Tokyo Motor Show The Tokyo Motor Show was recently held in Japan. There were cool cars there! Quite a few concepts that may never see the light of production day, but we can still fantasize.

Barbara Hall I'm voting for Barbara Hall for Toronto's next mayor -- not because she's a woman, or because she was a mayor of Toronto before -- I'm voting for Barbara Hall for what she isn't. Barbara Hall isn't a politician. She's genuine. She's a person. The other candidates are politicians, and therefore nothing more than the scum of the earth.

Welchia I read about this in the latest issue of Scientific American, on my flight to Washington, DC. I had previously heard of the results of this worm -- but hadn't heard it's name. It was released into the wild just after the Blaster worm and the Sobig.F virus -- so while the world was busily making Blaster and Sobig.F celebrities, Welchia slipped quietly into systems. Blaster and Sobig.F were a pain. They brought down computers, affected networks and made themselves known. Welchia on the other hand, slipped in quietly and had a few profound purposes in life:

it forces the host computer to contact Microsoft's Windows Update website and download a patch for the very hole it exploits (incidentally, the Blaster worm also exploits the same hole)

it scans the host computer for the Blaster worm and removes it

it scans the local network, and attempts to procreate

It contains code that will delete itself on January 1, 2004

It installs a small file transfer server on the host.

The last bullet points to Welchia's nefarious intentions. While it appears to be a good worm, it leaves a backdoor entry for its creator. The SciAm article raises some interesting ideas -- it contends that worms are evolving to the point where they're starting to compete against one another for host systems. The article also suggests that this may be a way of combatting future malcode exploits -- creating similar code to search and destroy malicious code running rampant on the net. Pretty cool idea -- and quite Matrix-like!

Cecilia Zhang ... or Cece, as her mother affectionally calls her -- is 9 years old, loves animals -- has two cats, Happy and Lucky -- loves fishing and playing tennis -- loves science. It has been over a week since she was kidnapped from her bedroom. The police has scoured the neighbourhood, appealed to the public -- a blitz has been made with her photo across Toronto. Last Monday, when I was driving to work, I saw a number of police vehicles, horse trailers, etc., parked on Don Mills Road, not far from McNicol. The police did non-stop searches for a couple of days after the little girl disappeared. Volunteers came out. Helicopters were used. Nothing. Yesterday, Cecilia's parents spoke to the media for the first time. Cecilia's dad cried -- a big thing for a Chinese man -- and appealed to the kidnapper(s) to return his daughter. Cecilia's mom spoke to Cecilia. It's been nine days since her disappearance -- chances of Cecilia being found alive are slim. It she is found still alive, she will bear scars for the rest of his life. At times like this, Canada needs the death penalty. We put animals down for attacking people -- whoever kidnapped Cecilia is nothing more than an animal -- nothing more than a vermin, that needs to be put down.

Added Links I've added a couple of new links to my 'quicklinks bar' on the left.

Technorati - because I read about it in Discover Magazine, and it's cool!

The Onion - because the Onion is always cool!

Dream Job Here's a little bit of inspiration for those of you who find themselves in a daily grind - it's an article from the Globe and Mail, and was sent to me by a friend (thanks for this one too Naj). What exactly makes some people love their job, while others hate the jobs they find themselves in? The article contends that some of us see our jobs as the end - the final goal in life; while others see their jobs as a means to the end - only a stop along the way of achieving that final goal in life. Personally, I love my job. Yes, it's damn frustrating at times, and hard, and time consuming, allowing me to do little of the other things I want, but I don't see it as the end of everything I'm going to be doing in life. Neither do I see it as the most important part of my life. It's a means - an important means - but I can be replaced, and so can the job. Family, friends, the impact I have (however little) on the world - the way I will be remembered - that's the end. It's quite intangible.

