Dan Bornstein

Mystery fossil turns out to be giant fungus

Excerpt:

Scientists have identified the Godzilla of fungi, a giant, prehistoric fossil that has evaded classification for more than a century, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

A chemical analysis has shown that the 20-foot-tall (6-metre) organism with a tree-like trunk was a fungus that became extinct more than 350 million years ago, according to a study appearing in the May issue of the journal Geology.

Known as Prototaxites, the giant fungus originally was thought to be a conifer. Then some believed it was a lichen, or various types of algae. Some suspected it was a fungus.

"A 20-foot-fungus doesn't make any sense. Neither does a 20-foot-tall algae make any sense, but here's the fossil," C. Kevin Boyce, a University of Chicago assistant professor of geophysical sciences, said in a statement.

[...]

Samples of the giant fungi have been found all over the world from 420 million to 350 million years ago during a period in which millipedes, bugs and worms were among the first creatures to make their home on dry land. No animals with a backbone had left the oceans yet.

The tallest trees stood no more than a couple of feet (a meter) high, offering little competition for the towering fungi.

Plant-eating dinosaurs had not yet evolved to trample Prototaxites' to the ground.

All I'm saying is that the world needs more cuddly dancing robots.



(New Scientist Tech article, Marek Michalowski's project page.)

...unless you really really want to, and you think you'd enjoy having it as part of your permanent collection. It's not as if experimental ambient is what tops the charts these days, so I won't take offense if it's not your cup of tea.

(Can you tell I'm not in marketing?)

More info here: http://www.milk.com/fuzzboy/ Buy it (or merely hover your mouse over the "add to cart" button for a while) here: http://cdbaby.com/cd/fuzzboy

1. Paris Hilton cut me off in line for the portapotties once, with Lindsay Lohan in tow. They were both very giggly.


2. I once made a milkshake for Neil Young.


3. I can't stand bananas, but I love fried unripe plantains.


4. My right wrist joint is extremely loose. It can totally creep people out when properly demonstrated.


5. I have a "dead pixel" in one eye, though most of the time I don't notice it. (It tends to show up on bright sunny days.) I've had it since at least high school.


6. I sometimes invent recipes. (My latest work-in-progress is sesame soft pretzels.)


7. A family friend used to call me the "Five Thousand Year Old Man" — after the similarly-named Mel Brooks character — when I was little (like when I was 5 or so) because I always seemed so serious.


8. The "brain in a vat" thought experiment has stayed with me ever since I first heard about it. It is more-or-less the basis for my personal philosophy.


9. I have an overdeveloped sense of empathy. (I feel your pain.)


10. [REDACTED]

I read this story once about a (vinyl) record which had a tune that was so catchy that it wouldn't leave your head... until you played it for someone else. I hope it really works...

How bad is it that I "get" this?: http://xkcd.com/c153.html

It's official: I'm over sudoku. I have a new, less deterministic, obsession: Dicewars.

It's sort of like Risk. The rules aren't explained on the site, so I'll do a half-assed job here: During your turn, you may make as many attacks as you want. An attack happens from any of your territories with at least two dice to any adjacent territory under another player's control. You both roll all the dice on the respective territories. If the attacker's total is higher, then all but one of his dice moves onto the attacked territory (leaving one behind) and the defender removes his dice; otherwise, the attacker removes all but one of his dice from the attacking territory (and the defender keeps all his dice). At the end of your turn, you get a number of extra dice equal to the number of territories in the largest block that you control. The dice are placed randomly, except that no territory may have more than eight dice on it. If you have spares after placement, they "roll over" to your next turn. The game is over when there's only one player left on the board.

For the SF Bay Area folks, something you may be interested in: John Kricfalusi Retrospective at the Castro Theatre.

