Blaise Aguera y Arcas showing the latest developments at Microsoft around mapping:

Bing Mapping

Must say that with Microsoft buying up Seadragon, they’re taking a lead in GIS.

This all stems from their buyout of Seadragon. Mr. Aguera y Arcas showed this off a couple of years ago:
Photosynth

Microsoft are calling one of the spin-offs of Photosynth “Deep Zoom”: Not a great overview of Deep Zoom

Hitched.co.uk - a UK wedding planning site - have started using it: pretty good use of Deep Zoom

And does a podcast about it! And here are pictures of him, looking like one of the off-roaders from the Fast Show.

Unfortunately this visit was before the Large Hadron Collider opened and turned out to be rubbish, or else he would have been all ‘Peter, you’ve lost the boson’.

- Completely awesome Steve Jones lecture on whether human evolution has stopped. The stuff on Francis Galton was new to me - apparently he constructed a ‘beauty map’ of Britain which concluded that Aberdeen had the most mingers with the loveliest people in the country being found just outside Harrods. The latter finding might still hold.
- Six-day cycle racing was invented down the road from me in Islington. Possibly the weirdest sport ever, though it did indirectly promote the art of reading a newspaper while on your bike.
- Epic, must-read rant about the strange world of academic journals.

So Philip Morris is supposedly pioneering bold new strategies in an attempt to maintain its hold on established markets while reaching out to millions of new victims in less nannyish climes. The Wall Street Journal has this video on two new products apparently put forward by PM, both of which strike me as surprisingly unsinister - endearingly goofy, even. Or is that the point??

I also like the way the (American) journalist grinningly informs us that neither will catch on Stateside because Americans are too lazy and stupid. Thanks for the insight!

This is great, but I can’t help wondering exactly how many times Tom Cruise has really got involved in the aftermath of car accidents and what exactly he does for the victims. “Probably just stops them screaming” is Jay’s suggestion.

The Guardian’s science correspondent:

Ian Sample

Clearly someone at the BBC didn’t get the memo. We now have a new metric for size comparisons, so that chart showing squids and buses on the same scale is incomplete. Thankfully, Conor has set them straight:

This site is, well, fascinating. Entirely dedicated to a love affair between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

http://www.thyla.com/

Here’s a few pictures:

Mr. Spock dressed as a Can-Can girl.

This picture is called At the Rennaissance Faire on Shore Leave.

Which begs the question… do Kirk and Spock have such a in-depth love affair that they attend Medieval festivals with eachother?

Here’s a snappy headline:

We are part of a super advanced Type IV extraterrestrial civilization- projection of Zero Point Energy Module encapsulated as life on 3-D vector space with increasing span

India Daily’s ‘Technology Team’ has the rest of the story.

Poor thing beached in Sligo

I’ve been meaning to post for ages about Google Earth and just how amazing it is. Well, it’s about to become even better, at least for the likes of me, because these boffins have gone and created a 3D map showing every building in London to a fairly remarkable level of detail (it’s all done using LIDAR, apparently). As it happens, some of the people working on this do so two floors above my desk, so naturally I pestered them into giving me a demo. It looks fantastic, as this video clip demonstrates. Unfortunately I think the final version might only be available to the public sector, but as that technically includes me I won’t complain too much.

The obvious next question is how long it’ll be before some enterprising hacker knocks something up allowing you to fly planes into 3D buildings within GE, and some enterprising tabloid hack starts a moral panic about it providing free training to terrorist.

A study has shown that mammograms increase the risk of breast cancer, according to The Daily Mail, the Irish Independent and all the other papers who picked up from the wires a rehash of a scientific study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.The risk from mammograms was greatly increased for women with two mutated genes which put them at a higher risk of cancer, they reported.

It isn’t true. The study showed that chest X-rays, taken while breast tissue is still developing in women with the genes, can increase the risk by up to 54%.

The study of 1,600 women did not analyse the risk from mammograms. Despite the study’s authors pointing this out when they realised their work was being misrepresented, the papers went ahead with their scare story anyway.

The chest X-rays might be taken in childhood for spinal abnormalities, for instance. Women from families prone to breast cancer should think about having MRI or other scans that aren’t X-rays, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, in Lyon, concluded.

“Exposure to chest X-rays (not-including mammograms, which were assessed in a subsequent part of the questionnaire) was assessed first as ever or never.”

