Conservative Sex

Just how far can conservatives extrapolate? Well, with gay marriage, apparently they are tad more liberal with their imaginations than they are ever given credit for. Check out the Canadian Cynic for more.

Make IT Matter

Forrester's Best Practice Report, Make IT Matter For Business Innovation, quotes 2002 survey results of business and IT decision-makers to conclude that "IT organizations have lost their way." While it was recognized that IT is vital to business innovation, only 22% of respondents saw IT as a source of innovation. The usual suspects were dragged out to explain why there is a such a dim view of IT:

• IT is a constraint and lacks flexibility
• IT doesn't meet business expectations
• Support burden continues to increase
• IT wastes energy on prototyping toys with no clear business value.

IT used to be innovative, and can still change. There is significant, untapped value in IT staff that are under-utilized and not called on to be innovative. IT also has to retake its place at the business table, and remind their organizations that they're more than just an expense. Forrester lists key IT assets that are untapped for business innovation as:

Source: Forrester Research.

IT-enabled business innovation is given the following definition by Forrester:

Transforming a business process, market offering, or business model to boost value and impact for the enterprise, customers, or partners.

That definition is further refined by the following qualifying criteria:

Source: Forrester Research.

So how will IT get its groove back? Forrester has a hand 12-step, self-help program for business innovation recovery of IT organizations. After years of cutting, Forrester suggests that IT needs to rebuild its innovation talent, visibility and momentum.

Source: Forrester Research.

How your organization tackles the 12-steps depends on the state of IT, whether its drunkenly falling out of control or sobering to reality, and what type of IT organization it aspires to be. The 12-steps can't be tackled all at once, so there isn't going to be overnight recovery -- and therefore, it is most important for the intestinal fortitude to be there sustaining recovery.

With the short term thinking that organizations excel in, a 12-step recovery program that requires upfront investment and long term planning sounds like it will fail before it starts. That's what the outsourcing vendors and consulting firms count on of course -- organizations inability to do basic long term planning and investing. But, organizations can succeed on the 12-step program if they go for targeted investment, deliver results in the short term and slowly build on their successes.

An older Forrester report that I recently read also sparked similar thoughts. Consumer-Focused Innovation, summarized how forward thinking businesses are leveraging consumers in their innovation processes, to redesign process, develop new products and explore new channels. As I read the report, I couldn't help but draw parallels to the predicament of insourced IT shops that are struggling to "avoid the commodity death spiral." It's a good read in that context.

2006 Application Development

Forrester rolled out the crystal ball for the annual forecast of what the next year might bring -- and on the enterprise application development front, they see a slight shift in focus. Here's what they see coming:

• Governance -- auditability, traceability and accountability. (And I love that word!)
• Collaboration -- to be enabled with new tools for developers.
• High-Fidelity Prototyping -- "Early adopters are proving the value of being able to create near-perfect simulacra of proposed systems." (I love the buzzwords!)
• (Renewal of) Browser as Client -- rich, interactive and zero-footprint deployment apps via architectures such as AJAX.
• No Formal Standards -- formal standards adoption will decline as new technologies deliver more innovation.
• Multilingual Developers -- development languages are not as important as frameworks. Development landscape will become more diverse.

SOA Adoption on the Rise -- the theory should become practice as tools are released.
So, what does this all mean? Not as much as Forrester would probably want you to think. The really big shift the 2006 outlook predicts is the change in focus from formalized standards and locked in language selection, to selecting the right technologies to solve problems. This, coupled with "high-fidelity prototyping" suggests that the frenetic pace to be responsive, to deliver and be a source of innovation has not changed, and will likely increase.

Cost of Maintenance

According to Forrester, application vendors charge between 17-22% of license costs for application maintenance, with Oracle leading the pack. It amounts to re-buying the software every 4-5 years. What do you as a customer, get for such hefty fees? Well, if you call the vendor for help, little to nothing, as your bugs are usually already known and either fixed or on the roadmap for a future release.

For vendors with an acquisition strategy for growth, this is a lucrative revenue stream. Vendors use maintenance fees to fund future development. But what do you care? If your business processes are stable, you've had a few years under your belt with the software already -- so most bugs are known to you -- then you're getting nothing for your maintenance investment. So here's an idea -- stop paying maintenance fees, shore up in-house support and re-buy the software when you want new functionality.

Terror

"Large-scale attacks against civilians continue, women and girls are being raped by armed groups, yet more villages are being burned, and thousands more are being driven from their homes." -- UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in a December 23rd report released at the UN. That is a fitting description of terror, and it is what is being played out in Darfur, Sudan, as armed militia roam unchecked and a power struggle ensues between rebel groups in the region.

