Also filed under Random ♠ comments: ∅

You've probably seen the headlines saying that wild male chimpanzees have been observed sharing meat with females in exchange for sexual favors. While certainly appealing to the sexist "common sense" endemic to our culture, the reality doesn't show this at all. Research by Cristina Gomes and Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute show that males who share meat with females aren't any more likely to get some action when the females go into estrus. Instead, as The Primate Diaries explains:

Rather than such hackneyed cliches as “Sex sells, even in the rainforest” (Cosmos) or “The way to a chimp’s heart is through her stomach” (both Wired and the Chicago Sun-Times) the real story was that female chimpanzees demonstrate flexible and opportunistic strategies to maximize reproductive success. Furthermore, because the sharing of meat was primarily with anestrous females, and because there was no relationship between the amount of meat provided and the number of copulations, suggesting that this had any connection to prostitution or buying someone an expensive meal in order to “get lucky” was to completely miss the point. In all likelihood, females were using these exchanges to determine who would be the best potential father for her offspring over the long term.

Oddly enough, these conclusions don't make it into the popular press. Personally, I think the idea that women may be wired not just to be attracted to males of high status, but also to males who are more likely to share their resources makes more sense. Is it better to get a fraction of more food, or all of a smaller total? I believe western ideals tend toward the latter.

Additionally, the study clearly showed that males shared way more meat with their hunting partners than with females. Where were the "bromance" jokes?

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I've already said everything I have to say about the diffuser issue.

I'm ECSTATIC that the FIA ruling has finally come down on the side of common sense. This does little for "cost saving" - but oh well. Plenty of really smart and talented people get to work overtime redesigning cars this year. We get to see some big money and big talent struggle to keep up, which will serve to flush out any weak links in their respective chains and really show us what all that money is good for.

It's like a cataclysmic asteroid hitting a planet: kinda sucks until the new equilibrium is established, but it's anyone's game while the whole system is shaken up.

Also filed under F1 ♠ 1 comment ⇒

These are the crucial questions that come up at work. So I decided to find out. The answer: about 6,150. Unfortunately, hilarity does not automatically ensue. The vast majority, at least from my cursory sample, seemed to be of the "I'm too lazy and scatterbrained to gather my thoughts into cohesive or even grammatically correct posts, so instead I ramble in front of a camera" genre.

She's cute at about 2:45:

I don't understand. Am I supposed to be turned on? Epic Fail, girl. Try again.

Do us all a favor and STFU

Humanity may be generating more data every year than in the entire 19th century... but not all of it is worth keeping

0:19 "Like, Ohhh My Gawd! You guys are like so totally brutal! Gag me with a spoon fer shure!"

Also filed under Random or media ♠ comments: ∅

In line with the recent post about the validity of online polling, NASA is sponsoring a poll celebrating Earth Day where we get to vote for the 3 most important advances in terrestrial observation that NASA has provided in the last 50 years. At the landing page is a list of major achievements, complete with links to spectacular imagery. Vote on the second page. Javascript required to vote.

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Pharyngula posted a poll that needs to be fixed, and the atheists responded in force. This, I believe this shows the necessity of critical judgement when looking at any online statistic. This poll doesn't show that more than 9 of 10 New Statesman readers believe creationism has no place in rational curriculum, it shows that creationists are less than 1/10th of the people who responded to this poll.

Still, it's entirely gratifying to see people on my side of the debate mobilize, even if it's only for something as convenient as two mouseclicks.

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For folks like myself, opensource is a big deal. I'm not going to say I've submitted numerous patches to various projects, but I have been able to fix problems that have come up for me, extend functionality, and scripted solutions that make sense for what I want to do. A self-circular argument, because what I want to do is have fun computing. Making CPUs warm by performing calculations on datasets with operators that will generate new (hopefully) intended datasets.

Most people who use computers don't care HOW they work, and don't care to know. They expect to see easy-to-understand buttons that magically make stuff happen for them. By most, I mean the vast majority of the "dirty, unwashed masses" still "stuck in the win32/Wozniak wasteland". The vast majority of people have not the slightest interest in looking at source code, and in fact wouldn't even know source if they saw it. Most people certainly don't want to compile their own code; the expectation has been created for them that there is nothing more to installation than downloading and unpacking. Even the rudimentary installation on win32 systems is hidden from them. Have you ever seen an InstallShield wizard tell you what registry keys it's installing? I haven't. I have never seen InstallShield tell me what libraries (dlls) it's installing either.