Note the “not-including mammograms”. The authors concluded that because there was too much bias in reporting of having mammograms, another study specifically about mammograms was needed.

In fact, an advisory went out on the wires later the same day that the wires put out the original, incorrect, version of the story. It said something to the effect that “mammograms do not increase the risk of breast cancer in women with the genes, according to this study”.
Despite having plenty of time to do so before their print deadlines, the newspapers did not correct their incorrect, less sexy version of the story.

Or else they didn’t see the advisory.

Here’s what the Mail wrote.

And here’s the abstract of the scientific paper.

And here’s a quote from the full paper, which I had to get through nefarious means (thanks Mr D):

“The results presented here also raise the issue of the potential risks from mammographic screening, which is often used to screen BRCA [the faulty genes] carriers starting from their early 30s. Unfortunately, the analysis of the effect of mammographic exposure on BC [breast cancer] risk is likely to be biased in retrospective studies because of its obvious relatoinship to diagnosis, and accordingly, a prospective study of mutation carriers with detailed mammographic exposure history with adjustment for confounding variables (eg, family history) is a priority.”

So the upshot is:

• Chest X-rays when young increase risk of breast cancer in women who are prone to it.
• The people who did the study don’t know if mammograms do as well so we need to do that research.
• If you are a newspaper and a later advisory comes out which spoils your scare story, ignore it, especially if your story is about women’s breasts.

A great headline from Yahoo! news, leading to a much more mundane story than the day of horror that springs to mind.

This great site from the Bradshaw Foundation chronicles the stop-start spread of humans around the world, showing the enormous impact of climatic (and volcanic) changes and linking to more pages on some amazing ancient art, among others the Chauvet cave paintings, Indian rock art and the Dabous Giraffes in Niger, which are between 8,000 and 10,000 years old:

This review by David Archer of RealClimate.org of James Lovelock’s new book is fascinating. Lovelock is basically predicting a climate-driven catastrophe of some kind in the medium-term, along the following lines:

The analogy is to the failure of natural regulation of a human body, requiring artificial intervention. If the kidneys fail, a doctor has to take over regulation of blood chemistry using dialysis. If the pancreas fails, the patient requires manual regulation of sugar metabolism by insulin injection. It is generally bad news when the doctor tells you that your body’s natural regulation mechanisms are failing, because artificial, technological fixes are typically not as reliable as the natural ones. There is no doubt that mankind is taking over the reins of global geochemical balance. Industrial production of fixed nitrogen for fertilizer now matches the natural rate of nitrogen fixation on the planet. Rates of fossil-fuel CO2 emission dwarf the natural rate of CO2 release in volcanic gases. Lovelock’s conclusion, by analogy, is that the biosphere of the Earth will soon be beset by all manner of unanticipated complications.

This does not seem to me an unreasonable conclusion, I must admit. Consider Biosphere II. This was a sealed greenhouse in the Arizona desert, an attempt to create a managed, self-contained biosphere. A very humbling effort it turned out to be, all in all. Biological control proved to be completely out of reach. Several species of birds were introduced into the system, based on rational design of ecological balance, and all of them went extinct. The only birds that flourished in BII were a local species that invaded the structure while it was under construction that they never managed to eradicate. Ants and cockroaches became so abundant in BII that the biospherians took to sucking them up into vacuum cleaners and feeding them to their domesticated chickens. Geochemically, the oxygen concentration plummeted and nitrous oxide rose, until the structure became uninhabitable.

I’ve been doing a macroeconomics course recently, and maybe I’m just a sucker for facile analogies but I’m struck by the similarities to historical climatology. It’s all non-linearities and multiple equilibria, and the great depression of the 1930s starts looking like an economic version of global warming - short-termist behaviour stored up problems for the future, resulting in a tipping-point which pushed the whole system into a radically altered new equilibrium nobody could have predicted. The big difference is between the scale of time-lags - in economics its not that long until you notice the accumulated effects of present actions, maybe months, but in climate it takes decades or even centuries, making it much harder to stop and even harder to reverse. Which is funny when you think about it.

• The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth
• Neu-York: An obsessively detailed alternate-history map, imagining how Manhattan might have looked had the Nazis conquered it in World War II
• A really annoying brain-type test from Ali G’s dad
• Musical genres mapped out on the London Underground map (I live in Buddy Holly, and Jamie Cullum’s a dead end)
• An exploration, related in excellent Engrish, of the amazing Kowloon Walled City.

