07 Oct 2005
Why Does the Extreme Right Love Cancer?

Unbelievable...

The Family Research Council is concerned that vaccinating against HPV might encourage kids to have sex. This is probably a legitimate concern-- I know that when I got a tetanus vaccine, the first thing I wanted to do was to run out and play on rusty manure-spreading farm equipment in an effort to get as many puncture wounds as possible.

(link) [morons.org]

00:00 /Politics | 4 comments | permanent link

Pagan Benefit Shot Down

Remember this brouhaha? Who's heartless now?

Pagans on Colorado's plains wanted to give St. Jude Children's Research Hospital a helping hand but say they got a slap in the face.

(link) [Rocky Mountain News]

via Letter From Hardscrabble Creek

00:00 /Asatru | 0 comments | permanent link

Single-play DVDs a Hoax

Well, I think my $100 is safe. Sometimes the "new media" can be just as credulous as the mainstream variety.

Ed Bott's blog states that in relation to a previously posted slashdot story "a hoax can spread just as fast as a genuine news story. That's the lesson from the bogus story published in an obscure UK business magazine yesterday that claimed Microsoft is about to unleash a new single-play DVD format. Paul Thurrott reprinted the story without giving credit to the original source. Bink.nu picked up the story from Paul and reprinted it verbatim. Techdirt commented on the original story, with attribution but without any fact-checking. So did John Walkenbach. The funny part? There's no truth to the story. None whatsoever. In fact, the original story sparked a flurry of e-mails around Microsoft as people in different groups tried to figure out where on earth this story came from. After the head-scratching stopped, a spokesmen told me, they concluded that the story was not true. "It appears to be confusing an existing feature within Windows Media DRM that allows for single-play of promotional digital material. This has been an option for content owners to use for some time for the Windows Media format - it does not apply to MPEG2 content found on DVDs.

(link) [Slashdot]

00:00 /Copywrongs | 1 comment | permanent link

Course puts the science into evaluating animal welfare

You know, there's nothing wrong with having academics look at issues of animal (or human) welfare and happiness - but there's something seriously flawed with the thought processes that claim to measure "happiness" scientifically, in either animals or humans. It's tough to measure what you can't define.

I see these kinds of efforts as the ultimate grasp at philosophy by an utterly materialist culture: we believe that everything can be measured, and that every state of being has a quality that can be observed by an outsider. We often forget that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is as applicable to emotional states as it is to quantum physics.

Though a tiger in the Berlin Zoo and a dairy cow in Wisconsin don't have much in common, each animal has specific welfare needs that must be addressed. But assessing those needs is by no means a simple task. Michigan State University is now one of only a handful of institutions offering training in the scientific assessment of animal welfare, bringing qualitative measurements to an area long left to the subjective, and even the emotional.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

Protothreads and Other Wicked C Tricks

I've always been fascinated by code along these lines. We used similar tricks in the early 90's to force Windows 3.1 to pre-emptively multitask with background DOS processes. It used to amaze people at trade shows that we could kill their voice processes by starting the paint program and holding down the mouse button, while ours kept right on answering the phone (and allowing paint to draw). Seems trivial in this day and age of XP, the Internet and Unix based systems, but back then, well, that was some trick!

Interesting to note that embedded systems with tiny memory footprints can still used this kind of magic efficiently.

For those of you interested in interesting hard-core C programming tricks: Adam Dunkels' protothreads library implements an unusually lightweight type of threads. Protothreads are not real threads, but rather something in between an event-driven state machine and regular threads. But they are implemented in 100% portable ANSI C and with an interesting but quite unintuitive use of the switch/case construct. The same trick has previously been used by Simon Tatham to implement coroutines in C. The trick was originally invented by Tom Duff and dubbed Duff's device. You either love it or you hate it!

(link) [Slashdot]

00:00 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link