Geb

One thing that has triggered my pedant instinct recently is a question in a science quiz: is teh link (The test is very easy, be embarrassed if you don't get 100%)

Question 11 irritates me. I don't like having to give the answer that they want instead of the answer that is correct.

Forget all the nonsense of neat lines in ellipses around a dot. This is what an atom looks like: is teh link to image The big black smudge is the electron cloud, the blue and red smudges are the protons and neutrons in the nucleus. Note that the black smudge is bigger than the nucleus. That is actually the size of the electrons It isn't the area in which you find electrons, that is the electrons. That is how big they are.

Electrons are bigger than protons. We've known this for more than half a century, I wish people would stop trying to claim otherwise.

This weekend's activities:

• Played Risk
  
• Took photos of sheep is teh link to image
  
• Pissed in the sink
  
• Took photos of motorway is teh link to image
  
• Was forced to call my brother to forward port 22 on the home router as I had forgotten to
  

Since I have been bringing people down by documenting her decline in a depressing series of posts, I suppose I should let everybody here know that my grandmother died this morning. We knew it was coming about a day in advance. I had plenty of time to do everything that needed to be done, think everything that needed to be thought. I'm fine.

Now all that's left to do are a few mechanical details: organising a funeral, the reading of the will, trying to figure out what to do with all of her remaining stuff. I may lay claim to her mobile phone, because it's actually better than mine.

The North Korean government now lists me as a friend on Twitter.

Using the word "vore" in a public post alongside an image has attracted google. This journal isn't ranked very highly, but it does now seem to be turning up on the ninth or tenth pages for various vore image searches.

Hello google searchers!

There haven't been any really hilarious search terms in referring urls yet, although the search for "penus vore" did make me giggle. I'll give it a week before making a list to look for the funny ones.

My grandmother's situation continues to get worse.

She's in pain, and her mind is starting to go to the point where nobody can explain to her why she's in pain, so she thinks that it is because the nursing staff are giving her the wrong medication. She doesn't trust them. She claims that they're refusing to give her food. It's hard to tell, but I think what actually happened is that she refused to eat because she thinks they've put her medicine in the food.

When we visited today, she did nothing but beg us to call the police because she wants to tell them she's being mistreated. It's horrible to have to tell her that we can't because it would do no good. She thinks we've betrayed her, and won't accept anything else we offer to do to help.

I'm certain that she's not being mistreated. The nurses can't give her the help she wants because there's nothing medically useful anybody could do now, short of increasing her dose of painkillers into near lethal amounts. I'm going to call her doctor anyway to ask him to check her prescription, but I doubt it will do any good.

Sod it. I don't care that anybody on my friends list who would want to see this has already seen it, I will link anyway. Don't let my previous post fool you into thinking I've been irritated recently. My mood lately can be described as "squee bouncebouncebounce got a new commission!", although with slightly more dignity.

Caution: link shows anthro nudity and vore. If you don't know what that means, you'll probably be happier not clicking.
is teh link to image
is teh link to higher res image

Art by CornerShop, who can be found on FA.

I don't know why complete strangers keep feeling compelled to walk up to me on the street and tell me "get a haircut".

Yes, I am in fact aware that my hair is over 80cm long. It didn't grow like that overnight, I've had plenty of time to notice. No, I am not in the habit of taking fashion advice from people I don't know, and most particularly if the unknown person is wearing even scruffier clothes than mine. As far as I am aware we are not still in the 1950s, sometimes men do have long hair.

I really don't get it.

I've got used to the idea that people tend to shout out whatever they are thinking without stopping to wonder whether it's a good idea, but why is it always this?

Every time I go to Tesco, I wander the aisles thinking that I should buy something healthy to eat: some vegetables, breads, pasta, sauces without too much fat.

What I actually buy is almost invariably two kilograms of cheese, and things that can be eaten with cheese.

My lunch today will be an entire wedge of brie with crackers.

I haven't done this in a very long time. Another Q&A meme has turned up, and I can't pass it on without a hefty set of edits first. This time I haven't just cut out all the questions I thought were boring, I've replaced them with questions picked at random from IRC logs. Context, sense and grammar can go hang.

Attempt to make sense of these in any way you can. Bonus points awarded if you can find some way to answer some of these honestly.

