Leuf Daynotes MM week 08

Daynotes: Week of 21 - 27 Feb, MM

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 08

* Link to: last modified 27 Feb MM at 17:25 GMT+1.

The update-link (above) points to where I last added some text -- I have so far not implemented a current-entry page, nor a day per page, but instead stayed with the week-per-page format.

Associated links:

Write me at: bo@leuf.com -- if private, mark it as such!
Posted mail/discussion, see the WikiForum LeufNet
Occasional thematic articles, see "DisISay" LeufOrg

Earlier weeks, see the Daynotes index.

Monday 21 February

I've got some feedback on some viewing problems of these pages related to different browsers and CSS-handling. See this wiki page for these threads. While normal in IE and Opera, users with Netscape (Linux) and other browsers do experience odd rendering, so I may have to cut back on the layout features I use here. Please let me know of any problems.

Tuesday 22 February

Appears I neglected to update the site yesterday. Sorry. Lost focus in between the coughing attacks or something. And not really able to focus for very long periods on anything at all. Otherwise I am trying to spend some time catching up on my reading -- lots of interesting articles have piled up over the last year or so while writing and family matters dominated the agenda. Illness is nature's way of redirecting your focus...

I had bookmarked a number of good articles over the months. One was from last year's SciAm about Venus and current theories about why its atmosphere looks the way it does. The conclusions reached about this have important implications for how Earth's climate works and the really remarkable way many processes, gases and most importantly water interact -- sometimes with negative feedback (more or less stable), sometimes with positive "runaway" feedback. Yet another example of that we need to know much more about Earth's climatic cycles, both long and short term, before we can say anything intelligent about our own impact on the climate. Or more to the point, how this impact can affect climate, and whether there are any critical thresholds we need to be aware of -- potential disasters triggered either by our own activities, or by natural events (volcanoes, comets, shifting ocean currents).

In the local news...

A mysterious Swedish murder case. A 16-year old girl is being held by police after a man, 52, was found murdered in a tunnel (I assume a pedestrian one under a road) in Gävle yesterday. Neither the girl nor man were known by police, and few details have been made public except that the degree of physical violence was said to have been "exceptional".
More and more Swedish drivers tank and run. With the price of a liter of gas long past the "pain threshold", a growing problem is the number of drivers who "can't afford" to tank up, and so drive off without paying. Police rarely have the time and resources to follow up. Estimates put the number of non-payers for 1999 at perhaps 35,000 cases -- a serious loss for some station owners.
Swedish Board of Health and Welfare continues to recommend prophylactic mammography. The issue was recently reviewed by two professors who determined that pro and con sides both lacked credibility. Despite claims of a reduction in breast cancer by 20-30% due to the examinations, the effects could not be verified clinically. Nonetheless, the board stood by its earlier position.
Pre-natal ultrasound diagnostics of e.g. Downs Syndrome has been used for many years, complemented by invasive analysis of womb water in cases of high risk or observed abnormalities. While neither ultrasound or testing is mandatory in Sweden, many expectant mothers do get the impression it is. What is not generally known about the invasive testing in particular, is that for every case of Downs Syndrome identified in this way (about 1% of the tested pregnancies), the testing itself causes 2-4 miscarriages of presumed normal children (exact figure depends on who gives the figures). There are no visible plans to change procedures or improve information despite even official criticism of the situation. A debate is however growing, fueled by a very heated one in Norway where new ultrasound diagnostics were banned by a government minister, about the whole issue of pre-natal testing for "abnormities" and the ethics that should guide this sort of "birth selection".

Genetic ethics is rapidly turning into one of the hotter issues for the 21st Century, as is the question of what is perceived as "normal". Several researchers in the field are already concerned that the emerging diagnostic and manipulative techniques may easily create an atmosphere that discriminates against or even persecutes people who for one reason or another do not follow the "recommended" procedures for having "desirable" children.

Chicken-leftover soup (I thought if Chris can do computing at the eating edge with all that "yum" at the end of most days, why not here?):

Assumption: you have some chicken meat picked from a previous dinner left over in the freezer (or in fridge for that matter).
Boil up water and vegetable stock -- say 2 litres. Add a couple of peeled and chopped up carrots and potatoes, a cup of red lentils, and a half cup of sunflower seeds. Let simmer for about 15 minutes. Take out the frozen chicken meat (likely a more-or-less solid block) and dump into the soup, increasing the heat a notch. After about 5 minutes, stir and ensure that the chicken bits have separated. Add some herbal spicing to taste, or not, as the mood strikes you. Add one peeled and chopped green apple. Lower heat and simmer a few more minutes while you set the table. Serve.

Simple, almost mindless cooking. But good and nutritious, tastes almost like chicken...

and don't forget to feed the cats -- salem

Wednesday 23 February

A space item to start the day...