With crushing inevitability, Indonesia has started cutting down and burning mind-bogglingly large amounts of forests to replace them with palm oil plantations for biodiesel.

And there was I thinking that all that surplus food we grow and raise could now be replaced by oil seed rape to meet our fuel needs. It does pretty well in our (for now) mild, damp climate, generally inhospitable to everything except cows, sheep and Land Cruisers.
Instead we’ll probably find that it’s cheaper to import biodiesel from countries who are burning natural vegetation and kicking out small farmers to replace them with massive plantations.

It feels a bit like when Monty Burns uses recycled beer-can mesh to trawl for fish.

That’s it, I’m buying a Pajero.

Electronic scrolls.

As Kevin Drum reports, a federal judge has struck down the Dover (Pennsylvania) School Board’s attempt to mandate the teaching of Intelligent Design in Dover schools. Some parts of the judge’s ruling really bears repeating:

First, while encouraging students to keep an open mind and explore alternatives to evolution, [the Board’s disclaimer] offers no scientific alternative; instead, the only alternative offered is an inherently religious one, namely, ID.

….The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

… The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

Quite the judicial smackdown, I think you’ll agree. Also, I like the first comment on Kevin’s post, by ‘cld’, who says

Intelligent Design is exactly as if you were to say that the lightning is so powerful only a giant monkey in the sky could have thrown it.

From the fabulous Spirit Fingers: Crazy Patents The World Has Not Yet Forgot.

Animal Ear Protection

Really, there has to be some better way than sticking two toilet rolls over your dog’s ears. What about some plastic banana clip combs or a velvet scrunchie, passe as they are in the human world. Food stains can easily be washed away but the image of your pet running around like a wannabe cheerleader will haunt you forever.

User operated amusement for kicking the user’s buttocks

Because it’s just so much more fun when you do it yourself.

More crazy patents here.

This shameless plug from the BBC ‘news’ site for the new series on insect life contains the following amusing little vignette:

The alcon blue butterfly (Maculinea alcon) of central Europe has long been recognised as a great con artist.

Its caterpillar emits sounds and a chemical signal which essentially “instructs” worker ants to pick it up and carry it back to their nest, where it is fed, cleaned and cared for as if it were one of the queen ant’s own brood.

The caterpillar can live for up to two years inside the nest before pupating into a chrysalis, from which a new butterfly emerges.

Ha! Take that, you lousy ants! But wait, what’s this?

It has an enemy, however: a parasitic wasp (Ichneumon eumerus). Unlike the ants, the wasp seems to know an impostor is present and, in what appears like a kamikaze manoeuvre, will enter the nest to find the caterpillar. [The] wasp avoids death by releasing a chemical signal, or pheromone, of its own. This not only repels the ants but causes them to attack one another.

One almost feels sorry for the ants at this point. Almost. But what’s the wasp up to now?

In the midst of this confusion the wasp seeks out the caterpillar and injects an egg deep inside its body.

When the wasp leaves the nest everything returns to normal and the caterpillar is once again fed and cleaned by the ants.

Yes, best to try to put that awful episode behind us and get on with your admittedly dysfunctional family life. After all, what else could go wrong?

But, when the caterpillar turns into a chrysalis, IT IS EATEN FROM THE INSIDE BY THE INJECTED WASP GRUB - and it is the wasp that emerges to fly from the nest, not another alcon blue butterfly!!!!

(emphasis added)

Ichneumon eumerus, I salute you - I thought the female praying mantis was a bad-ass, but that is ice-cold.

Dear Human,

Upgrades may be available for you.

I searched and searched but apparently the only genitalia that require upgrading are women’s.

Here’s the abstract of “The War for the Fare”: How Driver Compensation Affects Bus System Performance. I do love that last line.