The reasons for the conflict is complex -- but that's an excuse for more debate and inaction. It boils down to simply three reasons: race, religion and wealth. Where have we seen this before? Sudan has two peoples: Africans and Arabs. The Arabs are in power and control the wealth of the nation. The rebels of the Darfur region don't think they're being treated well in their own country. To combat the rebels, the Sudanese government armed Arab thugs and released them in Darfur. Read the quote from Annan again. That's the result. The UN has repeatedly called for the Sudanese government to disband the militias, but the government has done nothing. When will the world intervene? The government in Sudan has demonstrated its inability and lack of interest in ending the violence. It isn't looking for a truce or negotiations. The conflict, which started in the fall of 2003, is creating a state of unrest that only helps solidify their grip on power and the nation. It has also created a disaster that relief agencies and struggling to cope with, as refugees flee their homes to camps ill-equipped to handle them. The world is spending money and effort trying to deal with a refugee problem that is growing, yet is doing little to close the wound.

Where is the coalition of the willing? Nowhere. It is Africans after all that is suffering.

Mother Teresa vs. Bill Gates

Scott Adams asks the question on his blog: "Who is holier – Mother Teresa or Bill Gates?" It's a tongue and cheek question, with Adams just out for a few laughs in his post. (He goes on to ask is Santa Claus fought Jesus, who'd win?)

If we take the first question a little serious for a minute, it does become an interesting one. Not the holy part -- but a little rephrasing, "Who has had a more positive impact on the world – Mother Teresa or Bill Gates?" (I happen to believe that holiness is irrelevant -- irrelevant to living a life and irrelevant to each person's personal relationship with whatever god they believe in.) Mother Teresa dedicated her life to the poor in India, and in the process, gave to many that have nothing. Bill Gates on the other had, has targeted some of his fortunes on eradicating certain diseases, etc. Along the way, they've both influenced others with their positive work.

It's a question that has an answer in time. Today, the answer is Mother Teresa. She lives in the world culture, epitomizing the best of humanity. She has influenced the moral fibre of countless, inspiring to make little changes, give a little, be a humanitarian. We see in Mother Teresa, the best of what we can be. She continues to inspire and lead. Bill Gates on the other hand hasn't had the benefit of time. He's saddled with a multinational conglomerate with capitalist-totalitarian aspirations. I think he can reconcile his humanitarian ideals with his capitalistic aspirations, but thus far he's been sending a mixed message. He's for curing diseases -- but for truly helping the third world, he stops short when there are conflicts of interests with Microsoft. He inspires, but only the brotherhood of the rich. Gates has hardly reached the common folk as an example.

[I got to this after reading Ted Demopoulos' post on the topic.]

Bloggers Are Savage Children

This post is to introduce you to an idiot, a stupid person, a person in need of a lobotomy: Kathleen Parker, of the Orlando Sentinel, who did a recent piece on the blogosphere. She hates us bloggers. She's vicious. She's scared and on the defense. She holds herself above us, proclaiming journalists as the ideal models of integrity ... OK ... I'll stop there, cause you're laughing now. [This post was brought to you via the Canadian Cynic and Think Progress.]

Procrastination

Paul Graham has written an interesting article on procrastination. Graham postulates that

there are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important.

He contends that the last variant is actually good procrastination. Type-C is the procrastinator that puts off the "small stuff to work on big stuff." The small is the stuff that you will never be remembered for when you die -- it's the work that is nothing more than errands in your life. Of course, putting off some of the small stuff could have a material and emotional cost, and could lead to you paying a hefty price later on. However, Graham suggests that even putting off some of that small stuff and paying the price in order to work on the big stuff will put you further ahead at the end. You simply can't do it all. If you're working on the small stuff, it invariably means you're not working on other things. You only have so many hours. If you want to kill something great, remind yourself of all the errands that must be done first before you can start or really commit to the great thing.

For the corporation, Graham labels office workers as Type-B procrastinators -- interrupt-driven people. They are the most dangerous type of people. They let errands consume their daily work lives instead of applying their time to real work. Think of the number of hours you've wasted on meetings that could have done without you. Think of the churn that ensues when the boss mentions that idea s/he has had. Type-B is worse when it's not acknowledged as procrastination, but rather, as work. Accomplishments are being made -- just the wrong ones.

Graham suggests that we all ask ourselves and those around us, the question Richard Hamming of Bell Labs used to ask:

What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?

