Putting the Bio into BioLOG
28 June 2002
What a friend
14:50 Had to take Sophie to the emergency doc's last night <#inc .nhsrant> which meant I was listening to the wireless for about half an hour more than I normally do on a Thursday night, which is silly because Paul Jones has a really good, hour-long R&B show. Anyway, he (Paul) played a track originally on vinyl, What a friend we have in Jesus from the Flying Clouds of Detroit, an acapella quartet (AFAICT). Beautiful, harmonizing black gospel, cranked up as I drove along East Road. They have a new album out, which I guess is a remastering of their stuff (they're quite old). Now on my wishlist. Buy it. Buy it now.
Oh, Sophie's all right, by the way; just a middle ear infection.
27 June 2002
Schadenfreude
13:33 Is it churlish to laugh at the Yanks? Bite me.
26 June 2002
Tag this
12:34 Hee hee. Found in a .sig over on a Farscape froup:
* THIS IS THE VOICE OF THE MYSTERONS. WE'RE NOT SURE IF YOU CAN HEAR US, EARTHMEN. TESTING. ONE-TWO. ONE-TWO. IS THIS THING ON?
25 June 2002
Chalk it up
15:25 I want to pronounce this 'warch allking'.
25 June 2002
Nor any a drop to drink
13:50 OK, there's a lot of talk about water- (actually hydrogen-) powered infernal combustion engines. But according to this site there's a concern that it will use up the world's supply of oxygen. Hunh? But if you're starting with water, and then burning the hydrogen to get, um, water, you'll end up with exactly the same amount (assuming 100% efficiency) as you started with. Even if you have excess H2 and O2 due to incomplete combustion, on average I would expect those two species to combine to yield . . . water. So we posit water-containing asteroids coming to Earth and melting icecaps to replenish the water. And the excess oxygen is allegedly a good thing too. Strange.
My biggest worry with all this is that it smacks of eternal motion and free energy. I don't understand the chemistry, but if you're using the power from the combustion to fuel the hydrolysis, then even with a catalyst you're going to run into trouble and not actually be able to drive? I can't find anything that doesn't look like snake-oil . . . email me if you know better.
20 June 2002
Shouldn't they be called hittiles?
14:14 Dear, dear Charles writes -
'Missle'
Unfortunately, Usenet Netiquette prohibits me expressing my deep frustration
about people who use 'Missle' when they mean 'Missile', but are too
thick/deeply ignorant/Product of American public education to be able to
learn to spell properly in the first place.
To all of you, and you probably don't have a clue who you are, I'd like to
say 'please stop now'.
17 June 2002
Prettiful
11:00 Rosanna is one of my colleagues here at the LMB. She spends her time making the place more pleasant to work in, as well as being a good scientist. Recently, she has been trying to crystallize a protein (aren't we all?) and has come up with two crystal forms which deserve wider appreciation. So, here are the Borg and the Star of David.
_
Blogging like a tinker's wife
13 June 2002
Shiny!
11:20 From the toys we really want department, Desktop Rover. Thanks to James for that (and reminding me of the appropriate response …). There's one small problem, however; according to Charles, The lasers are a bit feeble, though. We want the sort of thing that can put a four foot wide hole in a concrete wall *instantly*. Quite.
11 June 2002
Zimmer space
19:08 All right! Run, don't walk and get yourself the Mac GNU Privacy Guard - basically GNU PGP for OSX; GnuPG is a complete and free replacement for PGP. Because it does not use the patented IDEA algorithm, it can be used without any restrictions. GnuPG is a RFC2440 (OpenPGP) compliant application. There are four things you'll need from there: GNU Privacy Guard, GPGKeys, GPGDropThing and GPGPreferences. If you're feeling really wimpy, then Gpg Tools might be for you, too.
You can email me at home or work.
11 June 2002
Snoop doggy dog
13:10 With civilians probably (given the current fascist regime's record) soon being able to snoop on your email and other e-habits, time to dust off the old PGP doohickey, methinks. We may as well allow postal workers to open mail, and teleco workers to routinely bug 'phone lines. Oh wait, they already do that. I've said it before, I'll say it again, I didn't vote for these bastards.
07 June 2002
Gotcha
12:48 Come over to the Dark Side, Luke.
07 June 2002
Look out!
11:18 Cambridge college bans crappy, evil software. WTG.
06 June 2002
Update city
13:09 What have we here? OS 10.1.5, EV Nova 1.0.1 and Mozilla 1.0.0. That's right, the magic 1.0.0.