Every now and then a science article will throw up something that I think is brilliant. An article in today’s Seed, entitled The Wiring of Desire, contained one such nugget.

After discussing how temperature affects sexual selection in developing gecko embryos, and how it also affects later behaviour, the author goes on to mention similar effects on other species:

It turns out that an embryo’s environment has similarly powerful effects in other species. Mice, for example, give birth to more than one pup at once — and the behavior of adult mice is affected by whom they were next to in the womb. A female who was between two sisters is more docile as an adult, and males tend to find her more attractive than other females. She is also more likely to be attacked if she rejects a male’s advances. A female who was sandwiched between two brothers will be more aggressive—and less attractive to males.

I just like it because it illustrates the fluid nature of everything in nature. It’s not simply a case of different, precisely controlled, doses of testosterone for male and female, but a general increase of testosterone in the area around embryonic males which then also raises levels in any surrounding females.

After my disastrous round of golf last week, where I shot a 120, this week was much better. Last week was exacerbated by the fact that I hadn’t played at all in 9 months, and a full 18 holes in as many months, and I’d never played at Hurstville before. A quick trip to the driving range to refamiliarise myself with my swing didn’t really help either.

So, after signing up for another round with Simon, Danny, Clyde & Chris this week, I hit the driving range twice this week to get my 3,4 & 5 irons dialled in. It worked pretty well, and this week I managed a 108, which is about normal for me. More importantly, I also got my first birdie on a full-size course. With a following wind, I hit a pitching wedge around 120m, getting a creat bounce and leaving it about 3m from the pin. Hit a sweet putt and got the distance just right, the ball teetering on the edge before dropping in. Gotta happy with that ;-)

I’m tempted to play a few more times before I leave for Canada to see if I can improve more and maybe get closer to 100, but there’s not much point really. Might as well wait until I get back, on until summer rolls around in Vancouver.

I’ve been cycling in and out of work for the past few weeks and it’s getting better now that the frequency of the occasional week of rain has dropped. I managed 136km last week, and the same again this week which I was happy enough with, especially since I missed out on cycling on Monday evening and Tuesday morning. Looking back on my training logs they’re some of the biggest weeks I’ve ever done, which suprised me. Maybe I haven’t trained as much as I thought in the past?

I’m off to Canberra next week, so will have to do some running in the hotel instead. Then it’s back into the pool next week for two reasons:

1. my mates have started the ‘Budgie 100’, where we all race each other over 100m Free, and I haven’t swum since January

2. I’ll need something to do once I get to Canada and there’s a pool in Fernie. I won’t have a bike and it will be too cold to run. Besides, my legs will be wrecked from all the snowboarding anyway.

In the meantime, I’ll keep cycling.

B: 136km

Bloody liberal media!

via scot hacker

Coalition of the Willing my arse! Turns out the US threatened to “bomb Pakistan into the Stone Age” if it didn’t sign up to the War on Terror™

In an interview to be aired on CBS television this weekend Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, said the threat was delivered by the assistant secretary of state, Richard Armitage, in conversations with Pakistan’s intelligence director.

“The intelligence director told me that (Mr Armitage) said, ‘Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the stone age’,” Gen Musharraf was quoted as saying. The revelation that the US used extreme pressure to secure Pakistan’s cooperation in the war on terror arrived at a time of renewed unease in the US about its frontline ally.

With friends like that, etc. etc.

80GB of music & video playing goodness ;-)

I’ve just installed GeoPress so I can now add Google maps to any of my posts. Here’s my current location.

INSERT_MAP

This will be brilliant when I head off to Canada next year!

I went to see Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth the weekend before last and it was excellent. Having watched his presentation on YouTube a few months ago, it was good to see it on the big screen and be able to read more of the statistics he presents. The movie left me wondering how much better shape the world would currently be in had the US Supreme Court not overturned the will of the people, shunting Gore out of office and the current fuckwit in. Gore is smart and determined, and you can see that he can grasp the nuances of a position, and not devolve everything into some bullshit us vs them, simpleton argument.

