NATIONAL SCIENCE WEEK

The bestest week of the year

Down in Australia it's national science week. To get on board with the activities check out the web site here. We kicked it off last night at the cub pack sleep over participating in the Big Aussie Star Hunt.

But of the many benefits offered by Science this one caught my eye. By mathematicians at the Carlton University & University of Ottowa have completed research on

WHEN ZOMBIES ATTACK!: MATHEMATICAL MODELLING OF AN OUTBREAK OF ZOMBIE INFECTION

Here is a link to the chapter.

It examines three possible stratigies

• quarantine (could lead to eradication, but unlikely to happen)
• treatment (some humans survive, but they still must coexist with zombies),

but shows that there is REALLY only one strategy likely to succeed:

“impulsive eradication.”

I love it -

“impulsive eradication.”

Probably like the impulsive eradication demonstrated in the new trailer for the upcoming survival training video with Woody Harrelson 'ZOMBIELAND'

The study goes on to record “Only sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing force, will result in eradication, assuming the available resources can be mustered in time,” they concluded.

And if we don’t act fast enough?

“If the timescale of the outbreak increases, then the result is the doomsday scenario: an outbreak of zombies will result in the collapse of civilization, with every human infected, or dead,” they wrote. “This is because human births and deaths will provide the undead with a limitless supply of new bodies to infect, resurrect and convert.”

How fast do we need to deal with the outbreak?

Here’s the equation they used, where S = susceptibles, Z = zombies and R = removed. If an infection breaks out in a city of 500,000 people, the zombies will outnumber the susceptibles in about three hours.

So there it is -Aim for the head and shoot fast.

This is an example where the world of academia is providing useful advice to deal with real world situations.

I love science.

A day that will live in INFAMY

A date which will live in infamy…no matter how long it may take us to overcome this, …the American people, in their righteous might, will win through…."

Obviously he was referring to the granting of a U.S. patent 735,777 on 12 August 1903 to the KATO coffee company for “Coffee Concentrate and process of making same”

That right INSTANT COFFEE was unleashed upon the world at the PAN AMERICIAN Exposition in Buffalo later that year. This was probably what led to president William McKinley being shot when he visited the fair in September.

I admit it is a luxury, but a fine espresso is a civilized start to any day and a cup of instant coffee is an abomination.

"No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness". ~Sheik Abd-al-Kadir

“It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning. It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion” my co-workers get nervous when I start muttering this.

Whose up for a cup?

With this much irony

…….. surely it must be a carefully thought out marketing strategy.

On 17 July 2009 owners of an Amazon Kindle who had bought copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm found their copies deleted remotely and their purchase refunded to their accounts

HOLY CRAP

It's something of a worry for me as this year after having to pack up all my books for a move I promised myself that I had purchased my last hard copy book. (Emergency by Neil Strass if you are interested) I had heard good things about the Kindle, admittedly all about the US edition with its wireless capabilities, but so much so I was considering handing over the hard earn readies when it was picked up by an Australian distributor.

But after Amazon’s tanty last year attempting to remove listings on ‘Adult material’ but which seems to have selectively and disproportionaly targeted authors of homosexual, gay or queer writings as covered in Flinhart’s blog here.

Now this latest stunt. You wonder if Amazon has been bought out by the fundamentalists.

Surely someone at Amazon is self aware enough to have realised to retrospectively try and remove a book you purchased from you, which was described by one of the readers of David Pogue’s Tech Blog at The New York Times “….it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table..”. is particularly rediculous when it involves books that as a theme talk about cencorship and control of knowledge.

What’s next, wiping out copies of Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ with a little flaming icon on the screen while it was removed.

Though its all over who owns the rights to republish electronic copies of Orwell’s books needless to say I am rethinking my plans to purchase a Kindle as my eBook reader. Scifi’s Scott Edelman has quipped - As Orwell once wrote, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." To that we add, freedom is the freedom to keep the book we paid for.

My favourite news quote so far about this is by Seattlest’s “Amazon's Kindle--Now with New Take-Backsies Feature”.

Anyone got any e-book readers they would suggest?

With this must irony…..

…….. surely it must be a carefully thought out marketing strategy.

