously thoroughly practiced to appear spontaneous and fluid. A little cheesy but fascinating to watch anyway. FYI: SICAF is the Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival.

Mind

Messing with the mind
- Our current brain model is crude (on the level of butchery) but it's a work in progress. I have no doubt that we should study the brain, but whether people will abuse or use our building knowledge is a larger ethical problem that comes with progress. It is in areas like this where "religion" will give us "feelings" on how to act but we will need secular tools to work this out between the different perspectives.
- 'First there is the issue of whether we will ever actually know enough about something as complex as the brain to be able to control it in any practical sense. As Rose reports, research has been stepped up to an industrial scale in recent years. With the market for drugs such as Prozac and Ritalin hitting nearly $50bn a year, experimenters are flush with funds. Good grief, even car companies such as DaimlerChrysler are buying multimillion-pound brain scanners so their marketing teams can discover what turns on the grey matter of customers! And yet, says Rose, all this clever neuro research is being done using almost laughably crude models of the brain.'
- 'The brain is commonly treated as some kind of computer or information processing system - a bit of machinery that can be tinkered with once we have the blueprint of its circuits. However, Rose argues that the brain is something organic, holistic, a living system. So it needs to be explained in terms of theories that deal explicitly in meaning and mindfulness, such as, for example, the "autopoietic" or self-making approach advanced by the Chilean pair of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. An autopoietic system is one organised to respond to the world. Prod it and it will react homeostatically, striving to reach a new accommodation that preserves its integrity. There is a global cohesion - a memory of what the system wants to be - that reaches down to organise the parts even while those parts may be adding up to produce the functioning whole.'
- 'So the brain is too complex to control. Yet Rose is then faced with the uncomfortable paradox that crude measures often do in fact work. As an autopoietic system, the brain may be unpredictable in its responses, but it still does react somehow, even when prodded with a remarkably blunt instrument like a massive jolt of electricity or a kick of toxic molecules.'

Money

'Bush nominates Wolfowitz for World Bank post. "Willingness to accept a long-term American occupation force" is now set to become a condition for future bailouts. ' [MeFi]
- Of course they're howling about this on the MeFi thread:
  - 'Nothing says good financial judgement like thinking that the Iraq war was "going to pay for itself".'
  - 'Is it just me.... Or is anyone else getting the feeling that the "real" agenda for this administration is the complete dismantling of everything that everyone else has been working towards for the past 100 years? Un-freaking-believable!'
Firefox explorers [/.]
- It is good to see that some companies are starting to see that free-cost, F/OSS, and standards-compliant software is the obvious way to go.
- 'When Bill Robertson decided last year to switch 450 workers and 100 desktops at De Bortoli Wines to the open source Firefox web browser, he had the company's future in mind. In moving to the free Firefox, he did more than just install a web browser that rivals Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which comes for free with every PC running the Windows operating system. The CIO defined a radically new desktop interface for the company and forced his software suppliers to comply with his technology direction, which had a heavy emphasis on open standards so he would no longer be locked into any one vendor's products.'
Identity Theft Victim Gets Last Laugh [/.]
- Ha ha! Ovid's post reads like a detective story happening live.
- ' Being a bit of a hypocrite, I sometimes whine about privacy in my blog. I do, however, try to be careful about not letting anyone get information about me they shouldn't and I rarely, if ever, use a credit card online. This is why I was surprised to find out one morning that identity thieves had racked up thousands of dollars one two of my credit cards. By early afternoon, I caught them and the police arrested them." '