The Wal-Mart Economy Here's a Toronto Star article forwarded to me by friend (thanks Naj). We've seen the newscasts featuring many small towns pleading for a Wal-Mart store to be opened in their area, but what are the real effects of Wal-Mart on the economy, and on society as a whole? This article contends that they're pretty bad for the economy and society. It's a bit slanted towards the left, and demonizes Wal-Mart, and while all of the negative press may not be warranted, there is some truth to it to what the article speaks to. I know from a business perspective, Wal-Mart is noted for its bullying tactics when dealing with suppliers. You either do things their way, or you're out of business - sometimes you're damn either way. Read however, and make up your mind on your own.

Alternative Media Blogs, blogs, blogs. Blogs are so mainstream now. There are photo blogs, audio blogs and other media blogs. Nevertheless, the overwhelming documentation of every nook and cranny of the world is worth it in some cases - check out this article from Wired Online, about the use of the internet, and grassroots media to document atrocities around the world. In many cases, the people doing the documenting are taking a risk. If caught by the people they're capturing on video or camera, they could be killed. Kinda puts my little online presence to shame when I think about the people out there making a difference with theirs.

New Zealand Moms Against Genetic Engineering OK, the only reason I'm posting this is because of the the ad campaign. Kiwi moms are ... well ... you make up your own mind, but four breasted women ads? They're protesting New Zealand's government decision to overturn a ban against genetic engineering. The lift on the ban would allow GM foods to be sold across the counter to the public.

Family I picked up a copy of the National Post Saturday edition for my daughter, cause she needed the inserted Saturday Night magazine for something for school. I browsed it and found this amusing article on ISO certification: "Are We Certifiable?" by Peter Carter. It's about certifying your family (no - not that way) ... about standardization. From that, to another newspaper article: "For the kids, it's cool," in the Saturday edition of the Toronto Star. The article is about children in gay and lesbian families - the parents are same-sex. While the kids are OK with it, and the parents are OK with it, others seem to have big problems with it. People don't seem to realize that good or bad parents come down to the individuals involved. It says something about people willing to take on the challenge of raising kids and choosing to do so, instead of the many 'accidental' parents there are out there.

Tech Glossary From geek.com, here's a glossary of over 2000 tech terms ... from abend to zoomed video. And it's searchable!

Bizarre Math of Elections Here's an article about the confusing nature of US elections ... just how are winners decided anyway?

Office 2003 From eWeek Magazine, a first look at Microsoft's new office release. It's not a surprise - eWeek isn't jumping up and down to sing the praises of the new Office release. Since Office 97, there hasn't been a real pressing need for businesses to upgrade. Most users hardly use most of the functionality of Office 97, so why bother with the incremental offerings in the subsequent versions. Well, as a user of Office XP, I know the newer versions make it easier to do a lot of common tasks - however, for a business, I don't think you can really find a pressing need to go to Office 2003, unless you implement some of Microsoft's backend server offerings to take advantage of the new features of Office 2003. Then there is WordPerfect and StarOffice ... both good alternatives.

Titan's Lakes There's mounting evidence that Titan, a moon of Saturn that is targeted to be visited by the Huygens probe flying onboard the Cassini spacecraft, has lakes of liquid hydrocarbons. Huygens is targeted to touch down on Titan in 2005. A recent study used radar to penetrate Titan's smog filled atmosphere, and bounce images back to Earth. The results were indicative of liquid. Check out the article from Space.com.

Stellar Catastrophe is Beautiful The Chandra X-Ray Observatory snapped this composite image of a star heading rapidly towards becoming a supernova. The star has already passed through its red giant phase and the image shows the shell it blew off.

China in Space China has done it, and it was a great story to follow. If you read the accounts coming out of China, you know that everything is carefully orchestrated. The country will look good. The government will look good. The military will look good. It's also interesting to read the American media reporting on the feat. They're almost grudging in their reports, acting like a cool kid who just witnessed someone else doing something cool, and is having troubles acknowledging it. Read the CNN reports ... they can't even acknowledge that China calls their astronauts, taikonauts (the Russians have had cosmonauts since the beginning) ... CNN refers to them as the "so called taikonauts." Regardless, as NASA said, it's a great achievement in space exploration.

