On The Third Hand

International Geek Song

A geek love song… sort of. (Note: it starts straight… and gets funnier as it goes.) Thanks to Overtaken by Events for the link.

I knew it was too late to join the dot com boom when the local water delivery guy asked if I wanted to invest in his new internet company. He, and a couple of buddies from Poland Spring, were going to do something online involving water and he was generous enough to offer me a slice of the action. I politely declined and then sold all my Cisco stock.

From Winterspeak at Assymetrical Information.

Tinfoil hats attract mind-control signals, boffins learn

Wearing a tinfoil hat to deflect government mind-control radio waves is even more foolish than most people think. According to several (apparent) students from MIT who tested several hat designs, there was “a 30 db amplification at 2.6 Ghz and a 20 db amplification at 1.2 Ghz, regardless of the position of the antenna on the cranium.”

Heh. Thanks to Tim H. for the link.

If you can’t get to your favorite blog (other than this one, of course), it’s because there is a major DOS attack affecting Hosting Matters (where many blogs are hosted).

Microsoft in $7m spam settlement

US software giant Microsoft has won a $7m (£3.9m) court settlement from a businessman considered to be one of the world’s biggest senders of spam e-mail.

Scott Richter agreed to pay the sum after Microsoft filed a lawsuit against his internet firm Opt In Real Big.

Microsoft alleged Opt In Real Big had sent millions of unsolicited commercial e-mails, using forged sender names and false subject lines.

Mr Richter denied any wrongdoing, but said his firm’s operations had changed.

Yeah. Right. But it’s still nice to see him zapped - even a little. I wonder if the Russians have his address…

Ann Althouse - one of the three bloggers covering for the singular Instapundit

Discovery has landed safely.

Does he play by sense of smell?

Amazing.

Google Moon

Hat tip to amcgltd, who finds these things so I don’t have to.

Tuskless elephants evolving in China due to poaching.

BEIJING, July 17 (AFP) - A recent study has predicted that more male Asian elephants in China will be born without tusks because poaching of tusked elephants is reducing the gene pool, the China Daily reported Sunday.

The study, conducted in the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture in southwest China’s Yunnan province, where two-thirds of China’s Asian elephants live, found that the tuskless phenomenon is spreading, the report said.

The tusk-free gene, which is found in between two and five percent of male Asian elephants, has increased to between five percent and 10 percent in elephants in China, according to Zhang Li, an associate professor of zoology at Beijing Normal University.

“This decrease in the number of elephants born with tusks shows the poaching pressure for ivory on the animal,” said Zhang, whose research team has been studying elephants since 1999 at a reserve in Xishuangbanna.

Only male elephants have tusks, which are said to be a symbol of masculinity and a weapon to fight for territory. However, due to poaching for ivory, the elephants’ pride has become a death sentence, the report said.

“The larger tusks the male elephant has, the more likely it will be shot by poachers,” said Zhang. “Therefore, the ones without tusks survive, preserving the tuskless gene in the species.”

I wonder how long it will take until there are no elephants with tusks… I suspect it will be a very short time in evolutionary terms.

Hat tip toamcgltd, whose post notes that this finding is controversial ‘even in China’ - though I can’t think why. It’s basic common sense.

From NASA

New U.S. Army sensors rock

Washington, DC, May. 27 (UPI) – The U.S. military is developing miniature electronic sensors disguised as rocks.

The disguised sensors can be dropped from an aircraft and used to help detect the sound of approaching enemy combatants, the London Financial Times has reported.

…

The new sensors would be made cheaply enough to be left on the ground without need for retrieval by soldiers.

Something like that would be right handy along our borders too. But the best thing about it is that our pilots can run around dropping real rocks along with the fake ones… and if some group really wants to sneak around an area without being caught… they’ve got to check all of them.

Clear skies end global dimming

Our planet’s air has cleared up in the past decade or two, allowing more sunshine to reach the ground, say two studies in Science this week.

Reductions in industrial emissions in many countries, along with the use of particulate filters for car exhausts and smoke stacks, seem to have reduced the amount of dirt in the atmosphere and made the sky more transparent.

That sounds like very good news. But the researchers say that more solar energy arriving on the ground will also make the surface warmer, and this may add to the problems of global warming. More sunlight will also have knock-on effects on cloud cover, winds, rainfall and air temperature that are difficult to predict.

All right, time to switch to coal-burning cars…