Is it any coincidence that every OS review in the magazines, and every mention online, of a distro makes a point of saying at least an entire paragraph about the package management system? How many problems have you seen at linuxquestions.org, unix.com, etc regarding package management? There comes a point where a computing software system (OS, libraries and executable software) becomes too complex to programmatically manage. People who know how these things work know that these issues are easy to solve, and know how to solve them, but most users don't. Yes, linux makes it easier to diagnose and repair dependency errors. This means nothing to people who aren't interested in fixing them. It's human nature to stick with the devil you know rather than a new and different set of problems. Most people already know how to work around win/mac limitations, and once they get to a point where the computer does what they want it to do enough of the times they ask it, they're happy. Most of the population referred to as "users" are actually "operators", and they're more than happy in their ignorance.

People who understand software to the point that an OS is just another piece of software understand how important a slick scheduler is, compile-time optimizations, and how various kernel architectures are suited for different tasks. Seriously, how much of the computing public does that number comprise? I'd wager that less than 1% of people who use computers daily know what each of the following are: library, scheduler and linker. The people who do know what those are, how they work and how to make them work for their tasks at hand are the few people who NEED them to work well, day after day.

It makes no difference to most people how much better their experience could be with the investment of a few hours worth of mental elbow grease. The box turns on, they get online and go to facebook, myspace, World of Warcraft, whatever. That's what they expect from a computer, and people will happily pay commercial OSs to make it easy for them. Linux will not be able to compete with commercial OSs until commercial apps, with all the support structure (books and magazines and friends and websites) run flawlessly and identically to their analogues on OSs they are more familiar with. The cruel irony is that the manufacturers of commercial software aren't going to invest in making their products work on an OS that has a tiny fraction of the overall market, and a miniscule fraction of their target market.

The other cruel irony is that it seems a lot of energy in the opensource community is directed towards trying to put a sterile veneer on linux, trying to hide all the messy guts. I ran a live cd from a wildly popular distro the other day, and it didn't have a root account, didn't have 'dig', didn't have 'cfdisk', didn't have 'awk' or a host of other utilities that any selfrespecting unix-like system should have. There's certainly a place for making the transition from computer operator to computer user as simple as possible, and I certainly applaud those efforts. But I'm terribly afraid the community is trying to sell more than it can ever deliver, and is delivering no real reason to make the switch.

Yes, you can make linux do whatever you want. What does that mean to the company that manufactures a wildly popular MMORPG? It means there's no way you're going to try to build code that will work on the multitude of kernels, C libraries and supporting utilities out there in the wild. It's like trying to write software that will run on anything from win3.1 to server2k7, and macs too. It's a programming nightmare even if money weren't an object. Yes, linux is generally free of charge as well. Most people don't understand that they're paying for their OS now, so that seems a moot point. The only way linux can get the "killer commercial app" written for it is if a single distribution gains enough market share, and the distro stays consistent long enough, that enough people adopt it for all the reasons we push linux for now. Except the distro has to discourage customizing the installations, to maintain a stable platform for the developers.

So, in conclusion, while the greatest strength of Open Source Software is the ability to bend it, stretch it, hammer it, glue it and paint it any way you want to... that's also the weakness that will keep it relegated to the ranks of the geekelite for the forseeable future. Personally, I think it's a great thing, insofar as the community keeps it's collective eye on the ball and dedicates itself to producing software that works right. If the energy that went into hiding the dark, scary innards of linux went into forcing market share for open protocols (a fight that's conceivably winnable, as the battleground is the serverroom), lobbying for closed protocols to be opened, and cracking commercially closed protocols, linux would be better off. Only fight battles from a position of strength. Linux is the swiss army knife and Rosetta stone of the serverroom. Lets all make sure it stays that way.

Also filed under technology ♠ comments: ∅

Some time ago, the Linux Foundation sponsored a contest to create a video adverstisement for Linux. The winners have been announced. All three of the selected videos take different approaches, but they're all really good.

The first video feels like a Mac video to me; it's all touchy-feely artsy. Very well done, but not my cup of tea. The second is my favorite - it covers the breadth of linux, captures the excitement of OSS and engages and involves the viewer. The third is a great skit, but I don't know if most users could relate to it - it makes the point that Linux is different, but not why or how.

This my favorite video:

The Origin... from Agustin Eguia on Vimeo.