Some related reading that Graham and his commenters referenced:

• You and Your Research -- talk by Richard Hamming
• Thinking as a Hobby -- William Golding [PDF]

Of Superfluids and Quark Stars

Researchers at Rice University have managed to achieve superfluidity with supercooled fermions in the lab. Fermions are the fundamental particles that constitute matter, coming as leptons and quarks, and having half-integer spins. (While Bosons are the particles that mediate the forces, such as photons, W vector, gluons and gravitons, and have integer spins.) There are of course, the composite particles that come as fermions or bosons -- without getting into a long explanation that I would probably screw up, let's just say it's all about the total spin of the particles and leave it as that. Full integer spin means a particle is a boson -- half integer spin means it's a fermion. In this case, the researchers used lithium-6 atoms -- fermions.

Source: The Particle Adventure

When cooled to near absolute zero, it has been predicted that fermions with equal but opposite spins would attract each other, forming pairs and behaving like a single particle. This change of phase allows superfluidity and superconductivity to occur.

In a superfluid, occurring in materials that are not electrically charged, there is zero viscosity, zero entropy and infinite thermal conductivity. While in a superconductor, in materials carrying an electrical charge, electrons can traverse the material without interacting with it -- there is no electrical resistance, and no interior magnetic field (you've probably seen the cool experiments where a magnet levitates due to this property). What is most interesting in this experiment, is that the researchers allowed the fermionic pairing to be unbalanced -- thus leaving some particles unpaired. Remarkably, the lithium-6 gas behaved just as would be expected if there was a complete pairing of fermions. This goes a step beyond what an MIT team had accomplished earlier this year.

What does this all mean? Who knows. It's nothing that's ready to have real world applications, but it does provide a platform for further studying of superfluids and superconductors. There is also speculation that the results from this experiment present the type of exotic matter found larger neutron stars, known as quark stars.

Better Than People

Japan is a country in some serious population trouble. Since the end of WWII, there was been a decline in the birth rate, and an increase in the aging population. The total population is expected to peak in 2006, and then enter a period of depopulation for the next 50-years. This period will be a live experiment for the social scientists, as they observe a dwindling youth population cope with an ever increasing aging population. Will Japan's society survive?

Japan is a very insular country -- hardly open to foreigners. (The only country that's more closed to foreigners is probably Korea.) It is a cultural thing, and it goes way back. The culture frowns on interracial marriages for instance, as there still a stigma attached to non-Japanese. Basically, the darker your skin, the more contempt you're viewed with. It's nothing short of racism. (Related reading: The Minority Interracial Couples -- a report reviewing the marriage patterns of ethnic minorities in California.) So barring a sudden change in the social norm in Japan, just how will they balance the load of the aging population on the backs on their youth?

Answer: robots. Japan is forging ahead, spending billions on R&D to make robots look, feel and act more human. Why? The Japanese are more at ease with robots than they are with people. Japan has been groomed on a culture that is accepting of robots -- from Astro Boy and his ilk to the native religion, Shintoism. For a pretty good article on the subject, check out Better than people in the latest issue of the Economist.

Modern Darwinism

The Economist is carrying a nice short essay on the story of humans. It serves as a short introduction to where Darwinism is today. The great lesson of Darwinism is that the strongest, fittest, will always survive. It's a great lesson for capitalist societies, where success is measured by how competitive one can be. But how to explain collaboration? According to social Darwinism, collaboration and competition coexist, pushing and pulling against each other -- neither one truly gaining total control. Human societies evolved collaboration through social interaction, and have worked out ways of ensuring its success. More collaboration occurs between individuals or groups that work together for shared success -- those that cheat, receive less collaboration, or are punished.

Humans may have evolved to be humans in the savannah or jungle, but humanity most likely evolved in society.

Peek-a-Boo

There's been a great amount of noise made recently about Bush's authorization for the NSA to eavesdrop on telecommunications without court approval. The authorization was given after 9/11, to allow spy agency to quickly narrow the scope on suspected terrorists. The Bush administration has steadfastly held that such ability to gather and analyze information is required for rapid response to suspected terrorism action. Critics have charged that the measures the spy agencies have taken violate civil liberties and privacy of Americans. Now, the New York Times that those early reports of the Bush administration enthusiasm, were only skimming the surface. What the NSA has been doing is nothing short of data mining the telecommunications flowing across the network backbone. The NSA has gained the cooperation of the major network carriers in gathering, analyzing and applying pattern recognition algorithms to data on just about every bit of electronic communications.

Now, did anybody seriously ever think that such things weren't actually happening? To a certain extent, if such things weren't happening, I'd be really worried. The James Bond era of gathering data via people in the field has been losing ground to more and more electronic surveillance for sometime. Spying on the bad guys, suspected bad guys and just plain looking for trouble before trouble finds us is a good thing. It should be happening. What I find troubling is the lack of oversight. Who's watching the watchmen? Here's where things get real murky for the Bush administration. Bush's response to such questions has typically been of the "trust me" nature. That's enough to leave 50% of American's coughing nervously -- for the rest of the world, that's probably closer to 100% -- especially as the New York Times is reporting that more and more international-to-international communications is flowing across American based telecommunications infrastructure.