1. Where was that thing with the wrist slicers?
2. How old are you?
3. Are you single or Taken?
4. What is your favourite film?
5. What is one of your favourite songs?
6. Favorite Band/Artist:
7. credit card ads wouldn't be too bad, but what happens when somebody tries the same thing for penis enlargement or porn?
8. Do you have any tattoos or piercings:
9. Do we know each other outside of LJ?
10. NTR = Orion?
11. Where are you reading that, out of curiousity?
12. Would you keep a secret from me if you thought it was in my best interest?
13. What is your favorite memory of us?
14. you call that a knife? this is a knife!
15. Tell me one odd/interesting fact about you:
16. You can have three wishes (for yourself, so forget all the 'world peace etc' malarky) - what are they?
17. Can we get together and make a cake?
18. Which country is your spiritual home?
19. What is your big weakness?
20. Do you think I'm a good person?
21. What was your favorite subject at school?
22. Do you want a boiled sweet? WHAT?
23. If you could change anything about me, would you?
24. What do you wear to sleep?
25. hm? which alternate universe?
26. why wasssuuuuuup with you? you have illness? party last nite?
27. If I only had one day to live, what would we do together?
28. so only 5% of the nukes get through?

is teh link to video
is teh link to video

I hadn't heard of this one until today, I'm very excited about it. It hits a lot of points that I love, space travel, fusion energy, the hardships of isolation, serious engineering in sci-fi, but my absolute favourite is robots that use emoticons for faces.

Look up there in the corner of this post at the angry face avatar. I drew that years ago for something very similar to this. It was intended to go on a giant faceless robot, an automated vehicle, that needed something to display on its screens to show that it was more than just a very large remote controlled car. I am looking forward to seeing how the film handles this. If they can maintain the feel of an emotionless system trying to mimic its way through social interaction then the scene will be set perfectly.

A perfect setting doesn't make a perfect film though. After seeing how badly some films can botch the topic of what it means to be human, I'm hoping that this one approaches it from the right angles. The trailer only hints at it, but I am optimistic.

is teh link

The Frivolous Theorem of Arithmetic.

Yes.

is teh link

How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever by Jack Horner and James Gorman

I saw this mentioned on Pharyngula and since I was buying some books anyway, decided to add it to the order. The proposal that the authors are pushing is one that hit the news media a few years ago, and is one that I very strongly agreed with. I wanted to see what they had to say directly, in their own words.

It's a strange book. 90% of it is introducing concepts, and setting the scene. Anybody who takes an interest in dinosaurs beyond the level of "oooh... giant lizards" will know most of this already, topics such as extinction theories, fossil hunting, the importance of development in evolution, cladistics and the link between dinosaurs and birds.

The actual plan of action, once you get through all the padding, is one that I hadn't expected.

What they want to do is to create what they call an experimental atavism. To demonstrate reproducibly in the lab that modern birds evolved from dinosaurs, and to learn the precise paths taken, you meddle with developing chicken embryos at defining points in their growth attempting to make them more dinosaur-like. The interesting thing is that it is all done using transcription factors introduced externally, there's no genetic engineering happening at all. They do want to create a chickenosaurus, as they call it, something that will recognisably be a dinosaur, but it's not supposed to be an authentic recreation of any previous species; its purpose will be as a demonstration of how much flexibility there is in the growth of tetrapod embryos. It's a visceral example, literally, of what chickens used to be, and what echoes of that are still present in them now.

Once you've demonstrated that it can be done chemically, you can go back and attempt to figure out what genetic changes would be needed to make the transcription factor patterns that you had artificially applied, and from that possibly make chickenosaurs that would be able to breed more chickenosaurs, rather than just chickens, but the book is extremely hesitant about proposing such a course of action.

I think the authors are worried about being misquoted, or of being dismissed as dreamers. Everything they have proposed is extremely likely to be possible, and they've studied the evidence that it is before speaking out. This isn't a case of something we could potentially do in a few years if the technology develops, it could have been done at any time in the last decade. Not only is it realistic but they've also held back from trying to propose anything that doesn't have a high scientific value.

I don't care about being misquoted, and everybody knows damn well that I'm just a dreamer rather than a real biologist. I don't think the proposal goes far enough.

The problem is that only a very limited selection of saurischians survived to become modern birds. There is no modern decendant of the ornithschians, nor anything related unless you go right back to reptiles. Even among the groups that did lead directly to birds, a hell of a lot of information has been lost in the K-T extinction and the last several tens of millions of years. Basically, there's not enough information surviving in living species to figure out what most dinosaur genomes would have looked like even with very cunning and subtle bioinformatics. Nor is there enough even to make developmental approximations like the chickenosaur without a hell of a lot of guesswork. I think we should be working towards making a framework in which we can make those guesses.

What will be needed is computational embryology, a field that doesn't yet exist, but which is probably only years away from appearing. It will be the science of accurately simulating developmental biology, treating cells as elements in a fluid sim with their properties being managed in terms of various transcription factors. Hundreds of levels of different fluid and particle sims, all interacting in physical, chemical, and biological ways, all giving you a way to go from cell to embryo in pure software. This would be a system in which you could work towards trying to find out what sort of mix of modern bird and reptile genes is necessary to create, for example, a creature that looks like a stegosaur, without having to physically create tens of thousands of hybrid embryos and spend decades poking them trying to make them grow.