John Kricfalusi in person to share some of his favorite works, including lots of Ren & Stimpy! With his landmark 1991 TV series Ren & Stimpy, featuring the demented, wildly anti-social and hilariously inappropriate antics of the two title characters, Canadian-born animator John Kricfalusi kicked modern cartooning in its underpants, starting a myriad of trends. Kricfalusi followed up by inventing internet cartoons in 1996 with The Goddamn George Liquor Program and developed the techniques for Flash animation that are used at practically every studio today. The matinee show is aimed at a younger audience; the evening show is more adult-themed.

I'm going to the Saturday evening show. Perhaps I will see you there...

Will the vegans eat it? Will this cause there to be a new category of "vatetarian" or something?

Test Tube Meat Nears Dinner Table

"All of the technology exists today to make ground meat products in vitro," says Paul Kosnik, vice president of engineering at Tissue Genesis in Hawaii. Kosnik is growing scaffold-free, self-assembled muscle. "We believe the goal of a processed meat product is attainable in the next five years if funding is available and the R&D is pursued aggressively."

Free cheesy dystopian sci-fi plot idea for the taking: In the future, vat-grown human meat gets popular... and then somebody detects human consciousness in the muscle.

Locals-to-me may be interested in this:

MAY 21 ROLL A GIANT KATAMARI WITH US ACROSS THE CITY OF SAN FRANCISCO

Fundies Say The Darndest Things.

The pig is the most shameless animal on the face of the earth. It is the only animal that invites its friends to have sex with its mate. In America, most people consume pork. Many times after dance parties, they have swapping of wives; i.e. many say "you sleep with my wife and I will sleep with your wife." If you eat pigs then you behave like pigs.

Monster band has Finland fretting over face it shows, from the International Herald Tribune. Excerpt:

"In Finland, we have no Eiffel Tower, few real famous artists, it is freezing cold and we suffer from low self-esteem," said Lordi, who has horns protruding from his face mask and sports black fingernails 15 centimeters, or 6 inches, long. ...

But not everyone in the country views the monster squad as un-Finnish. Some Finns say Lordi is right at home, and that its use of flaming dragon-encrusted swords and exploding baby dolls express the warrior spirit of the Vikings.

I'm not big into blog reading in general, so it's probably not too surprising that I find it a pain in the butt to run a separate app to read the few blogs that I do.

I recently switched to GMail for much of my mail, and that solved part of my problem, since it lets you add RSS feeds to it, where it will show you one headline in a little box above the main email content. Within a day or two, I've read enough headlines that I probably don't miss any postings.

Unfortunately, though, the GMail feature only works for public (non-authenticated) feeds. So, I took the time to write the script below. I run it (a couple times, for a couple different journals) in a cron job once a day and have it email the output to me if it's not empty. The idea is that, every day, it grabs some LJ user's atom feed both with and without authentication. Subtracting the non-authenticated stuff from the authenticated stuff leaves you with a list of private postings, and diffing that list with the same list from the last time you run it lets you know what's new.

Without further ado, lj-alert:

#!/bin/bash
#
# lj-alert <userid>

set -e

if [ "x$1" = "x" ]; then
    echo "$0: no userid specified"
    exit 1
fi

who="$1"
user='xxxxx' # your LJ userid here
passwd='xxxxx' # your LJ password here
url="http://${who}.livejournal.com/data/atom"

# set up prog to be the name of this script, including following symlinks
prog=`type -p $0` >/dev/null 2>&1
while [ -L "$prog" ]
do
    newprog=`expr "\`/bin/ls -l "$prog"\`" : ".*$prog -> \(.*\)"`
    expr "$newprog" : / >/dev/null || newprog="`dirname $prog`/$newprog"
    prog="$newprog"
done
progDir="`dirname $prog`"
libDir="$progDir/../lib/lj-alert"

lastDiffFile="${libDir}/${who}-last.txt"
mkdir -p "$libDir"