Spying is good. Without oversight, it's bad. Part of that oversight should be metrics to assess whether the price freedom is paying for catching the bad guys is actually worth it. For all the spying that the Americans have been doing, I'd hope that someone is looking at their success rates and determining if it's all worth it. Maybe it is. Maybe it's not.

Do They Know It's Christmas?

Northern Kenya has been living with a three-month drought that has already taken the lives of people and livestock. Northern Kenya is an arid and hard place to live in, bordering with Ethiopia and Somalia -- it's also the poorest part of a nation that has one of the strongest economy in East Africa. With the arrival of the Christmas season, the attention of the nation has been turned to north, and criticism has been thrown at a government that has shown little compassion for the poor and dying -- until now that is. In a speech on Christmas eve, the Kenyan president has promised $40M in aid to the north, and has made an appeal to the international community to provide what aid they can.

Meanwhile, the world is set to wish Zambia a bad new year, as the UN has received no donations to fund food-aid for Zambian refugees in 2006. The refugees, fleeing from war torn neighbours of Zambia, have no where to go, and there is no long term hope for them unless the civil wars that rage in Angola and the Congo are brought to an end. Since there is no concerted effort by the international community to end the fighting, hope really is lost. Without food-aid for the refugees, hell will get a lot worse in Zambia. The UN is warning of starvation leading to deaths, as well as an upsurge of disease such as HIV/AIDS, as women and girls sell their bodies for food.

Well, tonight thank God it's them instead of you.

Top 10 Science Breakthroughs of 2005

Science magazine has published their top 10 science breakthroughs of 2005. Here it is as stolen from BBC News:

1. Winner: Evolution in action [PDF]. Genome sequencing and painstaking field observations shed light on the intricacies of how evolution works. (Related: Is the "Big Bang" in Animal Evolution Real? [PDF])
2. Runner up [PDF]: Planetary blitz. Europe's Huygens probe touched down on Saturn's moon Titan in January. It was joined by a fleet of other explorers, including Nasa's Deep Impact, which smashed a hole in a comet.
3. In bloom. Molecular biologists pinned down several of the molecular cues responsible for spring's vibrant burst of colour.
4. Neutron stars. Satellites and ground telescopes shed light on the violent behaviour of neutron stars; city-sized corpses of stars that pack matter into an extreme state.
5. Miswiring the brain. Researchers gained clues about the mechanisms of disorders such as schizophrenia, dyslexia and Tourrete's syndrome.
6. Complicated Earth. Comparisons of rocks from Earth and outer space forced scientists to scrap long-held views of how our planet formed.
7. Protein portrait. Scientists got their best look yet at the molecular structure of a voltage-gated potassium channel.
8. Change of climate. More evidence implicating human activities in global warming was presented, the magazine said. (Related: Tiny Bubbles Tell All [PDF])
9. Systems biology. Molecular biologists are looking to engineering in order to understand the behaviour of complex systems.
10. Bienvenue Iter. After 18 months of wrangling, the $12bn International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) got a home: Cadarache in France.

It's ironic to see evolution take the top honours, especially since 2005 has also been the year it came vehement attacks from the ignoramus-religious-creationist-unintelligent-design-freaks. Breakthroughs in 2005 reconfirms -- as if it was needed -- evolution as the foundation for biology. Much of the new findings was from genetic studies that showed how, at the fundamental biological level, life changes over time. It was exciting times for biological science.

Top 10 Weirdest Case Mods

fosfor gadgets has a year end list of the top weirdest case mods out there. Just when your old beige PC isn't good enough for you -- and you've got a bit of spare time on your hands .... The top 10 in reverse order: 10) The Microwave PC, 9) The Wallcrawler, 8) The WMD (my fave, pictured below), 7) The R2D2 PC, 6) The Lego Mac, 5) The Cyberpumpkin, 4) The Y2K Bug, 3) The Gingerbread PC, 2) The Toilet PC, and ... drum roll please, 1) The Miss Kanna PC (a PC built into a lifesized manga doll. Definitely some weird stuff!

"Pope delights crowds with Santa look ..."

... and scares the shit out of the rest of the world that actually have eyeballs connected to their brains. I'm not sure if the poopy-one was actually trying to pull off the Santa look by donning the camauro -- but I'm sure the similarities must have dawned on at least one of the sparks at the Vatican. The only problem is, the poopy-one stunk as Santa. Santa is a jolly fellow. Poop Benny looks like the Grinch.

Hats off to Eric over at The Panic Blog for bringing this one to my attention.