Gore recently gave a speech to New York University’s Law School in which he outlined potential areas where rapid change could be made, allowing the U.S. to take a lead in reducing emissions, such as, amongst others, moving towards a decentralised electricity grid and aiding GM & Ford, both of whom are dead in the water, to switch to manufacturing electric and hybrid cars.

He also uses the following line:

It is, in other words, time for a national oil change. That is apparent to anyone who has looked at our national dipstick.

We’ve been looking at their national dipstick for the last five years and are desperately waiting for them to vote the fuckwit out of office! ;-)

The Royal Society has told Esso/ExxonMobil to stop funding groups attempting to undermine global warming.

In an unprecedented step, the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific academy, has written to the oil giant to demand that the company withdraws support for dozens of groups that have “misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence”.

The scientists also strongly criticise the company’s public statements on global warming, which they describe as “inaccurate and misleading”.

In a letter earlier this month to Esso, the UK arm of ExxonMobil, the Royal Society cites its own survey which found that ExxonMobil last year distributed $2.9m to 39 groups that the society says misrepresent the science of climate change.

Have a look at this: Death And Taxes

It’s a graph of what the US spends its discretionay budget on, ie: the bit of hte budget that Congree actually votes on. 64% of it goes towards military spending!!

Here’s a less detailed follow-up graph which covers the entire annual US Federal budget, showing that military spending is the single biggest item – even bigger than social security!

Wired has an article examining the likelihood of an American dying from various causes which the current hysteria in perspective…

At least there was an upside to all the rain last week.

The Royal Society has just made its entire archive digital, and it’s online, and free until December. You can read original proceedings as far back as 1665, containing reports of all sorts of stuff.

Check these out:

A report on Mozart, from when he was 8.

Crick’s original DNA paper

Franklin’s account of lying a kite in a lightning storm

Hook’s account (from 1667) of trying to keep a dog alive by inflating its lungs with a bellows

Cook’s account of his method of keeping his crew healthy during the voyage on which he discovered Australia

Basically, if you have any interest in science at all, you’ve 3 months to wade through and look at our acquisition of knowledge in progress before it becomes pay-per-view (at something like 5000 pounds sterling ;-)

TomDispatch has an excellent article on the deteriorating state of the US Army and the depths to which recruiters are sinking in order to sign up people for military service:

When the American war in Vietnam finally ground to a halt, the U.S. military was in a state of disarray, if not near-disintegration. Uniformed leaders vowed never-again to allow the military to be degraded to such a point.

A generation later, as the ever less appetizing-looking wars in Iraq and Afghanistan spiral on without end, an overstretched Army and Marine Corps have clearly become desperate. At a remarkable cost in dollars, effort, and lowered standards, recruiting and retention numbers are being maintained for now. The result: U.S. ground forces are increasingly made up of a motley mix of underage teens, old-timers, foreign fighters, gang-bangers, neo-Nazis, ex-cons, inferior officers and a host of near-mercenary troops, lured in or kept in uniform through big payouts and promises.

Now read Billmon’s comparison toThe Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

A web site showing CO₂ emissions, birth rate and death rate for every country on Earth. Turn the audio on and watch for a while. Strangely hypnotic…

BreathingEarth.net

Figures from the Irish passport office show huge increases in the number of Americans and British applying for Irish passports. The number of Americans applying has tripled since 2001 which is hardly suprising as half the world hates them. An American passport has to be one of the worst to travel on.

Several US websites extol the virtues of travelling on Irish passports pointing out that the republic’s long-established neutrality is a better guarantee of safety. “With an Irish passport you are at lower risk when travelling in areas of the world that are hostile to Americans,” explains ancestry.com. “Terrorists are far less likely to kidnap or attack an Irish citizen than an American.”

They’d better hope that ‘the terrorists’ don’t learn to differentiate between Irish and Amerian accents!

More surprising is the number of British applying, which nearly tripled over the last year, but I suppose that’s what happens when you sell your soul to the devil. The level of applications from Australians should be rising shortly as well then…

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of darkness, no evil shall I fear…

because I’m the meanest motherfucker in the valley I’ve got an Irish passport” ;-)

Researchers at Princeton’s Centre for Information Technology Policy have published a paper showing how lax the security is on a Diebold coting machine, and how easy it is to hack the system and steal an election.