tmpDir="/tmp/lj-$"
publicFile="${tmpDir}/public.txt"
privateFile="${tmpDir}/private.txt"
diffFile="${tmpDir}/diff.txt"
newFile="${tmpDir}/new-stuff.txt"

rm -rf "$tmpDir"
mkdir "$tmpDir"

if [ -r "${who}-public.txt" ]; then
    cp "${who}-public.txt" "$publicFile"
else
    curl --silent --output "$publicFile" "$url"
fi

if [ -r "${who}-private.txt" ]; then
    cp "${who}-private.txt" "$privateFile"
else
    curl --silent --output "$privateFile" --digest --user "${user}:${passwd}" \
        "${url}?auth=digest"
fi

diff -U 0 "$publicFile" "$privateFile" | tail +3 | grep '^\+' | \
    sed -e 's/^\+//g' > "$diffFile"
touch "$lastDiffFile"
diff -U 0 "$lastDiffFile" "$diffFile" | tail +3 | grep '^\+' | \
    sed -e 's/^\+//g' > "$newFile"
cp "$diffFile" "$lastDiffFile"

awk '
    /^ *<link.*href="[^"]*"/ {
        match($0, /href="[^"]*"/);
        link = substr($0, RSTART + 6, RLENGTH - 7);
        printf("\n    <%s>\n", link);
    }
    /^ *<title>/ {
        title = $0;
        gsub(/ *<\/?title>/, "", title);
        printf("    %s\n", title);
    }
' $newFile

rm -rf "$tmpDir"

10:55am: I finished filling in the seven or eight pages of questionnaire and headed out, to return tomorrow at 9am for the next phase of selection. The questions ranged from personal history (the careers of myself, my parents, anyone I live with, where and when I was born, etc.), to how I felt about civil litigation (too many lawsuits? too few? just enough? how about monetary awards?), to whether I or close relatives/friends had experience in very specific areas, including law enforcement and insurance, but more interestingly some other stuff which, although I don't think anything said the questionnaire was confidential, I'm guessing I probably shouldn't mention until I am no longer a juror or juror-candidate.

9:50am: The judge came in and talked a bit about the logistics. The judge is a fairly avuncular guy, probably mid-sixties, and his demeanor makes me believe he has a decent sense of humor. Anyway, for my group, jury selection today will be for a case of his that will begin in early January. The trial is expected to last 10 (business) days, at which point jury deliberation will begin. He expects there to be no more than about three days of deliberation. He told people who thought that the schedule would be a hardship to come get a "green form," fill it out, and then get in line, and he would talk to each person individually. Everyone else will fill out some other questionnaire, hand it in, and our service will be over for the day. We will have to show up tomorrow at 9am for further jury selection, and possibly one or two more days after that. I don't think I can legitimately claim hardship, so I guess I'll be showing up tomorrow.

9:46am: A short list of people was called, and they were relieved of their duty. The rest of us are apparently in one judge's group, and that judge will be coming into the room to speak to us in a moment. Perhaps this will be my last entry for a while. (And no more sudoku, alas.)

9:41am: The first set of names is being read over the loudpeaker (by yet another person). The names are being read in alphabetical order, and it's not just everyone in order, since my name was skipped over. Meanwhile, I've started working on some Very Important sudoku.

9:08am: Some other person appears to be manning the mike now. "Testing, testing, 1 2 3." It appears to be just about time for the video telling us how the justice system works (or something like that). "Can I see Becky last-name at the counter please?"

