The Antikythera Mechanism is a mechanical device dating to the ancient Greece. It was used at least for time-related and astronomical calculations.

Why I’m interested in it, is that in essence, it’s an about 1900 year old mechanical computer. Research is still ongoing as to the details what it is and what it does.

Now some more of the internal functionality and purpose has been deciphered – one of the functions was the timing of the ancient Olympic Games!

Nature has the story. You can read the paper too.

Includes CursorLine fix for 256-color mode by Pablo Castellazzi. Get it here! Also up at vim.sf.net.

Today I learnt that Java is very broken for certain tasks. There are no unsigned atomic types.

That’s right, this means if you want to write, say, a program to mangle certain byte-streams as unsigned values (like a packet overlay or anything enough suitably low-level which interfaces with the “real world”), it becomes very complex as you have to use non-elegant and strange hacks – e.g. using a bigger type to represent a smaller type, like 16 bits to represent 8 bits and then doing a lot of bit twiddling to get the numbers right.

Well, it’s always good to learn new things. I heard Python is nice, we’ll see.

Legal interception (i.e. spying of communications done by the instances of the government, with a permission) is coming soon to an ISP near you. Unless it’s already there, of course. Basically, if you are one of the Bad Guys(tm), all your communications would be spied upon and examined in detail. Of course, even if you are one of the Good Guys(tm) your communications would need to be spied upon and examined in detail, but that would surely be for your own protection and safety.

“But what about Skype – surely they can’t eavesdrop on Skype, I heard it’s secure and encrypted”

Well…
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I took Christian Sonne’s C-language version of Eric Rowland’s algorithm to generate prime numbers, optimized it and enhanced it to use the GNU MP multiple precision arithmetic library.

This means you can keep on running it as long as you like and occasionally peek which primes pop out. It might be good to redirect the output to a file, too.

Grab the source here.

If James Brown and Einstein were accelerated to near-lightspeed and then collided inside a particle accelerator, the result would be some funky science – a bit like this prime number generating formula.

Spoiler: a(n) = a(n-1) + gcd(n,a(n-1)), a(1)=7, n >= 2. Calculate a(n)-a(n-1), skip the 1′s and remove duplicates.

This short BBC clip about the statues of Bamiyan was fascinating. It might be that there is still one huge Buddha-statue intact on the valley floor, currently hidden under water. Considering that the Taleban shelled and destroyed the Buddha-statues and the elaborate cave paintings behind them, finding that hidden one (if it still remains) would be a major archaeological find.

In the ongoing waltz around the issue of nuclear power / nuclear weapons of Iran, recently Iran conducted a missile launch test using long-range missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv and other cities of Israel. This test was obviously in response to Israel’s earlier military exercise in the Mediterranean. And that was in response to the fear of Iranian nuclear weapons and threatening political rhetoric by Iran’s leaders, and so on and so on.

Anyway, some pictures and video were released from the missile test. In the pictures, due to self-similarities in the dust clouds resulting from a missile launch, claims were made that Iran’s missile test pictures had been digitally altered. And, of all things, using the simple “stamp” aka. clone aka. copy-move tool available in most image editing software…
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Incorporates a small fix for StatusLine in the 256-color terminal mode. Thanks to Charlie for spotting it. Get it here.

Update: v2.2 also now in vim.sf.net. (I found my password, hooray)

You may know from Yahoo (ex-Altavista). Did you know that exists as well? As they are computer-processed automatic translations, the quality often varies from funny to quite accurate. But overall, Google Translate seems to give much better quality.