Circular swimming in mice after exposure to a high magnetic field
by T.A. and C.E. Houpt

Paper and PDF can’t really show the effect directly, so here is a video of a mouse swimming immediately after exposure to the magnet. The output of Tracker is overlaid on the raw video to highlight the counter-clockwise looping. As the paper notes, the effect quickly wears off.

Tom did most of the work of designing, executing, analyzing, plotting and writing up of the experiment. On experiment days at FSU’s Magnet Lab, Tom’s mentor and long-time magneto-collaborator, Dr. Jim Smith, helped with the magnet rigging equipment. I helped with the camera setup and then wrote the Tracker program to extract data from the raw video. Lab Tech Breyda Ortega helped with mouse wrangling.

With this publication, I’m right on track for my goal of one scientific paper per decade! Samizdat reprints are available on request.

*The publication date on the issue’s cover is today, June 16th, but it appears that P&B posts its issues a month ahead of time. You’d think that the scientific press would be above the crass ploys of the commercial magazine industry, but apparently not. If I can’t trust the date on the outside of a scientific journal, how can I trust the data inside?

Before there was Steampunk, there was just Steam (the Steam Rally at Fengate, July 1979).

221.x.x.x - - [09/Mar/2010:09:18:29 -0800] "GET /lynxlet/ HTTP/1.1" 200 3355 "http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q=mac+os+lynx&btnG=Google+%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&aq=f&oq=" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; zh-CN; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6"

Ironically, the second to last hit from Google China was using Google’s own Chrome browser, but it is likely a foreigner because the browser is using English:

121.x.x.x - - [24/Feb/2010:07:38:36 -0800] "GET /validator-sac/ HTTP/1.1" 200 3137 "http://www.google.cn/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=validator-sac" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_2; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.322.2 Safari/533.1"

One solution is to setup a reboot job in your cron table, like this:

@reboot         echo 'Uh oh, a Reboot!'

Now, every time the system is rebooted you will get an email, and you will be better able to interpret or fix any problems that show up.

One caveat is that @reboot jobs are run whenever the cron daemon starts, so false positives are possible. However, in practice the cron daemon is almost never restarted on its own.

Boing Boing recently noted the satirical McSweeney’s piece “Leaping off the Page” by Ben Greenman that proposed a 3D typographic system, 3*TYPE, which would allow simple prose to meet the challenges of the Avatar-inspired 3D revolution. However, where would satire be without farce? So taking things to their natural extreme, I present “HTML in 3D!” which implements the 3*TYPE process for any web page.

HTML in 3D is a bookmarklet and CSS stylesheet that produce a anaglyph stereoscopic 3D effect for common HTML text elements (headers, links, etc). It should work in most modern browsers (i.e. probably not IE). Put on some anaglyph red-blue 3D glasses and  click the link to see this post in headache-inducing 3D:

3D!

How to use the bookmarklet elsewhere:

• Drag the 3D! link above to your browser’s bookmark bar
• Load any web page
• Don anaglyph red-blue 3D glasses
• Click the 3D! bookmark, and watch the HTML pop!

Thanks to GEKE.NET for the CSS Bookmarklet Maker.

The Daily Show Full Episodes RSS Feed

The Colbert Report Full Episode RSS Feed

The feeds update every hour, although the shows only appear the morning after their cable broadcast. The shell, XSL (and sed!) source can be viewed in the full-episode feed directory.

Eurasian Lynx by Michaelphillipr

I finally got around to converting Lynxlet from Ye Olde CVS repository into Subversion. By default the cvs2svn tool uses the customary trunk/branch/tag naming. I’ve never much like this naming scheme, in part because “tag” breaks the botanical morphology theme (shouldn’t it be trunk/branch/leaf?)

Since Lynx are carnivores, I decided mammalian anatomy would be more appropriate. So now main development is done on the “snout”, speculative versions are on “tails” and snap-shots of individual releases are “paw-prints.” See where Lynxlet’s snout leads it at the Habilis Public Subversion Repositories.

The Sheep Enterprise: How to establish and maintain the farm flock
Circular 657 (revised version of Circular 534)
University of Illinois, College of Agriculture, Extension Service in Agriculture and Home Economics
By W. G. Kammlade and U. S. Garrigus
May, 1950

PDF with searchable text, 8 MB, 48 Pages, slightly chewed by mice.

Although I understand the motivation behind URL-based session-ids (support cookie-less users), it seems inconceivable that all billion of these pages actually need cross-page state, even for casual/anonymous visitors (including search engine robots). I wonder how much bandwidth, memory and processing power are wasted to create empty session objects and shuffling around useless JSessionIDs in URLs and cookies.

My good friend Ken Bowen is launching a web project on new year’s day: a blog named “Written in Glory”  at 54th-mass.org. “Written in Glory” is a historical reenactment/reproduction of the year 1863 using the letters and memoirs of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of free black men that was created to fight in the American Civil War. Almost every day for the next year, letters from the officers and soldiers of the 54th will be posted on the same day of the year the letters were penned in 1863. Readers can subscribe and follow the story of the 54th’s first year in the real-time of 1863 (i.e. letters delivered by horse and steam, and news by telegraph.)

I’ve had a front-row seat to the construction of the site. Ken scanned, OCR-ed and proofed letters, memoirs, photographs and maps, as well as trawled the New York Times archive of 1863 for relevant articles. The site itself is built on WordPress with some unique customizations. For example, historic maps are listed for each post based on the current location of the 54th and any locations mentioned in the post. Serializing history like this is a great way to get a sense of the scale and difficulty of life and war in the 1800s.