For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus.

So that’s how Bush won Ohio!

Myself, Tom, Kevin, Marc, Billy and Lisa made plans to go mountain biking on Sunday in the Blue Mountains. This was before the torrential rain that’s been dousing Sydney for the last week had arrived, so there was a little apprehension as to whether the day would go ahead or not. A decision was made on Saturday night that we were going regardless, though after a night of the worst rain I’ve yet encountered in Sydney, Billy & Lisa decided to pull out.

The rest of us packed all our warm clothes and hit the road for the two hour drive to Blackheath. After some coffee and choc-chip cookies to prepare, we drove to the start of the trail and set about getting the bikes ready. It was still raining lightly, so there was no doubt we were going to get absolutely soaked, however, as Marc had never been MTBing before, and his relatively new bike still looked very nice and shiny, this was a good thing. It would be a proper introduction to dirt!

We’d deliberately chosen a relatively easy ride which led to Hanging Rock, a picturesque lookout over the Blue Mountains featuring a huge rock which looks like it could fall off at any minute. The ride out there was good fun, with lots of water bars to launch ourselves off, though doing so got me a puncture, so there was a brief outage while I got that fixed. Marc was enjoying himself, and his regular bike commute to work meant he had no problems on the fitness front. Indeed, he was fitter than the rest of us since we’d only recently started riding again.

Once out at the lookout, myself and Kev elected to make the jump across to the rock itself. Tom was the photogrpaher, and Marc decided that he would skip the jump since he’s the only one of us with the responsibilites of fatherhood. The jump itself is only about a metre wide and you could easily cross it with a single large stride, but while facing the gap you can see a drop of a few hundred metres into the valley on either side. It’s this drop, coupled with the fact that the point you’re aiming for isn’t flat, which tends to concentrate the mind and make the task a good deal harder than it really is.

Once across, you can walk out to the tip of the rock for a photo opportunity, but here’s the thing: the rock itself is roughly triangular in shape, so as you move towards the tip, you get closer and closer to the massive drop on either side. The result of this is that you reach a point (well I did anyway) where your legs refuse to go any further – they literally start buckling to force you to stop moving – without any concious decision on your part. Clearly my subsconcious mind had mutinied. It’s quite a funny experience!

Back on solid land we retraced our steps back to the car, arriving cold and wet. We’d another short ride planned, so we quickly packed up, stopped in Blackheath for a brief, warming lunch, then continued on to Linden. The ride to Hanging Rock was entirely on fire trail, but the Linden ride had quite a bit of singletrack which was the reason for its inclusion – to give Marc a taste of the real thing.

Torrential rain on the way to Linden almost had myself and Tom pulling the plug, but it had passed by the time we got there. Once back out on the bikes we warmed up again and, after some short fire trail, were soon enjoying ourselves on overgrown singletrack. The other three missed the benefits of my long tights as their legs got whipped by the undergrowth, but that wasn’t going to curtail the fun. We rode for about 40 minutes before deciding that we’d better turn back so we’d make it home to Sydney at a reasonble hour. Once back at the car we deemed Marc’s bike to be an official mountain bike, and took a photo of it covered in mud to prove the point. All in all, a bloody good day despite the crap weather ;-)

Photos

Bruce Schneier has a good post up today warning that we’re behaving exactly the terrorists want:

I’d like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

It’s fitness time again in preparation for the Canadian boarding season! TEN+ weeks of solid snowboarding in some of the best powder in the world, starting on December 27th, means I’ve got about three months to get super-fit. I’m not going to bother running for a while as I’m still carrying a few extra post-winter kilos, so I’ve been back out on the bike for the last two weeks.

So far it’s just cycling in and out of work, but I’ll be adding a few laps of Centennial to my daily commute after my trip to Canberra next week, and myself and Kevin are planning a trip down to ride the hills in the Royal National Park shortly which should be a good workout.

B: 60km