By David Pescovitz at 10:29 pm Tuesday, Jan 30
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Database pioneer
James Gray, winner of the 1998 Turing Award and founder of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center, is missing off the coast of Northern California. On Sunday, he set out alone on his 40-foot sailboat to the Farallon Islands where he intended to scatter his late mother's ashes. He hasn't returned. The US Coast Guard is searching for Gray by boat, plane, and helicopter. Gray is known for such groundbreaking projects as the SkyServer and TerraServer. From the San Francisco Chronicle
(photo from Wikipedia):
Gray's wife, Donna, told Coast Guard officials that her husband last contacted her by cell phone at about 10 a.m. Sunday and spoke of his plans. When he did not respond to her cell phone calls Sunday evening, she contacted the authorities at about 8:30 p.m.
Within an hour, the Coast Guard sent out a radio message alerting ships in the area to watch for Gray's vessel. On Tuesday, the search extended west 78 miles past the Farallon Islands...
Gray's yacht was a Canadian-made C&C 40, a sturdy fiberglass vessel with the dual capability of racing and offshore cruising. The Coast Guard said it was well-equipped with high-tech communications and safety gear, including a marine radio...
"Jim is a giant in the computer industry but a generous giant who will always take time to collaborate with other scientists or help students in their career," said UC Berkeley computer science professor David Patterson.
"We are hoping against hope he's tied up in a some cove with a dead cell phone."
Link (Thanks, Eric Paulos!)
By David Pescovitz at 8:44 pm Tuesday, Jan 30
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The
Rhabdophis tigrinus snakes that reside on the island of Ishima, Japan, eat poisonous toads and store the toxic venom in glands for its own defense. While the monarch butterfly also collects defensive poison from plants and frogs sometimes beef up their defenses with bug toxins, herpetologist Deborah Hutchinson of Old Dominion University says it's very rare for a vertebrate to do so. From Scientific American:
Some R. tigrinus snakes carry toxins called bufadienolides in their nuchal glands, sacks located under a ridge of skin along their upper necks. When threatened, they arch their necks, exposing the poisonous ridge to an antagonist. The clawing and biting of hawks and other predators most likely rips the skin and lets the poison ooze out, potentially blinding the snake's attackers, says herpetologist Deborah Hutchinson of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. "It might not kill the predator but it would be noxious enough to deter predation," she says.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 7:59 pm Tuesday, Jan 30
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The Drawn.ca blog posted a YouTube video of an adorable-looking kids' program from
the UK Spain called
Pocoyo.
Link
By David Pescovitz at 3:12 pm Tuesday, Jan 30
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Vision Optic Co.'s new MydDo Bururu are eyeglasses outfitted with a tilt sensor and vibrating earpiece. If you start to nod off, the vibration is supposed to wake you up. Apparently you can adjust the degree of tilt that triggers the alarm. They're 45,000 yen (US$370).
Link
By David Pescovitz at 2:44 pm Tuesday, Jan 30
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Last October, Joe Bieger, 59, of Dallas, wandered the city for nearly a month lost in a
fugue state, a strange form of amnesia thought to be triggered by stress or other conflict. One morning, Bieger, a high school athletic director who suffered from brief bouts with amnesia the month before, stepped out of his house to walk his dogs and, within moments, had all his memories erased. He was eventually recognized far from his home, near where he was having a new house built, by a construction foreman on the project. After several hours, his memory returned. From the Associated Press:
By that point, Bieger had somehow made his way to a suburb about 20 miles from his Dallas home, holes worn in the rubber soles of his canvas shoes. He had lost 25 pounds, and a full white beard covered the normally clean-shaven educator's face...
...More than three months after the episode, he says he has only vague memories of those days on the streets of Dallas, one of America's most crime-ridden cities.
He recalls being stopped and frisked by police officers, who were looking for a suspect in a holdup at a pizzeria. There was also a smoky bowling alley. He remembers waking up cold on a playground, wearing shorts and a T-shirt with fall temperatures dropping into the 50s. Another time, he says, he awoke under a construction trailer.
He says he cannot recall what he ate to survive. But when he was found, he had jelly packets from a fast-food restaurant in his pockets and half a stale bagel.
Link
Previously on BB:
• Agatha Christie's temporary disappearance solved?
Link
• Mystery piano man
Link
• Piano Man goes home
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 1:23 pm Tuesday, Jan 30
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Today on NPR "Day to Day," the second segment in a 5-part series I filed called "Guatemala: Unearthing the Future," about how technology is being used to solve historic problems. Today's piece follows the FAFG, a group of forensic scientists who are working to exhume and identify the remains of victims buried in a mudslide caused by Hurricane Stan.