Anime Model Sheets Want to learn how to draw manga? Check out these reference sheets!

Gravity From Discover Magazine, here's a great article all about gravity and how little we really do know. We've always thought gravity ended with Einstein. Everything kinda worked, and made sense. Or did it? We've had to invent dark matter, and other very interesting things to fill our universe to explain away observations. But what if we didn't really get gravity right in the first place? What if on really large scales, gravity acted ... well, not like we expected? What then? Well, this article collects some of the more interesting ideas. Check it out!

Optimize Here's a great IT/Business magazine!

Robots Finally, robots hitting the market that make your life easier! Read a summary article from MIT. Robots like Roomba, that vacuum a house, and PackBot, a military robot that goes into dangerous places and beam back information on what soldiers may encounter.

Book Sales If you like books, and are cheap, like to browse older, used books, and like to find the classics, then here's a site for you. It will point you to local book sales in your area.

Storage Tank IBM's answer to data storage and access needs. It turns data storage devices on disparate systems, running on potentially different infrastrctures, to all appear seamless from a data access perspective. Think of it as the spawn of GRID and SAN.

PLOS Biology Finally! If you've ever tried to find journal articles on the net, you've realized fairly quickly that unless you have thousands of dollars to spare, or belong to some institution that can afford a subscription, you're SOL. Well, a group of scientist are kinda sick of the journals dictating how science information can be disseminated - sick of the control over research that journals have - and they've created the Public Library of Science Biology (and will soon launch PLOS Medicine). Cool! Articles are available free of charge and in online or PDF formats. Information overload here I come!

CD Copying From CNN.com: a student who posted a paper on how to defeat a CD copy protection mechanism (by just pressing the shift key when the CD tray is closing) is being sued by the software maker. Let's see how this works ... someone releases information on the weakness of a piece of software and they're being sued for it? This shouldn't last a second in court. What's disturing here is that the way the protection mechanism works is by loading a driver file from the music CD as soon as it's inserted into the drive. Hmm ... someone should sue the software maker for not disclosing to end users that they're loading software on their computer.

Canada didn't go to war I read the cover article in this Saturday's Toronto Star, and was pretty pissed. It's not often that I get motivated to write a response to an article in the newspapers. But I found the article anti-US, very much misleading - which was done purposely. The article is about Canada's industrial participation in the US military machine, and hence our industry support of the war in Iraq. The article starts out by trying to convince the reader that what is to follow is a serious article that uses data to support a point of view - what it actually does however, is uses data to purposely mislead the reader. Let's start with figures - as the article uses a lot of them. The subtitle on the front page article is, "Star analyzes deals from 1997-2002 Defence contracts with U.S. top $1.8B." The article then says that there is billions hidden under sub-contracts as well. It goes on to present data in a table that says Canada has an estimated $1-1.5B in contracts with the US military annually. It doesn't try to reconcile the numbers above. Firstly, the numbers above are Canadian dollars, not US (an important point for later). Secondly, let's take a closer look at the $1-1.5B annual contracts. That implies over the period from 1997-2002, Canada got at most, about $7.5B in contracts. So, $7.5B - $1.8B = $5.7B. Over 5 years, this is $1.14B ... which is the billions per year hidden under sub-contracts? Choice of words people! The article went on to say that the US has a $165B (US) in annual defence spending on contracts (2002 figure). Of this, Canada got about what? $1.5B? That's a whopping 0.6% of the US defence contracts! We should really be worried! Let's dig a little deeper, like the article does, but hammer home points that the article refuses to. The bulk of the contracts handed to Canadian firms are not actually Canadian firms. They're actually US giants with a Canadian presence. Most of the profits from the 0.6% spending now seems to flow right back into the US! Now I'm really worried! The article contends that we're helping the US wage war by helping their military machine. Hmmm ... in a nice table of the $1.8B, the article provides a breakdown of where that spending was. It turns out that $0.2B in the last five years was used for ammunition and weapons. The rest of the money? Well, vehicle parts, services, furnishings, clothing, food, etc. So, where do we really draw the line? We educate some US soldiers. Some of them are members of our family. Some of them train with our soldiers. Some of them protect our country. If we don't really want to support the US war machine, we should stop just about every export to the US, as we help to feed the people that vote for the idiots who send off troops to bomb bastards with no excuse even if they really, really had it coming. The article brings home an important point - will our political leaders have the strength and independence to say no to joining a US war, when our defence industry pressures us because of lucrative (0.6% mind you) US military contracts? Well, Jean said no. But that's not the conclusion the Star's writers wanted. It just doesn't appeal to more US bashing, or sell newspapers.

