Iran is currently undergoing riots and violent demonstrations as a result of irregularities in the recent presidential vote. Thus Iran is all over the news, in good and in bad.

Recently Nokia-Siemens Networks got some (unwanted?) publicity from many sources after having sold “network snooping equipment” to Iran.

The sad thing is that while people are so pumped up by evil ayatollahs oppressing the people of Iran, they mistakenly think that spying on the citizens is something so terrible that it can only happen in some sort of backwater evil clerical dictatorship, and that such snooping is not even possible to do elsewhere.

That is false. This kind of functionality exists today in basically ALL GSM networks, in ALL countries you can think of. Yes, this means also your country.

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Abchernin has sent a step-by-step guide how to enable Zenburn colors into EasyEclipse for Python v1.3.1 - it should work with any Eclipse+pydev combination.
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We can soon start to detect potentially life-bearing planets, improving our searching for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Check this out, it’s good news.

An interesting article in the New York Times, about what we try to signal with our consumption habits, and how no-one really cares:

The grand edifice of brand-name consumerism rests on the narcissistic fantasy that everyone else cares about what we buy. (It’s no accident that narcissistic teenagers are the most brand-obsessed consumers.) But who else even notices? Can you remember what your partner or your best friend was wearing the day before yesterday? Or what kind of watch your boss has?

Wikipedia has a nice picture of the mechanism behind the evolution of Pig Flu, the so-called antigenic shift.

I needed DIMACS-format output from STP, so I hacked together a patch for it.

It works only against the SVN version of STP, but is trivial (although not automatic) to patch the latest non-SVN version also. To patch, cd to the STP folder, then use something like patch -R -p1 < stp_dimacs.patch

Then, use the “-o” switch to dump a DIMACS file to the current folder. Next, fire up your favorite SAT solver and profit…

Update: It seems the toDimacs call can create strange outputs. Be aware of bugs!

An interesting article on BBC about what individual actions actually matter in the fight against climate change/global warming.

Professor David MacKay advocates normalizing energy use into kilowatt-hour (kWh). Using this metric, he then compares the amount of energy saved as a result of various “green” actions. To give you an idea of the kWh-metric: in Great Britain, an average person consumes energy worth 125 kWh per day (for transport, heating, manufacturing, and electricity).

Among the perhaps not-so-surprising findings: turning off your phone charger makes no difference whatsoever, electrical cars are way better than hydrogen cars, heat pumps are a good way to save energy, wind micro-turbines on roofs are basically useless, etc. Check it out.

Update: Thanks to “eagle-eye” Jaska for spotting a bug in the units. Our physics teacher used to rant and rave against falling for that common error and of course I fell for it! “Kilowatt-per-hour” is wrong, it’s “kilowatt-hour”. Duh.

First, there was Mr. Samuel Jackson, who grew weary of “these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane”. That movie, and especially that utterance became an instant Internet meme (WARNING: contains spoilers).

Then, in a bizarre twist of cosmic happenstance, reality emulated Hollywood. Yet more snakes on the plane.

Tahoe-LAFS is a decentralized fault tolerant file system. When Zooko was demonstrating it, he wanted to show how the system stays up even when a node fails.

And to demonstrate node failure, he went postal with AN AXE :)

Abstract: We have empirically observed, for the first time, an accurate reading for the half-life of a combined chocolate-mint crush bar (M_f) having an initial mass of 200 grams. During the observations, the mass of the M_f underwent Zeta decay from 200 g to 100 g within about 310 seconds, causing an instantaneous measured energy gain of 7.0805 kJ/s in the observers. The instantaneous energy gain observation is consistent with the five-dimensional space-time manifold Rye-Ergot vertex postulate of the super-string “many worlds” theory [McKenna77].