Obituaries

John Paul II (1920-05-18/2005-04-02). Born Karol Józef Wojtyła. Pope of the Roman Catholic Church (1978-10-16/2005-04-02).
- So much has been written and spoken about him already. He has had political, religious, and spiritual impact --even with his death. His passing has been a remarkable global news event. It is good to have issues of the Church, churches, religion, and spirituality brought to the forefront.
- I remember when he visited Chicago in 1979-10-05. There were huge crowds and my folks were very excited. I saw him briefly as he passed by in his motorcade.
- I may have disagreements with the Catholic Church but I believe that Pope John Paul II was a sincere and spiritual man.
- Related: Pope John Paul II [W]
Dale Messick (1906-04-11/2005-04-05). Born Dalia Messick. The first woman syndicated comic strip artist. Best known for Brenda Starr.
- A pioneer in comics. The fabulous red-headed Brenda Starr is one of my favorite comic strip characters: a strong, beautiful, working, exciting, sexy, compassionate, and mysterious woman. The strip has been consistently readable over the years.
- ' Dale Messick, whose long-running comic strip Brenda Starr, Reporter gave her entry into the male world of the funny pages, died Tuesday, April 5, 2005, in Penngrove, Calif. She was 98. At its peak in the 1950s, her comic strip ran in 250 newspapers. Mixing hot copy with high fashion, Brenda plunged from one thrilling adventure to another, sassing her tough-talking editor, Mr. Livwright, and sometimes filing her copy with the only person left in the newsroom, the cleaning woman. As World War II raged she parachuted into action -- with every red hair in place. The love of Brenda's life was the mysterious Basil St. John, a man with an eyepatch and a mysterious illness that could be cured only with a serum taken from rare black orchids grown only in the Amazon jungle. At 96, frail but still formidable, Messick, shown here in 1982, told The AP that she never watched ''soap operas and stuff like that because I used to write them. In fact,'' she added, ''I started them.'' '
  [Chicago Tribune]
- Lambiek.com/messick_d.htm
- Dale Messick, 98 Creator of 'Brenda Starr' cartoon
- Dale Messick [W]
George Frost Kennan (1904-02-16/2005-03-17). Aka X. American authority on the Cold War. Famous for his "Long Telegram" memo.
- It is amazing how his policy of containment affects us even now, especially when misunderstood and abused by the clumsy and over powered Neo-Conservatives.
- 101 year old is pretty awesome too!
- "all came down to one sentence in the "X" Article where I said that wherever these people, meaning the Soviet leadership, confronted us with dangerous hostility anywhere in the world, we should do everything possible to contain it and not let them expand any further. I should have explained that I didn't suspect them of any desire to launch an attack on us. This was right after the war, and it was absurd to suppose that they were going to turn around and attack the United States. I didn't think I needed to explain that, but I obviously should have done it"
- 'The Wise Man. George Frost Kennan, (Feb. 16, 1904 -- Mar. 17, 2005). Architect of the Cold War, father of the Marshall Plan and the doctrine of containment in the "Kennan Century". In February 1946, as the second-ranking diplomat in the American Embassy in Moscow, he dispatched his famous "Long Telegram" to Washington. Widely circulated, it made Kennan famous and evolved into an even better-known work, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," which Mr. Kennan published under the anonymous byline "X" in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs. More inside. ' [MeFi]
- George F. Kennan [W]

Play

'The Most Ambitious Game Ever? At this year's Game Developers Conference, Sims creator Will Wright's upcoming game Spore drew standing ovations. Not to be outdone, Peter Molyneux (of Populous and Black & White fame) revealed his own ambitious game-like project The Room. While the top game designers have freedom to play, independents rail (read Greg Costikyan's amazing bit in the middle) at the restrictions of the publisher system. For those who doubt games can be art.' [MeFi]
- Yes, yes.
- Games are about interesting choices so cooperative games can be just as fun as competitive games.
- Real life is the best game ever.
- I have concerns about games that are too much like work.
DIY Laser Tag Game System [LaserTagParts.com/mtdesign.htm]
- Wicked! The great thing about making it yourself is that you can totally customize it.
- 'our ongoing efforts to design and build a high-quality, full-featured "laser tag" gaming system that is comparable to the best commercial systems on the market (honestly, we think it already surpasses most of those systems in both capability and flexibility) and can be built for a fraction of the cost of a commercial system.'
SolarDeathRay.com [/.] Ah the fun things you can do with a solar parabolic reflector. Everyone has a little pyro in them. Once it's built, it's 1500 W powered for free by the sun. The free energy that's around us is amazing.
Strategists Learn Non-Violent Warfare Tactics
- Awesome stuff!
- 'A pro-democracy group has sponsored a free video game designed to teach political activists how to plan and execute strategic non-violent warfare.'
- 'Sponsored by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, the game, called "A Force More Powerful," resembles a cross between a political science model and one of the popular city-builder games. The player represents the chief of staff of a non-violent resistance movement. He gives orders to various characters within the movement, who will attempt to carry out actions such as making speeches and organizing demonstrations.'

Politics

Living will is the best revenge
- This has a somewhat dark sense of humor.
- 'In the event I lapse into a persistent vegetative state, I want medical authorities to resort to extraordinary means to prolong my hellish semiexistence. Fifteen years wouldn't be long enough for me.'
- 'I want my wife to ruin the rest of her life by maintaining an interminable vigil at my bedside. I'd be really jealous if she waited less than a decade to start dating again or otherwise rebuilding a semblance of a normal life.'
- 'I want to be placed in a hospice where protesters can gather to bring further grief and disruption to the lives of dozens of dying patients and families whose stories are sadder than my own.'
- 'I want total strangers - oily politicians, maudlin news anchors, ersatz friars and all other hangers-on - to start calling me "Bobby," as if they had known me since childhood.'

Quirky [Possibly NSFW]

'Inside the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic. Memorize the keywords with which the lizards of the stage world will attempt to distort your reality. Can you accept your own vampirism? Are you familiar with the most common reality fishing techniques and horse movements? This is the painstaking record of a man for whom delusions have completely overtaken reality. Spend some time with it - the detail is mind-numbing and the reality he has created is utterly insane... and occasionally convincing. Mirror in case Geocities croaks. ' [MeFi]
- But then aren't we all a little crazy sometimes?
PotatoBugs.com [MeFi]. Gacckk! That's one nasty bug. It's like a roach and a cricket with a giant head.