Stardust 06-01-15

NASA's Stardust spacecraft is set to return to Earth on January 15, 2006. Stardust has travelled 2.88 billion miles on its trip to Comet Wild. Along the way, it not only took samples of Comet Wild, but also of interstellar dust. Stardust itself won't land on Earth, but will instead drop its sample return capsule, which will brake its descent using parachutes and land in Utah, at the US Army's Dugway Proving Ground.

Juniper Sues

What do you do when anonymous users on the internet bad mouth you? Well, if you're a company like Juniper, you do the very, very stupid thing of suing. Yes, in the old world, defamation meant you sue. You could get away with silencing your critics because critical thought and their publication did not exist in a democracy. Forget it, there was no fair and unbiased media. Oh, but how the world change. Of all the companies in the world, you'd think Juniper would have this figured out. They, after all, help move the internet traffic around the world. You'd think they'd know all about the new world we now find ourselves in. In this new world, gagging your critics is the response of the guilty -- regardless of what the truth is. Trying to silence critics on a democratic medium like the internet just means handing more ammunition to your critics. Even if you win, you lose. Before you know it, there will be a groundswell of supporters for your critics. No matter what you do, the underdog will be championed. The little guy in this case will win the moral victory. If you think your critics are wrong, challenge them with words -- haul out the propaganda machine -- just don't try to hit them over the head.

Shame on you Juniper. I now believe your critics, and you've already lost the moral battle.

Google + AOL

Google has beaten Microsoft to the punch in tieing a small knot with AOL. Both Google and Microsoft have been sniffing around AOL for sometime, eyeing it's lucrative user base and advertisement business. Google has been a long time AOL partner -- quite a percentage of their revenue from AOL. Google acknowledged AOL's value to them this week by sinking $1B into AOL and agreeing to take a 5% stake in the company. Part of the new relationship calls for a lot of integration between AOL and Google's offerings.

King Kong

I was out with the crew from work tonight to add my few cents to Peter Jackson's coffers for his latest offering, King Kong. This outing of Kong was an amazing adventure film. It had monsters -- big monsters -- just about everything was big, except the people running from them. It had action -- more than just the big monsters chasing people -- there were monster fights. There was also the requisite humour, pulled off by Jackson, even in the scenes where you were at the edge of your seat. The first 30-minutes of the movie moved slowly -- but when it started moving, Jackson didn't give you excuses to blink. It was a heart-thumping 3-hour ride.

Best of all however, it was a love story. King Kong has always been a love story, although it has been reduced many times to a monster flick by those without the storytelling talent. In the versions of King Kong I've seen, I don't think any filmmaker came as close to Jackson's version, in getting Kong to express so much -- to communicate so much, and so well with the audience, without speaking. After you've taken away all the effects, the roller-coaster ride -- you will have left the love story, and Kong saying so much with his eyes, his expressions and his body language. At the end of the movie -- and there is no surprise with the ending of this movie -- you will be moved to tears, even though you knew what was coming. It was a great movie, and will certainly bear repeat viewing.

EnviroPublishing

I was reading the latest issue of idea&s: the arts & science review from UofT, when I came across the following on the inside cover:

Printed on Mohawk Options: the paper is made from 100% post-consumer reclaimed fibre, uses process chlorine-free pulp and is manufactured entirely with wind-generated electricity. It is certified in accordance with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

So, how come more publications can't take advantage of paper and publishing like this?

Dust Devil

Dust Devil surprised me. I expected the standard fare in horror movies, it turned out that Dust Devil wasn't just a horror movie. It was a bit mystical, a bit fantasy -- and yes, a bit horror too, but don't let that distract you. The movie is set in South Africa, although some scenes were shot in Namibia. It follows Inspector Ben Mukurob, played by Zakes Mokae, who's tracking a serial killer through the desert towards the western coast and the sea. As Mukurob investigates, the case becomes more and more mysterious. The murders seem to be ritualistic in nature -- and murders of the pattern he's seeing have been recorded for since the early 20th century. The killer, played by Robert Burke, has been stalking his latest victim, Wendy Robinson, played by Chelsea Field, across the desert. Wendy is running from her husband and when she encounters the Dust Devil, she takes him to be a nice guy -- until she finds his collection of fingers from his former victims. The scene is then set for the showdown between Mukurob, the Dust Devil and Wendy.