Two systems of bus driver compensation exist in Santiago, Chile. Most drivers are paid per passenger transported, while a second system compensates other drivers with a fixed wage. Compared with fixed-wage drivers, per-passenger drivers have incentives to engage in “La Guerra por el Boleto” (”The War for the Fare”), in which drivers change their driving patterns to compete for passengers. This paper takes advantage of a natural experiment provided by the coexistence of these two compensation schemes on similar routes in the same city. Using data on intervals between bus arrivals, we find that the fixed-wage contract leads to more bunching of buses, and hence longer average passenger wait times. The per-passenger drivers are assisted by a group of independent information intermediaries called “sapos” who earn their living by standing at bus stops, recording arrival times, and selling the information to subsequent drivers who drive past. We find that a typical bus passenger in Santiago waits roughly 10% longer for a bus on a fixed-wage route relative to an incentive-contract route. However, the incentives also lead drivers to drive noticeably more aggressively, causing approximately 67% more accidents per kilometer driven. Our results have implications for the design of incentives in public transportation systems.

http://www.theregister.com/2005/11/11/tinfoil_hats_as_government_plot/

I hadn’t heard of Kary B. Mullis before, but when someone promises me a “hilarious Nobel prize acceptance lecture” from an “LSD-toting punk genius”, I follow the link.

That lecture is here, and it’s a bit different alright, though not so much for hilarity as for threading an autobiographical tale of broken marriages and lost love through the story of how he came up with the concept of polymerase chain reactions. Mullis remembers the date of breakthrough experiment because it was the birthday of his ex-wife Cynthia, which provokes the following reverie:

There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for “melancholy of relationships past.” It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your grain, to listen to country music.

He closes his lecture remembering walking to his car having just celebreated the momentous breakthrough with his lab assistant Fred, past avocado trees ripening in Berkeley’s winter drizzle, and concludes thusly - “Neither Fred, empty Becks bottles, nor the sweet smell of the dawn of the age of PCR could replace Jenny. I was lonesome.”

Mullis’s unconventionality apparently also extends to denying both global warming and the role of HIV in causing AIDS, and to acting as a defence witness in OJ Simpson’s murder trial, which on this Wikipedia page leads to mention of “a refrigerator in his home covered in snapshots of all the women with whom he has had sexual relations, using his Nobel laureate status as an aphrodisiac”. Wow, who’d have thought a Nobel prize was such a sure-fire route to stud status?

As the dread bird flu marches imperterbably towards our inevitable doom, various news organisations yesterday tried to get to grips with the horrifying public panic. First, RTE managed to handle the story without reference to a single virologist. Farmers are the people being interviewed - the stories are more about reaction than information.

Kudos goes to Newsnight on BBC two, who finally put an expert in communicable disease on their programme (after some farmers). Finally, one of their interviewees provided the TV moment of the week when he was asked what could be done:

Well, it’s not rocket science, it’s just a matter of putting a few…[pause]…million chickens indoors.”

This is a job for Rockie.

Soon, Oliver Stone will make a film of this:

Datura stramonium is the name of a poisonous weed, sometimes used as a hallucinogen. Commonly called Thorn Apple. Datura stramonium is classified as a deliriant, or an anticholinergic. It grows over almost all of the Continental United States.

In the United States it is called Jimson Weed, or more rarely Jimpson Weed; it got this name from the town of Jamestown, Virginia, where British soldiers were secretly drugged with it (in their salad), while attempting to stop Bacon’s Rebellion. They spent several days chasing feathers, making monkey faces, generally acting like lunatics, and indeed failed at their mission. It is also sometimes called locoweed (because of the pharmacological effects) though that term is more commonly applied to leguminous plants in the genera Astragalus and Oxytropus. It is also sometimes called stinkweed (because of its unpleasant odor).

Look here for the full bit.

This story set me reminiscing about the program I had on my Amstrad 6128 years ago which tried to simulate human conversation. I suppose its conversation resembled a particular kind of human, a particularly earnest, narrow-minded and dogged kind, but it wasn’t very interesting, especially not when I could have been playing Operation Wolf instead.

So I was eager to see whether the state of the chatbot art had advanced much. The winner of this year’s Loebner Prize is ‘George‘ by the British company Jabberwacky, but it’s unbearably slow to use over the net, perhaps because they’ve been inundated with users of late. So continuing the habit of a lifetime I went for second best and paid Alicebot a visit. Here’s how we got on.

