just say aaaahhhhhh

Today – the dentist – what else could I write about? Ouch.

Now just say aaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhh………

and now… a quick story of a nasty nasty shark bite…Way back in the last millenium a couple of months after the death of the dinosaurs, I was studying marine biology in climes a tad warmer than my present location. Living in a college and studying – great stuff. One day one of the girls from the college appeared in the dining room sporting a rather bulky bandage, arm in sling kind of arrangement. There was a bit of blood seeping through and a couple of her closest friends ushered her in slowly and pulled out a chair for her in the dining room. She had that weird shade of grey skin happening – not a good look. I looked to one of her friends. She lowered her eyes a bit and muttered “shark bite.” Shit! Oh dear – well actually there were a few more expletives floating around my head. Oh no- not the dive boat from the uni – again! Whoa… While I was wondering when I was going to get the full story – there were a lot of bronze whalers around and they attacked and chased people – (plenty of stories around the uni – how many students did it take to make a snack? – depended on the size of shark et cetera) – Anyway, while I was pondering the dramatic story – one of the girl’s friends winked at me and motioned to go outside. It turned out that the shark was one she had encountered on the dissecting table. When you dissect part of a shark you ram something down its gullet to give you a better go at the original incision et cetera. The ‘pale one’ had done that but forgotten about shark teeth facing backwards and ripped her hand out quickly. It seems she inflicted the shark bite herself. Despite the truly horrendous injury, she was in chipper spirits the next day showing off her wounds and announcing that she’d made sure that the shark was going nowhere and it was now lying dead somewhere. She neglected to tell all and sundry that it was dead when it “bit” her and that in fact it was only the top half of shark anyway – someone else was having a play with the rest of it on another table. : )

I wonder if she still shows her scars and says “shark bite” and then goes silent?… Moral of the story – never trust a shark… even if it’s come out of the freezer and is well and truly dead … te hee

dark matter

Dark matter – what a concept – alongside singularities and blackholes, dark matter has to be the most mind opening stuff available for the thinking. Had a look at a page appearing via /. about dark matter and it got me thinking. Then I noticed that dark matter was being sold on eBay – oh dear – I did have hopes that someone might have had a sense of humour and might have been trying to sell dark matter itself – that would have tickled my fancy – no such luck – just people selling things like books or clothes with that name – how unadventurous : /

Anyway – back to the good dark matter, one page I located had some great images of various bits of space with superimpositions of x-ray showing gas and graphic representations of dark matter in galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56. Okay, so I wouldn’t know this galaxy cluster from another – I’m not that clever or educated but this stuff always leaves me with such a feeling of awe – of the greatness of the cosmos – of feeling that there is so much that we mere mortals will never know and perhaps can never know – but which we can contemplate and calculate and in which we can take delight.

And for those wanting a simple definition of dark matter- from NASA’s little dictionary for schoolies:

dark matter
Name given to the amount of mass whose existence is deduced from the analysis of galaxy rotation curves but which until now, has escaped all detections. There are many theories on what dark matter could be. Not one, at the moment is convincing enough and the question is still a mystery.

It is warming to think that NASA can use the term mystery : ) Am still not quite getting the dark matter scenario – neutrinos are part of dark matter

According to one article in Nature:

Dark matter actually helps (?) normal matter clump together in the cosmos

Dark energy – seems to exist – at least as a concept to explain the continual expansion of the universe

And to quote Niels Bohr: “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it”

Michael A. Nielsen and Isaac L. Chuang. QUANTUM COMPUTATION AND QUANTUM INFORMATION, (somewhere in Chapter 2. Introduction to quantum mechanics, pages 60–119) Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Okay… i digress… here is a BBC offering on dark matter and the Hubble. It is the halo identified that gives the astro people such orgasmic cosmic smilings in relation to dark matter – who can blame them. The following is pretty special eh what?

search for dated URL or latest archived et cetera

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is a useful site for getting a peek at the net as it was such as around the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA. It is useful because it ‘allows’ you to search for specific URLs for specific years. However, if you go to the advanced search thang, you’ll find that you can actually use the same search prefixes to go directly to the pages without having to use their search engine. Now that is pretty cool. So long as you know the URL you can use one of several organisational or edu prefixes to specify the date – cool. Like these kinda thangs a lot. : ) The following are some of the things:

Retrieving the most recently archived copy of a specific URL

Retrieving an archived copy of a specific URL from given date

Searching for all copies of a specific URL archived in a given time period

Searching for all URLs for a site archived in a given time period

Who could resist this spider? 

