Links to 2009-11-22

It has been quite a week. I put in several links and then decided that they are boring. So here is what is left.

Biology

The smells from my childhood are very important to me. I lived in  a Hospital until I was three and these smells are the smells of home. Not the smells of a house. A scientific report proports to be able to prove this.

Climate

My strange flat mate is a climate change skeptic. But then he believes in a god.  But the militaries of the world are gearing up, and have been so for some time, to make claims over the Arctic as the ice melts. This is a tragic hang over of the evils of the previous centuries. We need to be able to stop countries from being greedy like this.

Computers

An interesting report on the failure rate of various computers, which I think is disturbingly high.

Cycling

This is a cool recumbent where you lie on your belly.

The world produces a bit less than 135 million bicycles and a bit more than 45 million cars per annum. Quite interesting reading. I love the quote: Each market has its own idiosyncrasies. Europeans mainly use bikes for commuting, but have the odd habit of ignoring models made explicitly for that purpose in favour of sleeker, faster models which are then expensively modified. Americans prefer off-road BMX trail bikes. Taiwanese demand is led by racing-style bikes used for exercise.

Apparently the Energy Consumption of bicycles is much less. I do not know how scientific this is or the calculation method, but it is better than people who say that bicycles produce no carbon dioxide or other pollutants. After all, do I not breath out. Does my body not produce carbon dioxide as a waste competent? It certainly does. Here are their calories per mile stats. I guess they used the average number of occupants for cars, buses and rail. I hope they did.

• Auto 1,860
• Bus 920
• Rail 885
• Foot 100
• Bicycle 35

Engineering

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers civil works controversies (New Orleans): It never ceases to amaze me that in a country who tell everyone how to have small government and private industry that the US army builds levies. I mean, why don’t they also build roads? In Australia that is done by private industry.

Internet

EU closes 54 Web sites for consumer law violations: Kevin Rudd and the Australian Law makers should look at this as how their monitoring should work. Treat it like any other matter. If a company or individual breaks the law, then take them to court, and make them do as you would with any bricks and mortar company. If international law is a problem, work to fix it.

Encrypt Your E-Mail: instructions on how to encrypt your email. Though my experience with people who do send me encrypt email is that is massively slows down my computer.

Media

On the media front the various camps are resorting to issuing dubious research findings which support their point of view, and the lack of independent journalists is sadly showing. But journalists are rarely independent in their point of view and even less so when it comes to the internet. This makes them an unreliable source of information. We have the Boston Consulting Group say ALMOST half of Australian internet users would be willing to pay a small monthly amount for unique and timely online news and the media turn this into warming to paying, though they do not state how they show that there is a change of state in the feeling. On the other hand Forrester Research say Most (80% of US users) won’t pay for newspaper, magazine content online. Maybe Australians are more willing to pay. Maybe the questions were done differently. How are we to know. Certainly the news services themselves are of no use here. Perhaps given that there will be bias, we need a system like they use in the finance industry. 80% of finance analysis companies think that the stock will go up. Personally I wonder why we don’t just read the news from Reuters? Then Google bounced into the fray and said that News Limited could simply stop google from reading the news by setting up their site so that it won’t read it. I guess that this is using something like robot.txt or perhaps it is something more sophisticated.

Apparently the Americans are finally ready to accept Dr Who. I won’t believe it until I see it.

Telecommunications

Cable & Wireless are splitting up. But in a tragic failure of imagination they are not splitting up into two companies called Cable and Wireless.

A bit closer to home: Indosat extends sea cable system to Singapore.

Transport

With Road Trains, Highways Become Public Transportation: This will take a while to happen, but the technology is there and the roll out will soon happen. So perhaps we can get driver-less driving in some limited cases before the boffins work out how to do it from individual cars. I suspect that this is more likely to happen in Europe where the governments are much happier mandating things than here in Australia.

WWW

Reading of SQL injection made me think of heroin injection? Are they the same? They use the same word. But alas, no, it is another case of overloading in the English language. SQL Injection: The Fastest-Growing Security Threat