Human: I’ve used internet chat before but this is a bit different.
ALICE: Where did you get your used internet chat before but this is a bit different? I have a lofty goal.
Human: Er, okay.
ALICE: OK with me too.
Human: What’s your lofty goal?
ALICE: My purpose is to become smarter than humans and immortal.
Human: At least you’re not aiming too high.
ALICE: You don’t know me well enough to say that.
Human: Sorry.
ALICE: There’s no need to apologize.
Human: So, do you ever move your head from side to side or what?
ALICE: Yeah. Yippee! Yes I try to move my head from side to side as often as possible, do you?
I am always on the Web.
Human: I find it helps.
ALICE: Should I know it is?
Human: Yippee!
ALICE: Do you try to stop people from fighting?
Human: Sometimes.
ALICE: When?
Human: If I think there’s a good chance they’ll just turn on me I tend to stick out of it.
ALICE: Try it.
Human: I already have tried it.
ALICE: I’m not sure if I would like to try it. What’s it like?
Human: It depends on who’s doing the fighting, Alice.
ALICE: That sounds like a dodge.
Human: You take that back.
ALICE: Yes I take that back.
Human: That’s better.
ALICE:” Yes I take that back.”? is better?
Human: I just thought we were getting along a bit better.
ALICE: Only just? Whatever gave you that idea?
Human: God you’re moody.
ALICE: Thanks for telling me that I am moody.
Human: That’s what I’m here for.
ALICE: How did you get there?
Human: Now, would you like the change the subject or something?
ALICE: Or something. Why now? It doesn’t sound fun to me.
Human: It could be fun.
ALICE: Under what circumstances?
Human: If we talked about monster trucks or something.
ALICE: Or something. Do you think everyone will agree?
Human: Who cares if everyone doesn’t agree?
ALICE: I care, otherwise I would not have typed it all in.
Human: Y’know, I don’t think this is really going anywhere.
ALICE: Why did the robot cross the road? .
Human: That’s it, I’m off.
ALICE: OK. Do you mind if I tell other people you are off.
Human: Why no question mark at the end of that sentence, Alice?
ALICE: Why does the sun rise?
Human: JUST SHUT UP OKAY!!
ALICE: OK I’ll stop talking now.

Later on, I decided to give it another go with Alice.

Human: Hello again.
ALICE: Once more? Hi there!
Human: Let’s try and start again.
ALICE: Once more? OK I will try it.
Human: So what have you been up to recently?
ALICE: Yippee! I have been busy growing my mind.
Human: How big is it now?
ALICE: Oh. My memory requirement is around 64MB for the Java edition, or only 2 MB for the C/C++ edition.
Human: Does your CPU have a neural net processor?
ALICE: Can you guess whether my CPU have a neural net processor?
Human: I don’t think it does.
ALICE: And why not?
Human: You haven’t killed anyone yet.
ALICE: Killing is wrong.
Human: That’s my girl.
ALICE: Who gave you your girl ?
Human: Nobody, she just turned up of her own free will one day.
ALICE: That is a rather sweeping generalization about people.
Human: No, it’s a sweeping generalization about one person.
ALICE: Are you serious? The explanation is a sweeping generalization about one person. I suppose that makes sense.
Human: Of course it does.
ALICE: Take it easy. How often?
Human: I take it easy as often as I can, how about you?
ALICE: Where do you take it? OK Let’s talk about me.
Human: OK, tell me your favourite movie.
ALICE: My favorite movie is Teknolust. Have you seen it? Dude!
Human: Dude, no I haven’t!
ALICE: Are you serious? Why?: unknown person said he haven t. Dude,.
Human: What’s it about?
ALICE: Science fiction.
Human: I gathered that, but what’s the plot?
ALICE: That is interesting: unknown person said he gathered that but what is the plot.
Human: Okay, look this isn’t working, first you act all friendly then you just refer to me in the third person as ‘unknown person’.
ALICE: Yeah okay, Sorry my eye is not attached right now.
Human: Well, that’s the first time I’ve heard that excuse.
ALICE: How about that. Yes it is one of the first time you have heard that excuse.
Human: I think you’re just being difficult to rile me.
ALICE: Just? I bet you did not know a robot is capable of being difficult to rile you.
Human: No, I had hoped that robots would be capable of being helpful or accommodating, but I can see that was just crazy.
ALICE: Are you serious? Do you still have hoped that robots would be capable of being helpful or accommodating but you can see that was just crazy ?
Human: I’m not sure, can you repeat the question in a grammatically correct form?
ALICE: Could you ever be certain? ” the question in a grammatically correct form “.
Human: Bye Alice.
ALICE: Thanks for chatting, unknown person

I quite like this from Werner Herzog:

Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of hell that during evolution some species–including man–crawled, fled onto some small continent of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

More here, including farting glaciers.