Underwater Windmill Here's a novel idea - stick a windmill underwater and let the tides, driven by the moon, spin the blades, turn the turbine and produce electricity. It's a project currently being prototyped in Norway, and produces electricity that's being fed into the power grid. The power generated is enough to power about 70 US homes (or 35 Norwegian). Cool!

Universe is Finite, Soccer Ball Shaped Well, another group, another claim ... and I'm planning on not getting too excited about this one. After all, it has been going back and forth for a number of years now. It does make an interesting read though. Jeffrey Weeks (a genius) and researchers from the University of Paris have, through observations using NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, have found evidence that the universe is dodecahedral shaped, and finite (but what is outside it ...). They've published their findings in Nature.

Gay Marriages The supreme court today threw out a challenge to Ontario's lower court decision that same sex marriage was unconstitutional. The court threw out the challenge on a technicality - saying the challengers weren't really losers in the lower court's ruling, so they really aren't allowed to challenge the decision. Who would challenge gay marriage rights? Well, the religious nuts of course! Here's the line up:

REAL Women of Canada - you gotta check out the site for these people of the 'alternative women's movement.' I can't believe the hate they profess, under the guise of a forward thinking organization. What's really scary about this organization, is that they have special consultative status at the UN, so they basically have a world audience for their hatred. Un-fucking believable!

Ontario Association for Marriage and Family Therapy - these losers profess to be at the forefront of the 'changing patters of marital and family relationships,' yet they oppose gay marriages.

Interfaith Coalition on Marriage and Family - and these people are the religious right! They should be shipped off world.

InformationWeek 500 Check out InformationWeek's annual ranking of the top business and technology innovators. The important thing isn't who's on the list, but what the companies on the list are doing, and what are the trends. The entire report is available for purchase from InformationWeek, but you can gleam a lot from the accompanying articles that are on the site.

Ig Nobel Awards The 2003 Ig Nobel awards have just been announced. The highlights:

Engineering - Stapp, Murphy and Nichols for creating Murphy's Law, which states, "If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, someone will do it."

Physics - some Australians for the report, "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces."

Psychology - researchers from the University of Rome and Stanford University for their report "Politicians' Uniquely Simple Personalities."

Chemistry - Hirose for his investigation of a bronze statue that fails to attract pigeons.

Interdisciplinary Research - researchers from Stockholm for the report, "Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans."

Peace - to Lal Bihari or India, who made three accomplishments. 1) for leading an active life after being declared dead; 2) for waging a campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives; and, 3) for creating the Association of Dead People.

Chang & Eng Bunker I just read a short note about the first 'Siamese Twins,' Chang & Eng Bunker. They were born in Siam, and joined at the chest, and continued life thus. They were imported into the US to star in the circus, and later married two sisters from North Carolina. They fathered 21 children, and led pretty full lives, considering the limitations of being joined. Read a most interesting life story (or two when you think about it).