Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Yeah, two days in a row. I had a backlog. Enjoy.

• Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year ("Anything into Oil", Discover, May 2003). The process is called "Thermal Depolymerization" and it takes in pretty much anything rich in carbon. "If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water." (Not going to list who comes to mind, got to behave, not gonna do it, not gonna do it...) Note, sterlized water -- any pathogens in the input go *poof*. "'We will be able to make oil for $8 to $12 a barrel,' says Paul Baskis, the inventor of the process." They say it's 85% energy efficient with turkey offal, more efficient with "relatively dry raw materials, such as plastics". It turns out that it can even make conventional oil production cleaner and get more useable product out of the stuff that comes out of the ground. If the process lives up to their claims, this'll be big.
• RIAA's Statistics Don't Add Up to Piracy at MacWizards Music, 11 December 2002. Analysis of RIAA market data in light of RIAA claims about Internet file sharing.
• Welcome to the White House -- if you type "www.whitehouse.org" when you meant to type ".gov", you'll get this political satire site. And if you try ".net" you'll get a different political parody site (and a different parody each time you hit the reload button). But be careful, 'cause www.whitehouse.com is a porn site.
• Nominees for the 2003 Webby Awards. Uses JavaScript to navigate to the nominated sites, which is only a minor annoyance since the URLs of the sites are displayed for convenient copy/paste; a much bigger peeve is the nominated sites which require JavaScript to be viewed at all -- shouldn't such a boneheaded design decision disqualify a site from being hailed as an example of the best of the web?
• Speaking out over Jordan 'honour killings' (BBC News, February 2003) "The United Nations estimates that 5,000 women a year are killed in this way." Y'all had already heard about this issues before now, I'm sure, but in case you needed another article about it or a reminder that it still happens...
• www.weblogs.com is a constantly-updated list of blogs that have been updated in the past three hours. I haven't figured out how to make my LiveJournal automagically report to that site yet, but maybe I can talk the author of the LJ client I use ('clive') to include that feature (or hack it in myself and send him the diffs).
• This article in Guardian Unlimited about the art found in Saddam Hussein's private quarters makes a pretty big deal about what we can tell about the man from his choice of paintings and murals, but I'm inclined to interpret it more the way Fred, who forwarded the URL to me, did: he was probably just a big Boris Vallejo fan.
• It looks like This beautiful composite photo of the Earth at night is making the rounds again. (It comes from this installment of the Astronomy Picture of the Day, by the way). The last time I saw a flurry of interest in it, in 2001, folks on Elbows made a bunch of interesting comments about what you could see (Nile, Trans-Siberian Railroad) and interesting contrasts between countries/regions, before an argument erupted about energy waste. Among them was this, from Crash: "If you want a big surprise, look for the bioluminescence down in the low thirty bins or so. You can get this easily by GIMPing [or Photoshopping -- Glenn] the image and then going into Image->Curves. [...] You can see the gulf stream (no surprise), the currents around Cape Horn and the Falklands (no doubt the reason for the good fishing), and surprisingly some action along the Marianas Trench." (He included the URL of a copy of the image modified thus, and I just checked to see that the URL is still valid, but I don't know whether he wants that link posted quite this widely.)
• World's first brain prosthesis -- an artificial hippocampus due to be tested on tissue from rat brains, then in live animals. (New Scientist, March 2003) "If all goes well, it will then be tested as a way to help people who have suffered brain damage due to stroke, epilepsy or Alzheimer's disease." A bit scary because of the connection between brain and identity, but the article suggests that it shouldn't impact personality. "Another ethical conundrum concerns consent to being given the prosthesis, says Anderson. The people most in need of it will be those with a damaged hippocampus and a reduced ability to form new memories. 'If someone can't form new memories, then to what extent can they give consent to have this implant?'"
• Top 7 [Web Site] Usability Blunders Of The Big Players -- short, simple, and IMNSHO leaves out a couple of important ones, but it's still something I'd like to see spread far and wide. Make the world a better place: encourage web designers to Not Be Stoopid. "The bottom line is that it's important to understand and respect your audience. If you don't, and don't help them fulfil their goals for using your site, they might stop seeing the Internet as a medium of choice for information. Or, more likely, they'll click away to the more usable site of one of your competitors."
• James Cameron is trying to bring 3-D movies back into the mainstream with his latest Titanic tale, 'Ghosts of the Abyss.'" I found this article more interesting than I expected to. It's digital, with some fancy processing. Regarding problems with older 3D movies, "Cameron contends that the headaches some people experienced in the past were the result of what they were seeing through the glasses, what Cameron calls 'the eyestrain factor of the bad stereo photography.' Cameron said digital image processing smoothes over many of the problems that sank 3-D movies the first time around." An interesting bit about future projects: "'I can't imagine going back,' he said. 'I'm certainly not going to shoot on film again [as opposed to digital].'"
• Growing Apart: The mathematical evidence for Congress' growing polarization ("do the math: A mathematician's guide to the news", Slate, December 2001) "Poole and Rosenthal found that the House and Senate grew steadily less polarized from around 1900 to 1980. Then something happened; polarization has been sharply increasing ever since." Starts with a general discussion of the idea of quantifying political polarization and a layman's explanation of statistical modeling, then moves on to look at trends. Following its own advice about a map being easier to make sense of than a column of numbers, there's even an animated GIF illustrating the changes. More detail in the paper the article is about.