Obviously I'm saying that this should be done because I want to see the stegosaur, but that's just one possible use for such a system. It would be a lot more powerful than that. If the software could be created and made to be an accurate simulation of real biology, what you would have created is a CAD/CAM process for making species.

Locally:
My grandmother is now moved into a nursing home. This is probably going to be permanent. She doesn't really understand the difference between a care home and a nursing home, so she thinks that we've sent her to the home two miles out of town to get rid of her. We can't convince her otherwise.

In space:
The shuttle has been given a go ahead for deorbit and after more than a day of delay due to bad weather, it will be landing in a little under two hours.

Open world gaming needs to include vehicles like this. There can be no possible argument against it.

is teh link

For people skim reading and not clicking the links, it's a Vespa scooter with a 75mm cannon bolted to it. A self propelled artillery piece that if it can't give you the correct elevation, you can just pick up the whole vehicle and use it as a shoulder mounted weapon instead. Not only that, but it can, and has, been fired on the move.

More pictures and a better description of it here:

is teh link

The chances of a game being set during the Algerian war aren't high, but historical accuracy need not be preserved for such a gloriously silly vehicle. Just the fact that it exists is excuse enough to use it.

Gods damnit, mating season! At any other time of year I'm happy being single.

is teh link

A page of efficient transport concept vehicles. The main page is in Russian, but most of the images have english text, just open full size to read.

Some of these are designed just to look pretty and would last about a month on the road before falling to bits, but there are one or two designs in here that I really love.

The Cargocube concept is extremely well thought out. We can't predict what engine and fuel technologies will turn up in the vehicles of the future, but cargo handling and loading is a problem we do know in detail and can understand intuitively. More automation of the process is clearly desirable, and this is a neat example. As soon as the technology to make it becomes cheap and reliable, I can't imagine that something like this won't be produced.

Cargocube:
is teh link to image
is teh link to image
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However, the designs for hybrid road/rail trucks are something I very much do not like.

is teh link to image

I do love the railways, but there is no way that you will ever convince me that shoving thousands of extra vehicles onto the track is a good idea. By splitting up trains into trucks each with their own engine, you end up making track management thousands of times more complicated, and scaling up the number of breakdowns, collisions, derailments with the number of vehicles. The resulting chaos would make gridlock on the roads look tame, after all on a road you don't need special hardware to change lane. In any case, the point of railways is not just the minimising of friction, but efficiencies of scale, a single huge engine has a lot of advantages over many smaller ones, not least of which is that they sound far, far nicer.

My grandmother has been telling us that she doesn't want to live anymore.

She's too weak to have much hope of ever being able to enjoy life, and while she isn't in pain, she is in constant discomfort. I don't know how seriously she means it, her body isn't the only thing starting to fail, but in the circumstances it is a reasonable thing to think.

I always have been, and still am, opposed to the idea of assisted suicide. It's too easy to abuse a system like that: nobody should ever be put into a situation where they can be pressured into allowing their death. A quick natural death might be the best thing to hope for in this case, but I'm not sure.

It's not a happy subject for thought.

In just over a week, ESA is to launch its all-our-eggs-in-one-basket mission, the Herschel and Planck space telescopes. Between the two of them they are hopefully going to do some real cutting edge science.

Planck is designed to study the cosmic microwave background. Depending on what it finds, we might get clear evidence that inflationary cosmology is real, and that will be amazing. The shortened version of inflationary theory is that spacetime itself will change under tension, a high enough temperature of the matter within space will actually modify the properties of space such that it can expand very rapidly. We think that's what happened in the first few hours of the universe, but the evidence for it is a bit sketchy.

Herschel is a high resolution infra-red telescope, very high resolution; it will be the largest optical mirror in space once it's up. Its cameras are a suited to a far wider range of tasks than Planck so most of its work will be things we've come to think of as day to day normal astronomy: stars, dust, gas, in-system asteroids. Leaving aside that, its most headline grabbing duty will be direct imaging of exoplanets. The Spitzer telescope was the first to manage direct imaging, but that one is an elderly dying spacecraft, running out of coolant and not designed for the task. With the launch of Herschel, expect to see a lot more images of extra-solar planets.

They're very cool machines, partly due to both being filled with massive amounts of liquid helium coolant. I worry then, that they're both being strapped into a single point of failure: an Ariane V. This launch system has a relatively good safety record, but not a flawless one. If this launch goes bad, astronomy and cosmology are going to be set back by at least five years, probably more.

My grandmother is back in hospital again. She moved into a care home at the beginning of this week, stayed there for two days, then became too weak to breathe unassisted and had to return to the wards. The doctors say it might take her several weeks to recover, and at the end of it she will probably have to move into a nursing home (not the care home). This all means that she's spending £500 per week on a room in the care home that she'll probably never see again, but which we can't cancel because there's a possibility that she might need it. In addition to this, due to the council's sheltered housing department attempt on the world record for least efficient communications system, she's also still paying rent for her flat which she will certainly never return to.