Also filed under media or technology ♠ comments: ∅

First, I'm proud to announce the new gallery.brainycat.com site! It features several hundred images I've collected from the internet, mostly desktop wallpapers. Oddly, I don't change my own desktop wallpaper very often, but I collect them. Also, I've rendered them into the 15 most common mobile device screensizes, there's sure to be an image to spruce up your PDA or phone. You can email the image directly to your device or copy it to your pc then download it to your phone. I found the list of common device sizes at sender11, and I still need to go back and do some SEO optimization; gluing the device models to each picture size.

I've also included a gratuitious random image in the sidebar. A perfect example of a great use for regexps would be a way to tell gallery "if the album name contains *[N,n][S,s][F,f][W,w]*, exclude from random image pool". All in all though, it's a fantastic piece of software and I'm looking forward to helping the 3.x effort.

I've run across some limitations in gallery2. Gallery2 is fantastic if you have a series of albums of widely unique content with different thumbnail and display needs. Unfortunately, if you have a variety of nearly identical albums, it is quite a chore to configure each album one by one. I wish there was a way to use regexps to apply configurations to a set of nearly identical albums. I looked at the database, thinking I could cheat a little like I did with WordPress, but there's 63 tables in that database! Forgive me for a moment of laziness, and deciding to just get the site up the one sure way rather than spend a week trying to make sense of all the JOINS ON. I didn't want to crush my laptop by duplicating the 83MB database locally; there's a few hundred megs of images to track and it would take me as long to do it by hand than duplicate it locally to look for a programmatic solution.

I also provided links to the slackware packages I've built at /linux/slackware-packages. These are all original builds for software I couldn't find at slackbuilds.org or alien. Included are all the multimedia libraries I could find, rebuilds of k3b, k9copy and kaffeine to take advantage of the new libs, gimp2.6, a build of elvis that doesn't include X but allows syntax highlighting, and some other goodies. Unfortunately, my notes don't explain what depends on what very well. I know the media players will all want the media libraries and dvd libraries, and gimp wants the gcraw and the FFT libraries, but other than that I'm not really sure. I should probable elucidate the dependencies more clearly.

They are all built with the 686 processor optimizations, and I definitely notice a difference in the media playback and mp3 encoding with the optmizations.

Also filed under sysadmin ♠ comments: ∅

There's very, very little I miss about living in the midwest. I was born, not raised, a west coast kind of guy. Besides proper thunderstorms, decent BBQ, and lazy float trips down warm rivers the only thing I miss are fireflies. Lightening bugs, as we called them as kids, don't live on this side of the Rockies in North America and when I decided to move out here I didn't think I'd miss them.

I was wrong. I miss fireflies terribly. Not the insects themselves per se, but all the good times that happened along with them. Fireflies came out during the last grainy minutes of daylight, as the temperature dropped from "searing" to "merely uncomfortable", and the evening breeze would come up and finally provide some relief from the broiling humidity. Emerging from underneath shade, out of doors and willing to venture a few feet away from sources of fresh water, people kids would emerge and congregate as they are wont to do at those ages.

Embued with the cruelty common to all children, I was the undispusted master Firefly Swatter as a young lad. This was a competion the neighborhood kids would do every few nights or so. We'd get our trusty wiffle bats and see how much glowy guts we could smear on them, one bug at a time. The winner had the glowiest bat by the time the fireflies settled down for the night.

Later, fireflies became synonomous with hanging out with girls, clumsily fumbling through the rituals of attraction: signal and response, just like the insects floating around us. Cool damp air, the warm earth, the drone of countless insects, fireflies twinkling about, and the soft moans of pleasure are and forever will be indelibly inked upon some primitive part of my brain.

Shortly after the wonderfulness that is girls became known to me, so did booze. Drinking with my friends, picking up on girls, listening to music out at the edge of the county are about the only parts of my highschool years that I remember fondly. Then I grew up, and got my own place to live, and a job, and suddenly there just wasn't time for sitting around for a few hours doing almost nothing.

Why the sudden melancholic introspection? Because I missed firefly day. Not that I have a lot to contribute to this study headed by the Boston Museum of Science, but if you live in a firefly zone you can still sign up to participate. It appears, that like bats, frogs and several other creatures of the summer night, their numbers are inexplicably dropping. Thanks to Bug Girl for the headsup and brief trip down memory lane.

Also filed under pacific nw life or science ♠ comments: ∅