On 17 July 2009 owners of an Amazon Kindle who had bought copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm found their copies deleted remotely and their purchase refunded to their accounts

HOLY CRAP

It's something of a worry for me as this year after having to pack up all my books for a move I promised myself that I had purchased my last hard copy book. (Emergency by Neil Strass if you are interested) I had heard good things about the Kindle, admittedly all about the US edition with its wireless capabilities, but so much so I was considering handing over the hard earn readies when it was picked up by an Australian distributor.

But after Amazon’s tanty last year attempting to remove listings on ‘Adult material’ but which seems to have selectively and disproportionaly targeted authors of homosexual, gay or queer writings as covered in Flinhart’s blog here.

Now this latest stunt. You wonder if Amazon has been bought out by the fundamentalists.

Surely someone at Amazon is self aware enough to have realised to retrospectively try and remove a book you purchased from you, which was described by one of the readers of David Pogue’s Tech Blog at The New York Times “….it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table..”. is particularly rediculous when it involves books that as a theme talk about cencorship and control of knowledge.

What’s next, wiping out copies of Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ with a little flaming icon on the screen while it was removed.

Though its all over who owns the rights to republish electronic copies of Orwell’s books needless to say I am rethinking my plans to purchase a Kindle as my eBook reader. Scifi’s Scott Edelman has quipped - As Orwell once wrote, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." To that we add, freedom is the freedom to keep the book we paid for.

My favourite news quote so far about this is by Seattlest’s “Amazon's Kindle--Now with New Take-Backsies Feature”.

Anyone got any e-book readers they would suggest?

Per aspera ad astra

Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on the Moon. July 1969 A.D.

We came in peace for all mankind.

It’s the inscription on a metal plaque on the legs of the lunar landing module which has sat for the last 40 years on a feature named the ‘Sea of Tranquility’ on earth's Moon.

For a geek there is no bigger day in the calendar than 16 July the anniversary of the moon landing. The_weapon and I have been trying to make a Lego tribute but the Lunar Lander (Lem) is proving a challenge. A much simpler tribute is the work of a fan using the lego from the time of the landings..

Nothing since has fired the imagination of the world. No other event is pointed to as a pinnacle of our technological achievement to compare all others -‘if we can land men on the moon, why can’t we….(insert desired)?” was a frequent lament for the decades after. A generation of engineers and scientists were created because of the zeitgeist of the goal to land men on the moon. There was a feeling our future would be ever upward, a bright shinny utopia.

But it’s been forty years. Now we seem to view the future more with fear and trepidation, less optimism and enthusiasm than ever before.

Why ?

In that forty years were’ve discovered more, learned of wonders both sublime and gross, we have more people and hence more of the most evolved thinking machines ever devised living longer, with access to better tools and more information that we have had in the past centuries. To those who lived a thousand years ago we in countries like Australia, Britain and the United States would be judged as Gods. Even the rest of the world is racing to catch up to our opportunities.

Yes there are problems but hope beats despair any day for trying to fix something.

So we need a new Apollo program to once again inspire hope, but its hard to imagine one that will fire the imagination like the first. The Large Hadron Collider excites me and a lot of other geeks but hasn’t caught the public’s imagination, other than as a tool for hacks like Dan Brown to portray as the evils of science personified. The human genome project gets me hot and sweaty but had to generate an iconic image like the photo ‘earthrise’.



A permanent colony on the moon? Its an obvious step but more a commercial operation like setting up research station in Antarctica sur a technical challange but no ones going to make a movie about it. A walk on Mars?

No for me I want a crewed journey to another star system - that’s what I want to see.


But then to get the funding they would probably want to run it as a live streaming reality program something like Ron Battlestar Galactica Moore’s new series ‘Virtuality’ which is a little depressing. Not the show, though I am sure there will be depression in, after all if you are stuck on a ship with the same people for 10 years that's bound to make you a bit blue at times. I meant depressing you need reality TV to drive space exploration.

Still Per aspera ad astra

I leave you with a piece of music which for many people, myself included, can’t hear without thinking of humanity’s exploration of space.

Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Op. 30 from 2001: a Space Odyssey

So what should be the next great adventure ?