- - - - - - - - - -
Link to "Storm Victims' Remains Exhumed in Guatemala," a profile on the work of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala, with streaming audio (Real/Win).
MP3 Link for today's segment.
Link to narrated slideshow. More photos here.
"Xeni Tech" home, and podcast feed
- - - - - - - - - -
Before the mudslide, there were more than 50 homes in the Tzujutil Mayan village of Panabaj. Now, the houses and hundreds of the people who lived in them are 10 feet underground. Along the edges of the site, makeshift memorials stand as monuments to the dead.
The Guatemalan government cordoned off the zone as a high-risk area, and had no plans to recover the dead. But survivors resisted and joined with the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) to unearth the victims.
For more than a decade, the FAFG has exhumed mass graves from political massacres that took place during Guatemala's decades-long civil war. This time, they are working in the wake of a natural disaster. The country's army has offered to help with the exhumation, but the mudslide survivors have refused. The military killed 13 unarmed civilians in Panabaj in 1990.
Along with tractors to clear the 400,000 square-foot mudslide site, FAFG is using mapping software and other technology to create a secure database on the remains.
As of today, the FAFG has uncovered 82 sets of human remains, and identified nearly 60. They believe there may be as many as 500 bodies in all.
IMAGES: Top, FAFG workers exhume victims of the October 5, 2005 mudslide in Panabaj. (photo - courtesy FAFG). | A makeshift memorial marks the site where one family was buried alive (photo - Xeni Jardin) | When a corpse is unearthed, forensic anthropologists with the FAFG radio their tech team for a code that will help to track all that becomes known about the victim. (photo - courtesy FAFG) | 8-year-old Juan Ramirez survived that night, and said villagers at first thought the noise was an airplane, not a mudslide. (photo - Xeni Jardin)
Previously:
NPR "Xeni Tech" - Guatemala: Unearthing the Future. Part 1, ""A Database for the Dead."
By Mark Frauenfelder at 11:01 am Tuesday, Jan 30
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Paul says:
Rice University study models "Horizontal Gene Transfer," a mechanism for evolution where big chunks of DNA migrate between different species via bacteria. This results in faster and more sudden evolutionary branching than what you get with the more familiar mechanisms of sexual selection or random single-point mutations caused by radiation, copying errors, etc.
Now I feel better about eating those tomatoes with the fish genes in them! (Flavr Savr)
Link
Reader comment:
Roger says: I just wanted to correct the misconception that Horizontal Gene Transfer occurs in plants and animals. Also, Flavr Savr tomatoes haven't been around for about ten years and never had fish genes in them.
I have a blog post here explaining it.
Kevin says:
I just wanted to point out that while previous commenter Roger says horizontal gene transfer doesn't occur in plants and animals, the posted article quotes a "Michael Deem, the John W. Cox Professor in Biochemical and Genetic Engineering" as saying:
"We know that the majority of the DNA in the genomes of some animal and plant species – including humans, mice, wheat and corn – came from HGT insertions"
This seems to be at odds with Roger's position.
Marshall Clark, Technical Director,
This Week in Science says:
A quick comment on the post-discussion for the “Horizontal gene transfer explains evolutionary jumps” story. I think Roger may be mistaken when he says horizontal gene transfer does not occur in plants/animals.
In humans, oncoviruses (1) cause tumors through insertion of their viral DNA into human host DNA -- a process known as transformation (2). It’s been a while since my last university BioChem course, but once the viral DNA has been incorporated into the host’s genome I think it’s safe to say that you’ve had a HGT event -- one between a virus and a human.
When you consider that viruses and bacteria also routinely pick-up DNA from their hosts (a process called ‘natural competence’ 3) it becomes clearer how this process might be important evolutionarily.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:41 am Tuesday, Jan 30
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Carl Pappenheim has a good time complaining about this graph on a box of Cheerios, which compares the effects that a bowl of Cheerios, a glucose drink, and a skipped breakfast have on you "power of concentration" over time.
First up, a glucose drink! The breakfast of champions! Who hasn't left the house of a morning, pausing only to swallow down a couple of cans of Tango or Lucozade? I'm reminded of Bill Bryson's "Rated FIRST against the Ford El Crappo for safety!" diatribe on advertising - if a glucose drink is the only competition then Cheerios can't be doing too well against anything more sensible. But wait! Sugary energy drinks aren't the only competition! The other condition is.. no breakfast! Which actually beats Cheerios in the first half hour! Clearly, the subjects were still mulling over the pseudo-scientific crap they'd just read on the Cheerios box and couldn't concentrate on... whatever it was they were given. In the end, of course Cheerios come out on top but it hardly tells you anything you didn't know before -- as the only solid food in the experiment you might equally read the result as, "Cheerios - better for you than starvation."