Galileo Mission Status February 22, 2000: NASA's Galileo spacecraft has scored another success by completing this morning's third and closest flyby of Jupiter's volcanic moon Io, dipping to only 199 kilometers (about 124 miles) above the fiery surface.

Clearly NASA kept miles and km straight this time around.

If you want to track developments in the field of software patents (recall the Unisys GIF idiocy), then bookmark this on your list of important sites: The League for Programming Freedom

Thursday 24 February

Nokia is teaming up with amazon.com for the next generation of mobile Internet shopping technology. If they could, I'm sure they'd give us beam-me-the-merchandise add-ons as well. As it is, Nokia is not lacking in ideas to get us to use mobiles more. Current plans are to integrate phone, "passport" and credit card as a SIM-chip for the mobile.

Some science notes...

Vital archaeological records could be lost as the computers they are stored on or file formats become obsolete, or storage media degrades. The physical site is nearly always completely destroyed during a dig, but archaeologists claim the knowledge they glean from the ground is available for posterity in the form of computer records. "The irony is that archaeological information held in magnetic format is decaying faster than it ever did in the ground," warns William Kilbride of the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) at the University of York. Archivists found that five percent of sampled older disks with archeological data from the early 90s had become corrupted due simply to media deterioration.
The only secure answer to data conservation would seem to be the Internet. Servers can go down or will need upgrading, but in theory, information on the internet will last forever. Or so goes the theory today. Which doesn't address the problem of obsolete file formats, however.
A Danish physicist and her team of collaborators have found a way to slow light down to less than one mile an hour (1.6 km per hour), slower than a slow walk. This remarkable is achieved by firing co-ordinated beams of laser light through a "Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC)". These atoms are cooled to a temperature of only a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. Slowing down light may have many practical uses in communications, signal processing, television displays and night-vision devices.
Space weather forecasters are warning that gusts of solar wind could disrupt satellite operations and power grids until the end of February. The high-speed particles are streaming out of a hole in the Sun's corona.

Other news...

Prostitutes are bussed to Strasbourg in connection with the week-long sessions of the EU parliament, says police. Just another form of European harmonization, I suppose.

just let me dominate the world, and i'll guarantee a different order -- salem

Friday 25 February

mmiau... interesting statistics -- the number of abandoned dogs in this region has increased by factor 4 over the past three years, according to the county vet's office.

speculation is that many households have very fragile economies these days, so that when the vet and food bills accumulate, the dog is the first to go. i've seen a st bernard eat as it happens -- grossgrossgross.

animal shelters are busier than ever, and placement in new homes is up factor 3. those responsible say people really don't appreciate the work and costs of having a dog until it's too late.

it's not just dogs, actually. abandoned cars are much more common as well. bigguy tells me that when the scrap-bounty was reduced some years back, there was a big increase in the number of cars just dumped by the roadside or in the woods. that increase continues. stripped of plates and often with serial numbers filed off, police don't bother even trying to find the owners. again, speculation suggests that many of these cars were reported stolen in order to recover some of the costs that burdened the owner, assuming they had that coverage.

in case you wondered, there's no such thing as an abandoned familiar, although i do admit you can see the odd abandoned owner wandering about. -- salem

Local Swedish news...

Former head of state wine and spirits to head study into effects on household economy when parents go from welfare to job income. Apparently the state child allowance and family subsidies systems are slated to be overhauled. The government has decided that it must be "profitable" for parents to work, and to work more.
Culture Minister promises measures to remove worst sex scenes from cable tv. Parliament recently screened a quasi-documentary about sex programming. None of the parties advocates a total ban, though several want new legislation targeting the worst scenes. It's noted that the state film censor board is currently not required to screen films intended for cable tv. Culture Minister says existing legislation should be adequate if only applied.
Number of filed discrimination complaints sharply up over past few years. Most of these concerned cases where "foreigners" (i.e. people easily identified as not of Swedish origin, whatever their actual current status) are illegally denied entry to restaurants and nightclubs. None of these cases have however led to any formal charges.
(Part of a general trend that even fewer and fewer actual serious crimes lead to formal charges.)
It has been noted that overt employment discrimination is also on the rise -- many applications now require photos. Applicants with "un-Swedish" names commonly find that they get the runaround, and are sometimes even incorrectly told that the position is already filled.
After the government gave its ok, there is now nothing stopping construction a new high-rise complex planned for the Swedish side of the new Öresund Bridge. The "futuristic" tower, proposed by a Norwegian financier, is to be 325 meters tall (including a 49 meter cooling mast), which makes it about as tall as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the tallest building in Europe.
Hospital laundry commonly contains injection needles, scissors, scalpels, and a plethora of other dangerous objects, complain personnel at hospital laundry in Lund. Apart from the risk to the laundry personnel, the object destroy clothing for large sums yearly. All hospitals report similar problems, and sometimes the finds are macabre indeed. Anything from rubbish bins, hearing aids and remote controls, to amputated body parts, are found by the laundry sorting personnel.