screwgle

check out the “l” – and the whole thing will gel

check out http://www.google-sux.com/screwgle.jpg

for his story about google being less than pleasant… I have mixed feelings towards google – sometimes i hate google; sometimes i’m “jolly pleased” it’s there… not usually a fence sitter.

and what has the above to do with anything? – absolutely nothing -actually it does – i don’t want to lose it – i’m in the middle of something so i just chucked it there… yes, i’m learning to be messy – in a properly messy manner that suits me… so there!

elegant universe : ) something awe inspiring

The elegant universe
Although I found this page – actually, I stumbled on it today, it is a site i visit often and happily sits in my favs : ) There is just something wonderful about string theory that, although in the process of being surpassed by the next big thang, still retains a level of appeal that is difficult to explain.

Not quite sure why – check the site out – lots of tantalising bits and pieces.

Apart from the amazing graphics of the PBS site, the whole idea of innumerable dimensions – say 11 is such a wonderful meditation / enigmatic enticement.

So many unthinkable thoughts amidst the claim for a unified theory of everything – in awe – just so so love this stuff.

ggoooooogle labs with timelines & maps

Gggooooggglle labs have some interesting things worth keeping an eye on… I spied this today although it’s been there for a while. Any search that you perform in this environment gives you a timeline of the results. This is excellent if you are tracking interest in an issue or even in the use of a key term. I like : ) Yes, it’s one of those fast and dirty kinda search tools but sometimes that is just the ticket when you’re starting off to look at a topic about which you know six tenths of two tenths of bugger all…so to speak if you’ll pardon my french please.

As you can see with the example above, using the timeline function is merely a matter of including view:timeline in the search box. You can also go to listview – which is actually the default google search or use the map view function to get google maps to come up on the right of the screen for each of the results located. To use this simple type in your search term plus “view:map”. Such simple operations can add a considerable amount of instant information for students starting on any research project or i guess for anyone starting out looking for information about anything.

a smattering of this & that -not google & traffic report

The concept of this site seems a helpful one – not sure whether or not it lives up to the hope… Might be worth a try though. This is really a noticeboard of sorts where you ask for assistance -

http://www.cantfindongoogle.com/en/list/1.html

unless you create an account however, you can’t search for specific problems. For those without an account, you find yourself in an odd situation where you’ve logged into a page that says “can’t find it on google” that then gives you the option to ..ahemm is this really as weird as it sounds or is it just me?… search on google : )

and now for something completely different….

http://www.internettrafficreport.com/

This is something i like : ) – internet traffic report – might just help explain a few fluffy slownesses at times. It’s not sophisticated – just quite quite interesting – including stats such as response times and you can download the previous seven days worth of stats in CSV format so that’s kinda cool if you want to go away to ponder. It says that they measure traffic every five minutes – cool.

just a little offering today : )

today’s offering is a really really dumbed down explanation of the net and the web – kinda cool if you don’t know that stuff – this is for my very luddite friends…

http://www.scotsnewsletter.com/20quests/hownet.htm

And this is kinda cute too: http://www.pageflakes.com/

this last one is a nice little page organiser complete with instant weather thang for your area et cetera…. this looks a lot more friendly than yahoo as a page -even if somewhat on the boring and ordered side – there is something rather cool about slight randomness eh what? – it’s called pageflakes BTW

mouse gestures – giving it the finger with the small ones

Just tried this out – a firefox addon that I quite like:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12

It has the functionality that I saw last night using GNU that I’d never seen before – which seemed pretty damned cool to me. Not sure about the firefox thang yet – haven’t put it through its paces. Actually it seems quite frustrating to start with – seems like more play time required : ) must admit – it is kinda fun using mouse to do instantly go back a page et cetera without having to do the “find the icon and click” or the “type the command” stuff..

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ignorati?… wiki wonderland?

afternoon peeeples…. today I found something that looks suspiciously useful. I say suspiciously because I’m not sure that I understand how these things work. Of course I do NOT! The following site is Twiki – it seems to be a wiki kind of starting platform thang…

http://twiki.org/

I would dearly like to have a play with this but do wonder if this is safe?… will ask a real technorati type persona methinks… This is the problem with being so ignorant and finding such cool looking toys – you’re (read “I”) am never quite sure what sort of bother I could create for my poor evergroaning computer…

still…this one does look like a bit of fun eh what?