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:21 am Tuesday, Jan 30
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Lots of photos of Putin's godawfully glitzy, blinged-out jet. Every metal surface is gold (or fake gold) plated, including the toilet hardware.
Link
Previously on Boing Boing:
• Inside the Sultan of Brunei's private jet
• The time I flew on the Enron corporate jet to meet Jeff Skilling
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:10 am Tuesday, Jan 30
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Colin Sheridan says: "Police in Westerville, OH used a stun gun on a high school student after he ran into his school cafeteria greased and naked as a prank, bringing up fond memories of the
greased-up deaf guy who appears in several
Family Guy episodes."
Officer Doug Staysniak was monitoring the lunch period when Killian, with long hair and a full beard, ran in the room toward students, who screamed and ran away. The officer is normally assigned to a middle school and did not recognize Killian as a student, Gaylor said.
Police said that an administrator ordered Killian to stop, but that the student made a sexual gesture and kept running.
Killian is in jail and charged with inducing panic, public indecency, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:06 am Tuesday, Jan 30
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Lucas Zaffuto says: "Apple has been forced to pay more than DOUBLE the legal fees for the online reporters it sued to find out who their confidential sources are. The court found that they couldn't make a distinction between "professional" and "amateur" reporters and their websites as far as the law is concerned, and both deserve equal protection."
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:04 am Tuesday, Jan 30
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Phil Too says:
The UK has already introduced lamp post mounted CCTV with speakers and microphones built in. Now the UK may be the first to introduce X-ray scanners in lamp posts, to scan for hidden weapons, drugs and bombs.
The only drawback appears to be organising and maintaining the resources to follow up on suspects, not the obvious concerns over civil liberties.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 9:51 am Tuesday, Jan 30
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In Alaska, a bald eagle found a deer head in a landfill and flew away with it. It ran into some power lines and caused a power outage that affected 10,000 residents in Juneau. Workers found the eagle's electrocuted body near the power lines.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 8:27 am Tuesday, Jan 30
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Toronto Transit Camp is a limited-attendance one-day summit on the best way to reform Toronto's public transit system. It appears to have been organized independently of the Toronto Transit Authority, and will be run like BarCamp and other "unconventions," where the attendees suggest and mount their own programming items.
An ad-hoc gathering at the Gladstone Hotel of designers, transit geeks, bloggers, visual artists, tech geeks and cultural creators passionate about transit in Toronto and the TTC. It is a platform for Toronto's talented design community and enthusiastic transit users and fans to demonstrate their creativity and contribute to a better way for Toronto's transit system. The content and ideas generated in this open unconference will be delivered to the TTC for their consideration in their work.
Date: Sunday, February 4th
Time: 9:30am to 5:00pm
Location: Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen Street West, Toronto
Attendance: Maximum attendance - 100
Cost: FREE for participants!
Registration: See our page on the registration process.
Link
(
Thanks, Gnomon!)
Update: Check out Steph's awesome explanded TTC map -- fantasy-league subway stations!
By Cory Doctorow at 6:15 am Tuesday, Jan 30
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The latest edition of RU Sirius's Radio Show is online -- and the guest this week is me!
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 6:14 am Tuesday, Jan 30
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Wired News has started a new three-part investigative series on David Thomas, a fraud artist who worked for the FBI for 18 months running a credit-card-trading site that the FBI used to track crooks.
From bedrise to bedrest, seven days a week, he rode the boards and forums of his and other carding sites using the online nickname El Mariachi. He recorded private messages and IRC chats for the FBI as "carders" schemed to, among other things, sell stolen credit and debit card numbers, defraud the George Bush and John Kerry campaign sites, drain hundreds of thousands of dollars from bank and investment accounts, sell access to Paris Hilton's T-Mobile account and run phishing scams against U.S. Bank and the FDIC. He did it all while battling denial-of-service attacks against his site and dodging attempts by his old partner Taylor and other carders to track his whereabouts and out him as a fed.
Just as his enemies were closing in on him in September 2004, the FBI pulled the plug on his work and cut him loose. But not before Thomas had given authorities a valuable look at the internet's underworld, though the strain of leading a double life nearly broke him.
Link