Behind the horror, the movie also provided social commentary on racism in South Africa. The uneasy coexistence of the races gave the movie a quiet, but powerful tension. It charged different scenes with a disturbing undercurrent that at times was more unsettling than what the Dust Devil was doing. Mukurob is a black inspector with white officers under him -- yet his position of authority grants him nothing in their eyes. When he stops two corporals from beating a black, handcuffed witness in a jail cell, you could read what wasn't being said. They knew that if the Inspector was white, there would be no problem. You could also see them deliberating whether they should attack him too. In one scene, Wendy's car is stuck. She gets help from a black man to push it -- and she takes off. Once she could move, she didn't stick around to give him the chance to take advantage of a white woman. Wendy's husband, a former soldier in the South African army, is beaten mercilessly for appearing by mistake in an all black bar, instead of going in on the all white side of the bar. Mukurob is even told by a shaman, played by John Matshikiza, that he needs to stop being a white man in order to fight the Dust Devil -- he needs to start being a (black) man in order to understand the spirit world.

The cinematography is superb. There is long stretches of empty roads with the desert on either side -- desolate and barren. Sand is everywhere, dry with a melancholy personality -- sculpting the landscape with a sad beauty. There is one scene where Wendy and the Dust Devil are at the precipice, overlooking the sinuous Fish River Canyon (second largest after the Grand Canyon) -- the Dust Devil describes it as being made by some god that crawled into the world. It is a primordial and awe inspiring land. The tone and imagery of the desert is dreamlike -- which the movie plays with a lot. What is real and unreal doesn't matter -- only possibilities do. The ghosts from the characters past haunt their present, as if looking for some conclusion, appearing in their dreams to haunt the present with guilt. Similarly, the abandoned and dying towns that the Dust Devil visits are almost characters in their own right -- their ghosts almost palpable in the movie. It all works -- the desert landscape; the towns abandoned or falling into economic ruin; the sand that is everywhere; the decay of the social condition; and the story of the Dust Devil. It all comes alive with sad and eerie beauty.

If you're looking for something a little scary, a little haunting, check out Dust Devil. Chances are, you won't be disappointed.

Stoop and Scoop

My wife and I went for a short walk in a neighbourhood park this afternoon. I wanted to take some pictures, but it wasn't quite the day for winter photography. What we did find however, were a lot of dogs, out walking with their owners. Two groups we ran into, had dogs racing up to us for some attention, then racing back away from us. They were having fun. We also saw a lot of evidence that other dogs had been in the park since the last snow fall. Yellow stained snow, dog shit interrupting the white blanket of snow -- and stupid owners that decided to "stoop and scoop" -- but then, they hung their disgusting shopping bags from the branches of the trees in the park.

Dogs I can forgive. They're just being dogs. But the dog owners in the park today .... WTF's wrong with you people?! Since you seem to lack common sense, are you also illiterate? Can't you read the fucking signs?! (And leash your dogs before they hurt someone or themselves.)

Duh ...

Just how stupid is your average consumer? They would be if they don't find this advertisement a little insulting. My wife found it in the Toronto Star today. Not sure which genius came up with it, but they should hauled out and flogged publicly.

Sophie Germain

Sophie Germain (1776-1831) is considered one of the world's greatest mathematicians -- she studied math at a time when it was considered a man's profession, and French society did everything it could to discourage her research. She was well respected and acknowledged by Carl Friedrich Gauss and Joseph-Louis Lagrange -- the latter taking her on as a student. Some of her most important contributions to mathematics was in searching for a proof for Fermat's Last Theorm and creating a mathematical explanation for observed elasticity behaviour found in Chladni figures. Germain spent her lifetime on the periphery of mathematics and science, never fully accepted, never fully attaining the level of training she wished to have and never taken seriously. Her final work on elasticity was ignored and not published until it was found nearly 50-years after her death. Germain died of breast cancer, and her death certificate listed her as a property holder -- not a mathematician or scientist.

2004 XR190

First observed in December of 2004, 2004-XR190 is a newly discovered Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) that is just plain weird. It lies way out there, around 52-62 AU from the Sun -- but has what appears to be a complete circular orbit with a 47-degree inclination from solar plane. This means that it spends only 2% of its orbit in the solar plane, where most surveys for KBOs are done. Ideas have been dropped to explain the large eccentricity of the orbit, but none that are sticking.

Tolls on the Internet

Try this concept on for size. In order for you to surf to Yahoo's rich media site, or Google's highly efficient search engine, a fee is added to your broadband monthly invoice -- or your ISP delivers a bill to Yahoo and Google -- or worse than those two scenarios, your broadband provider makes a deal with a media or search service, opens the tap their sites, while throttling back the pipe to the competition. Why, after all, should the ISPs allow unrestricted use of their networks, when they can make more money with restricted access?

It would be akin to taking your bandwidth hostage, and that's exactly what some of the new economy internet services fear, as pointed out in this BusinessWeek article. The broadband service providers deny they're even thinking about this -- but do you really believe them? Get ready for the end of the free for all on the internet. Coming soon will be a fragmented internet, where you will have to pay for speedy, unrestricted access.