It's not Crocodiles & Alligators any more

A few months ago I came across this report

"for the third time in just over a month, a healthy human placenta has been found by workers at the Urbana-Champaign Sanitary District. Urbana Police contacted the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District (CUPHD), and the Champaign County Coroner's Office for assistance with this unusual situation".

at the time the question was asked OK mainly over at IO9,

"which mad doctor has been doing experiments with transgenic babies in the sewers again? Seriously, if you're going to be hatching superhuman babies in your underground lair, don't flush the evidence down the toilet, genius/"

Which is where I assume the story would end.

However below is footage posted on youtube from a private contractor using sewer cam to inspect a drain in the sewers under Cameron Village in Raleigh, North Carolina. Yes I realise its a bit blurry but give me a break is a fibre optical cable as thin as a pencil inserted up the rectum of a city -do you really want HD. Honestly watch it, especially when it shudders -

That's just disturbing.

New York State University biologist Thomas Kwak claimed the sewer ball monster, can some one come up with a more mediapathic title for this beastie please? Kwak claimed the monster was thousands of tiny organisms called bryozoans, or moss animacules. "Invertebrates, they bunch together in colonies and feed with tiny tentacles".

Sounds good, plausable after all this is what bryozoans look like,

Dr. Timothy S. Wood, an expert on freshwater bryozoa and an officer with the International Bryozoology Association. He said:".....No, these are not bryozoans! They are clumps of annelid worms, almost certainly tubificids (Naididae, probably genus Tubifex). Normally these occur in soil and sediment, especially at the bottom and edges of polluted streams. In the photo they have apparently entered a pipeline somehow, and in the absence of soil they are coiling around each other. The contractions you see are the result of a single worm contracting and then stimulating all the others to do the same almost simultaneously, so it looks like a single big muscle contracting.

Which still leave me unsatisifed,

mainly because all I can think of it they look like

these, and we all know how well that ended.

There seem to be a lot of 'Days' & 'Weeks' these days:

National read to your child day -14 Feb, International Women's day - 8 March, Diabeties Alert day - 24 March, National library week -12 April, May is National Teen Pregnancy Prevention Month, National Teacher Day - 5 May, ...

Just June itself all ready holds
Stand for children day, National trails day, National men's health week, National cancer survivors day, Deaf-blind awareness week, World blood donor day, U.N world refugee day, Public service day,... and the whole month is home safety month,...

So I propose to add another to the list for June, a day to recognize the ceaseless vigilance of those who stand ready to face the shambling hordes of the undead. I want to declare June 23 International Zombie awareness day.

It was on this day in 1983 a low budget horror flick directed by Sam Raimi was premiered, the film Evil Dead gave us the greatest Zombie hunter of all time

Ashley J. Williams

The plot of the film is simplicity itself, a bunch of young adults go to an old cabin in the woods and each is killed, -horribly. A friend at the time directed after a late night showing 'get that thing, outa my video' -yes kiddies movies once came on black book shaped things called videocassettes.

The film spawned two sequels: Dead by dawn & Army of Darkness, a musical, computer game, a marvel comic book, many guest spots, Ash even made the list of Top 100 Heroes of All Time, describing him as "An egomaniacal, complaining, misogynistic goon, Ash is the best demon and zombie killer ever to be portrayed on the silver screen" and made the actor Bruce Campbell that played Ash welcome in any zombie hunter convention in the world.

Campbell himself said Ash is 'A bad slow thinker, but a great fast thinker' and 'Ash is pretty much incompetent at anything other fighting the evil dead'. He seems pretty ingenious to me such as making a chainsaw bracket and shotgun harness, gunpowder from mainly referencing its elemental makeup in a chemistry book, and a fully functional prosthetic hand from a metal gauntlet.

But he cemented himself into the annuals of zombie hunter fandom with bolting a chainsaw to the severed stump of his right hand and at the end of the second film standing in a barren wasteland with his trade mark sawed off double-barreled 12 gauge Remington shotgun and chainsaw surrounded by the evil dead.

"Hail to the King, Baby"

So June 23 International Ashley J. Williams day, whose with me?