9:10am: TVs are turned on. Someone pressed play on the DVD player: "California. The greatest state in the union. Our state is a source of great natural beauty. ... But ... We have disputes. ... Upholding what is right and correcting what is wrong ... But who should make these decisions? Who could make them fairly? ... Who could be impartial? ... Many times, we don't trust any one official, or ... Whether it's a civil trial, or a criminal trial ... Instead, we trust in the community to make the right decision. This is our democratic ideal. ... 'Our system is better than other countries...' ... So important is our right to trial by jury ... Never again shall we be judged by ... 'I would love to have the jury that I served on...' ... 'We're all different. We're all coming together.' ... If chosen to be a juror ... Democracy is made real every day, by ... You may be asked to serve on a civil case ... or it may be a criminal case. ... What does it take? Common sense, fairness, and ... There are three stages for jurors ... 'Remain seated and come to order...' In the courtroom, the judge will ... The secretary ... The bailiff ... The court reporter ... 'Raise your right hands...' Jury selection starts with your ... The judge tells you about the claims or charges ... If you have any questions about your privacy or confidentiality, you may ... The attorneys want the best juries possible ... 'I am a salesman for a pharmaceutical company...' 'There is the issue of bias, and there's the issue of an open mind...' ... 'As a peremptory challenge, we would like to thank and excuse juror number six...' ... For a criminal case, there are ... You need no special training to be a juror, but you will follow some rules ... Keep your mind open ... You can't investigate the case independently ... 'Ladies and gentlemen of the jury...' 'Your Honor, I would like to submit these e-mails into evidence...' 'Objection, Your Honor!...' 'Objection sustained...' You may hear the testimony of a number of witnesses. ... After all the evidence is presented ... These statements are not evidence, they are points of view. ... Only a jury can decide. ... The judge will instruct you on how to ... 'Trying to come to some sort of agreement with twelve strangers...' ... Often, a guidebook is available to help organize ... You may organize yourselves as seems best. ... It will be your duty to give your opinion, and also to listen to the opinions of others. ... 'Let's all take another vote...' ... In a civil trial ... In a criminal trial ... 'We the jury...' ... Justice has been served. ... After the judge discharges you, you are not required ... It is often a deep and moving experience ... 'I came out feeling positive...' 'I felt good about myself...' Justice. Of the people. By the people. And for the people. You make these ideals real by serving on a jury." [Queue up stoic and patriotic march music.]

8:55am: It looks like the line of people has dwindled down. Nice Check-in Lady is making an announcement over the loudspeaker: "Thank you for fulfilling your civic duty. The bathrooms are ... Payphones are located ... You will get a break as the schedule permits. ... Right now pre-trial proceedings are happening upstairs. You may get called ... Keep your summons with you. The best way to know your juror badge number is by keeping your summons, as it is printed on it. ... If you are assigned to a courtroom ... You are not reimbursed for parking ... By state law, jurors are not paid for the first day of service. ... If you are a government employee, state law says that ... If you need to leave the assembly room, please check in with us before you leave ... It is very important that everyone has checked in. ... Shortly we will be playing a video ... Safety is our primary concern. Should you be in need of any ... Should an emergency arise ... Thank you for your attention. Now at this time if you are a government employee, please raise your hand and ... "

9:03am: Several helpers are handing out special questionnaires to the government employees.

7:50am: Milling about at the front entrance, because it's EMPLOYEES ONLY until 8am. I didn't actually have to show up until 8:30am, but I decided to walk from my place, and I wanted to leave plenty of leeway. In fact it only took about 20 minutes, and that included a wrong turn and so an extra couple blocks' worth of walking.

8:00am: Walk through a metal detector. Put my laptop bag through an x-ray scanner. I also put my keys, wallet, and hiptop in the bag so as to avoid the hassle of emptying my pockets into a little bin and having some security dude poke at them.

8:02am: Check out the lovely bathrooms.

8:05am: Wander downstairs to the jury waiting area. Stand in a short line to hand the nice lady my papers. Got my laptop out and found out that -- as I had in fact been told -- the building has free 802.11. It is, unfortunately though, not exactly the zippiest connection on earth. I've been trying to use my remote screen(1) session, but it'll be responsive and interactive for only about a minute at a time, and then there will be a delay of between a few seconds to a minute or so. So I've been doing a lot of blind typeahead (perhaps to the annoyance of my irc buddies).