When Love Comes to Town

Tonight Toronto got its first big snow fall for the winter. It's still snowing out there, and weather people are having their moment. They're experiencing nothing less than rapture at being the centre of predicting the end of the world. The drive -- which I hardly ever do, unless I need the car at work -- was slow, coming home. I plugged the "pee-three" player into the car stereo and randomly selected a tune.

U2's When Love Comes to Town (Live from the Kingdom Mix) came deliriously through the speakers at me -- and for the seven minutes and twenty-nine seconds it played, I was the one in rapture. I suppose you need to be U2 fan. And if you haven't heard this version, I suppose you haven't been picking up the CD singles, because this track was included on one of them.

Take a listen to a low sample rip of it: When Love Comes to Town (Live from the Kingdom Mix). This version features the vocals of BB King and Little Richard, as well as the boys from U2.

Chimps vs. Humans

The NY Times is reporting on a recent study that pitted human children against chimps to figure out how we learn. Chimps were put through their paces to open an opaque box to get to food in a previous study. They were shown the steps they needed to take to open a door in the box. The steps included unnecessary steps. Surprisingly, when the chimps were given the same routine with transparent boxes, they saw that the unnecessary steps did nothing, so they skipped them and went straight for the prize. When those experiments were repeated with children, they imitated what they were taught even when they could reason that some steps were irrelevant.

Does this make chimps smarter thank kids? Not necessarily. It does tell us a few things about cognitive processes however. Chimps focus on their goal, while children are hardwired to learn by imitation. Probably goes some length in explaining why it's hard to change something that's been learned, no matter how logical it is to make the change.

Related reading:

• Causal knowledge and imitation/emulation switching in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens) [PDF] -- Horner & Whiten, Journal of Animal Cognition.

Food Aid

Here's a question for you ... Do you think we're actually helping people at the brink of famine by sending them emergency aid? If you really think about it, it starts to get downright confusing. We can't help trying to be heroes -- or at least, give ourselves that pat on the back for doing a good deed -- especially if it was just easy to pull off. But when it comes to real heroic efforts, do we just cave at the required effort? Again, the answer you might get when you really think about it, might surprise you.

In the short term, yes, we make a difference. There are starving mouths that needs feeding. Children, the elderly and the sick and poor. Without food they are the first to die off. In the long term, they need to live to sustain a society. Yes, saving lives is good in the short term too -- and that's why we do it. We need to keep doing it. But we also need to do the real heroic stuff. Sending food is easy. Making sure that in the long term, we don't need to keep sending food -- that's the challenge. We need to be able to provide help for countries on the brink to recover, and sustain an independence in provisioning the basics to their population. A country can be poor, but can also be self-sustaining. We don't tackle these challenges however.

Why?

Our attention span for one. We move from one disaster to another, pulling people back just in the nick of time, then move on. We're also not motivated economically to help anyone but ourselves in the short term. The only thing that causes us to swoop in when there is a disaster, is the few humanitarians amongst us that just won't shut up -- and perhaps a little guilt we feel from time to time. We don't think long term, because if we did, we'd realize that giving people help so they can sustain themselves in the long term is actually good for us economically. Put simply: if they could feed themselves, we could stop sending food for free to them; if they could feed themselves, they'd be more productive; if they were more productive, maybe they'd generate some meager income; and if they had money, we could sell them stuff they don't really want. The great circle of capitalist life! Hooray to globalization! It would be nice if we could also stop them from being distracted with the need to keep killing themselves so they wouldn't screw with the great capitalist plan.

Unfortunately, we appear to be too dumb to grasp that giving them the means to sustain themselves will eventually open their wallets to us. It would seem to me that that would be a great motivator to base tenet that really drives us: greed. It seems however that greed is also a double edge sword. Short term greed. Ever wonder about the amount of money tied up in delivering the food to those on the brink of famine? It takes a lot of money to get aid to where it is needed each year. So why would those with a vested interest in making money delivering short term fixes want to see sustaining happen?

Related reading:

• Malawi food experts question emergency aid system - from Reuters.
  
• Dependency and humanitarian relief: a critical analysis - from the Humanitarian Policy Group.
  
• UN World Food Programme reports of Food Aid.
  
• Hunger and the Globalized System of Trade and Food Production - from the Global Policy Forum.
  
• US Food Aid: Time to Get it Right [PDF].

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

We actually made it out as a family to see The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, tonight. Although that wasn't the plan. We were going to catch it later this month, and see the Harry Potter movie tonight, but due to a mix up, The Chronicles of Narnia presented itself instead.