Saturday 26 February

This is unverified by me, but was taken up in an article in the local newspaper. It concerns a scam that affects dial-up Internet users... (my summary), similar to what I have read about what happened to some US users last year.

Website visits cost 1800 Swedish Crowns (USD 200+). When the family telephone bill was suddenly much higher than usual, the requested specification showed international charges for calls to an island in the West Indies. Further investigation could only tell that the number belonged to an IP-address. Date and time coincided with the 12 year-old son's surfing, so the father took a closer look at the sites visited then. One of the webpages had innocent looking icons to "enter" a site, but when clicked on, remarkable things happened. The computer automatically hung up the ISP connection, then redialed. The new connection was to an ISP in the West Indies. Oops.
It seems the "enter" icon activated some code (javascript?) that could access the Windows ATAPI hooks and take over control of the modem. The telco ISP was reported as being very helpful in finding out what happened, while the police were totally uninterested in taking up the case.

The article doesn't give any real details, but I can well imagine potential ways to do this via the Outlook-IE combo. Speaking of Outlook, I normally use Pegasus 32 for mail which shortstops all "automation" that can be used for hijacking my system. Or so I thought. The other day, I opened an ordinary message in multiple parts. These were all labeled as being "text", but when I went to the second part to read it, suddenly the drive got very active. The Outlook Contacts window came up with a new contact. Very interesting, because Outlook wasn't running at the time, and there was nothing about that part of the message that indicated it was contact data. First time that has happened.

Spam via geocities continues -- currently, it is practically the only source for spam that I get. I am getting a slew of mails lately that only contain a single HTML line:

Subject: Thanks
Click Here

The code in this link is innocent enough (though it need not have been, see earlier discussions about dangerous HTML code):

<p><font size="6"><a href="http://216.141.99.11/getaway/getaway2/"> Click Here</a></font></p>

in an IP block registered to Seecomm Network Services Corporation, which of course says nothing, really. I can't say I am especially inclined to click on such an anonymous, unsolicited link, however proxy-secured I might be. But I suppose some people just can't resist. (<hehe> Could you?)

Some science items from the BBC...

Scientists at Cambridge University say they have developed a new generation of magnetic microchips that may herald the beginning of faster, more efficient computers and electronic devices (article). Researchers say that the chip stores data in the form of tiny magnetic fields and that versions of the chip currently being tested are up to 40,000 times more efficient than the electronic chips in use today.
Meteorological readings taken in the stratosphere over the Arctic show that in six of the past 10 winters ozone has thinned to half its normal concentration (article). Scientists have gathered in Kiruna, Sweden, to undertake the biggest investigation yet into how the gas is being destroyed. They are concerned not only about low ozone levels over the Arctic but about further data which shows a thinning over a large part of northern Europe. People are at risk from skin cancers such as melanoma, which has increased four-fold in Sweden since the 1960s. Stockholm hospital doctor Johan Hanson says there is a direct link between UV radiation and skin cancer.

Sunday 27 February

* Ye gads! The US patent office is insane. How is it possible to issue a patent for an "affiliate program" of all things (cnet article). Next, I suppose amazon.com will be seek patents for books and "shopping". Heck, maybe they can even patent running a website. In one way, I don't really blame amazon -- if the patent office is crazy enough to award patents like this, then somebody else would have applied and got it if amazon hadn't. The bottom line will we what, if anything, amazon does with the patent rights, although I admit the emerging trackrecord concerning the one-click shopping cart is not reassuring.

ScreenMates are cute.

cat1.png - 3kb -- cat2.png - 3kb

dog1.png - 2kb -- dog2.png - 3kb

These are small stand-alone programs (about 300K) that romp around on your desktop in amusing ways. Almost like the real thing...

2cats.jpg - 59kb

Anyway, that winds up another week. Next week requires a lot of paperwork and writing by the looks of it. I've lost far too many weeks for various reasons, which bodes ill for when the deadlines get nearer.

A news item...

Only a click away. A doctor in Sweden prescribed "Cyklo-F" for a woman patient, a common medicine to reduce menstruation, but by accident clicked on the next item in the alphabetical list on his screen. What ended up on the prescription form was "Cyklosfosfamid", a cancer medicine. The mistake was discovered after two months. The woman suffered vomiting and nausea, but subsequently recovered.

As usual, never accept anything without at least checking what you get. There are sporadic reports of incorrect medicines in pharmacy-prepared dosage packages -- usually discovered when some pills have the wrong color or text.

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