Rambling

2005-04-01t19:22:20Z: It is so easy to lose perspective. Time is limited so I want to choose to focus on certain things such as relating with people, making money, and exploring things like martial arts, faith & philosophy. However, it is so easy to have stuff like games, surfing, and blogging eat up a disproportionately large amount of time.

Relations [NSFW]

Teens view oral sex as safer choice: study
- I wonder when this transition happened? I think previous generations have perceived oral sex as kinkier or more taboo than vaginal sex.
- 'About one in five ninth-graders in the U.S. say they've had oral sex, a finding that adults should keep in mind when counselling teens about sex, researchers say. The study, which appears in the April issue of the journal Pediatrics, was designed to gauge teen perceptions of oral sex versus vaginal sex. To find out, researchers surveyed 580 ethically diverse ninth-graders with an average age of 15½ in California. Of the respondents, 20 per cent said they had engaged in oral sex, compared to 14 per cent who said they had had sexual intercourse. One-third also said they intended to have oral six within the next six months.'
'The 30 least hot things you can say to a naked woman. Based on The 30 hottest things you can say to a naked woman. via the always hilarious defective yeti. ' [MeFi]
- Hilarious and only R-rated. It certainly makes the original seem so lame.

Words

'Simlish as 21st-century Grammelot? I love Simlish. Never heard of Grammelot, before now, but, well, as they say "Hoh! Abba Da No!" ' [MeFi]
- Even if you don't play The Sims, the idea of a fake language that is unrecognizable but full of emotion is fascinating.

2005-04-19t17:06:47Z | RE: Biology. Conservation. Cyber Life. Cyber Tech. Faith; Philosophy;. Flow. Health. Local. Martial. Math; Science; Technology;. Measurements. Medium 2D. Medium 3D. Medium Mixed. Money. Play. Quirky [Possibly NSFW]. Relations [SFW]. Words.
2005-04-19t17:06:47Z

Biology

Top 10 Evolutionary Adaptations [/.]
- The list in brief: Mulitcellularity. The eye. The brain. Language. Photosynthesis. Sex. Death. Parasitism. Superorganisms. Symbiosis.
- 'The New Scientist has an interesting article up listing the Top 10 most amazing things to have evolved, including sex, death, the eye, language and parasites!" From the article:"Sponges are a key example of multicellular life, an innovation that transformed living things from solitary cells into fantastically complex bodies. It was such a great move, it evolved at least 16 different times. Animals, land plants, fungi and algae all joined in. '
- The eye is one of the "hang ups" that anti-Evolution have, so here's that section:
  - 'They appeared in an evolutionary blink and changed the rules of life forever. Before eyes, life was gentler and tamer, dominated by sluggish soft-bodied worms lolling around in the sea. The invention of the eye ushered in a more brutal and competitive world. Vision made it possible for animals to become active hunters, and sparked an evolutionary arms race that transformed the planet.
    The first eyes appeared about 543 million years ago - the very beginning of the Cambrian period - in a group of trilobites called the Redlichia. Their eyes were compound, similar to those of modern insects, and probably evolved from light-sensitive pits. And their appearance in the fossil record is strikingly sudden - trilobite ancestors from 544 million years ago don't have eyes.
    
    So what happened in that magic million years? Surely eyes are just too complex to appear all of a sudden? Not so, according to Dan-Eric Nilsson of Lund University in Sweden. He has calculated that it would take only half a million years for a patch of light-sensitive cells to evolve into a compound eye.
    
    That's not to say the difference was trivial. Patches of photosensitive cells were probably common long before the Cambrian, allowing early animals to detect light and sense what direction it was coming from. Such rudimentary sense organs are still used by jellyfish, flatworms and other obscure and primitive groups, and are clearly better than nothing. But they are not eyes. A true eye needs something extra - a lens that can focus light to form an image. "If you suddenly obtain a lens, the effectiveness goes from about 1 per cent to 100 per cent," says Andrew Parker, a zoologist at the University of Oxford.
    
    Trilobites weren't the only animals to stumble across this invention. Biologists believe that eyes could have evolved independently on many occasions, though genetic evidence suggests one ancestor for all eyes. But either way, trilobites were the first.
    
    And what a difference it made. In the sightless world of the early Cambrian, vision was tantamount to a super-power. Trilobites' eyes allowed them to become the first active predators, able to seek out and chase down food like no animal before them. And, unsurprisingly, their prey counter-evolved. Just a few million years later, eyes were commonplace and animals were more active, bristling with defensive armour. This burst of evolutionary innovation is what we now know as the Cambrian explosion.
    
    However, sight is not universal. Of 37 phyla of multicellular animals, only six have evolved it, so it might not look like such a great invention after all - until you stop to think. The six phyla that have vision (including our own, chordates, plus arthropods and molluscs) are the most abundant, widespread and successful animals on the planet.'
  - It makes me appreciative to have sight, but then our species doesn't know what life is like without it.