The movie is not LOTR -- although it may be a junior. It was made for a younger audience, but a great story is a great story, and the movie brought it to life very well. The actors pulled off their parts without a problem -- especially Georgie Henley (10-years old), who played Lucy, and Tilda Swinton, who played the White Witch. The effects were tremendous -- so good, that they were seamlessly integrated into the movie. All around, this is a great film -- worth the price at the theatre, and will bear repeated watching.

Happy Tail Ale

Happy Tail Ale. The site describes it as:

Non-alcoholic and non-carbonated, our Happy Tail Ale is the ultimate liquid refreshment for your best friend. Our brew is made with choice malted barley and filtered water, featuring all-natural beef flavorings. Plus, it's fortified with Glucosamine and Vitamin E!

What is it? It's beer for dogs. I kid you not!

Windows Live Local

Microsoft isn't sitting idly by and letting Google eat their breakfast, lunch or dinner -- they're fighting back in true Microsoft fashion -- copying the competition and building on what's already out there. Windows Live Local is Microsoft's version of Google Local, which provides localized information via their map and search engines. Check them out and decide which best serves you.

Google Transit

Another Google Labs product has made it to prime time, in beta. Google Transit proposes to give you transit trip planning information to help you get from point A to B. The site gives you departure and arrival times; estimated time for walking; and does a cost comparison between taking the public transit and driving. Current beta version only seems to have Portland, Oregon information, but I expect that Google will provide more cities as Google Transit proves itself.

Google: any information, anywhere, at any time. Way cool!

The People Under the Stairs

Wes Craven's the People Under the Stairs is a classic horror flick from one of the masters. It's horror, with a touch of humour added, making it all the more entertaining. It's not a serious movie by any means. Brandon Quintin Adams stars as Fool, a kid with a sick mom, living in a run down apartment building in a neighbourhood left behind by success. His family is about to be evicted because they've missed a monthly payment, and Fool needs money -- so he agrees to a plan with Leroy, played by Ving Rhames, to rob the family that owns his apartment building. That's when things go wrong. The family that owns his building are way, way out there.

To start with, it's a brother and sister, who refer to each other as Mom and Dad -- played by Wendy Robie and Everett McGill. They have a child living with them, Alice -- played by A.J. Langer -- that they had kidnapped because Mom wanted a child. They beat and torture her -- never letting her out of the house -- never letting her have friends. Alice lives in fear. When Fool and Leroy breaks into the house, they get a lot more than they bargain for. For starters, Mom and Dad return home early, and Fool and Leroy can find no way out. They house is totally secured. All windows are bolted, locked and secured from the outside. Not to prevent people from entering, but to prevent people from leaving. What follows is a mad chase through the house -- first by the dog that has a craving for human flesh, then by Dad, dressed in leather outfit and firing a shotgun. Leroy falls, but Fool manages to escape with a little help from Alice and her friend, Roach, played by Sean Whalen.

It seems that Alice isn't the only one trapped in the house. Mom and Dad, and whoever before them, have been kidnapping children and when they misbehave, dumping them in the basement to fend for themselves -- feeding them the flesh of hapless victims that made the mistake to knock on their door. Roach escaped from the basement, but since the house is secure, can't escape the house, so he roams the passageways between the walls. He leads Fool and Alice away from Mom and Dad -- but no for long, as the hunt is on. Mom finally figures out that Alice has been a bad girl, and gives the blood thirsty Dad free reign to punish her -- the only ones in his way are Fool and Roach. Can they fend off an crazy and angry Dad? Can they survive the dog that has tasted human flesh? Can they find a way out of the house before they too fall victims to the madness of Mom and Dad?

Like I said, the movie is an entertaining horror -- with slapstick humour that will make you laugh despite yourself. The actors pull off their roles very well. McGill is great with bloodthirsty madness. Adams and Langer are amazing for young actors -- they were 12 and 17 when the movie was filmed. Wes Craven kept the film at a good frenetic pace. His "Mom and Dad" characters are freaky. Overall, the film was great, and worthy for a Friday, late night watching with a big bowl of popcorn.

International Criminal Court to Probe Darfur

The UN refers to Darfur, Sudan, as one of the worse humanitarian crises on the planet, with a high number of murders, mass rapes and other crimes. This past March, the UN Security Council directed prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Moreno Ocampo, to investigate allegations. The UN handed over evidence and directed Ocampo to suspects. Unfortunately, Ocampo has not been able to interview witnesses inside Sudan, and has had to rely on witnesses that have escaped the country. Further, he doesn't think he has the ability to protect witnesses that come forward, especially since some of the suspects are within Sudan's government and military. There seems to be little hope for the ICC to make inroads into the atrocities being committed in Durfur.

It is interesting to note that the ICC, created in 1998 by the Rome Treaty, has only been ratified by 100 countries so far. It was specifically created as a permanent global war crimes t