I The Economist finns det en artikel om hur det naturliga urvalet kan användas som förklaring för:

• Kriminalitet
• Att kvinnor tjänar mindre än män
• Att ett samhälle inte blir lyckligare av att bli rikare, och att de relativt fattiga har dålig hälsa
• Att det finns rasism

I artikeln menar man att många av de saker vi tror går att ändra eller bota, i själva verket är uppkomna och skapade av det naturliga urvalet. I samtliga fall försöker man hitta rationella förklaringar, grundade på tesen att reproduktion är det viktigaste kriteriet för framgång. 

• Vad gäller kriminalitet så menar man att detta kan vara en "rationell" respons hos unga män som tror sig inte kunna få reproducera,
• vad gäller kvinnors löner så menar man att kvinnor över sin mest reproduktiva ålder inte behöver bevisa sitt genetiska värde med en hög lön och därför inte söker detta.
• Vad gäller rikedom och lycka/hälsa menar man att det beror på den stress som låg social status ger, då den försämrar reproduktionsmöjligheterna
• Vad gäller rasism att människan historiskt diskrimerat mellan "vi" och "dom" (men artikeln noterar att ras kan ersättas med något annat)

Jag tror att den här typen av resonemang kommer att få kraftigt genomslag i det allmänna medvetandet, och det potentiellt kan leda till stor oro.

A classic example is income. Women earn less than men. Or do they? In fact, younger women do not, or not much. A recent report by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a British think-tank, found that British women aged between 22 and 29 who were in full-time employment earned only 1% less than their male counterparts. This age group corresponds for many women to the period when they are single. Once they have found the best available mate, the calculation changes: a woman no longer needs to show of

Läs mer: Darwinian answers to social questions | Why we are, as we are | The Economist

Summary: Ctl-Alt-F1, followed by Ctl-Alt-F7 works for me

One of my Linux machines, a Toshiba L30 laptop running Ubuntu 8.04, has problems with the X window display system when running an external monitor. Sometimes the external monitor goes all black, and sometimes both the laptop screen and the external monitor go black. In the later case, I can see the cursor flitting around in a jerky way on the laptop screen when I move the mouse. Everything else is gone.

My guess is that there is something fishy in the dual monitor setup, and that possibly some memory positions are written to that should not be written to. It's been some years since I tried to tweak the X settings on a linux computer and I do not feel like trying again, because it is a job that is a real time sink.

A simple remedy I have found is to go into one of the command line consoles, by holding down Control, Alt and the F1 keys,  release them and then go back to X by holding Control, Alt and F7. I do not know why this works, but it does.

Another option is to hold down Ctl, Alt and backspace, but this reboots X, and you have to restart your applications. The method described above gets me everything back as it was.

First you need to download and install VirtualBox. That is the easy part. I used 2.10, which is the one available at the time of this writing.

Secondly, you need a premade Ubuntu image. You can find one here (I cannot vouch for the quality or integrity of these), specifically I used the Ubuntu 8.10 from here.

You need to unpack the image from its 7zip format.

Unpack the image. You now have two files inside a folder tree, a .vdi file and a .xml file. The .xml file contains the settings for your new virtual machine, such as amount of RAM and other stuff. The .vdi file is an image of the hard disk, with all the linux stuff pre-installed. These two files are all you need to create a VirtualBox virtual machine. We need to place these file where VirtualBox can find them and we need to edit the .xml file, because it does not work in its downloaded configuration.

The xml file that the Ubuntu 8.10 virtual machine image linked to above, does not work ( at least not on my machine, and not at the time of this writing) . I think it may have been made for an older version of VirtualBox, but I really don't know. We can make it work though. We do this by letting VirtualBox make a new Virtual Machine of its own (let's call this the bogus machine), and we use the files created by that one to guide us on how to make the downloaded machine work.

Start VirtualBox and pretend that you are going to make a new Ubuntu virtual Machine from scratch, just so we get a skeleton to work with.

Select Ubuntu, and some sane settings for memory and other stuff. Exit VirtualBox after you have created a virtual machine and its accompanying storage.

You will now have two .vdi files, one that was created by VirtualBox for your bogus Virtual Machine, and one that we downloaded. The downloaded .vdi file is correct and just needs to be placed somewhere where VirtualBox can find it. But the XML file needs to be edited.

Delete everything from the downloaded xml file except the beginning and the end:

<?xml version="1.0" ?><!-- Sun xVM VirtualBox Machine Configuration -->
<VirtualBox version="1.5-macosx" xmlns="http://www.innotek.de/VirtualBox-settings">
  <Machine OSType="Ubuntu" currentStateModified="false" 
lastStateChange="2008-11-01T12:55:48Z" name="ubuntu-8.10-x86" uuid="{c7f76231-b24b-462e-815c-967a054c0120}">

In the above XML I changed the OSType value from "ubuntu" to "Ubuntu". If you do not do this change, VirtualBox will choke on it and say that it is not among the valid OS types. Strangely enough it lists the allowed values as part of the error message and "Ubuntu" is not part of them, however Ubuntu works and is indeed generated by VirtualBox itself when it created our bogus machine.

and the end:

    <HardDiskAttachments>
      <HardDiskAttachment bus="IDE" channel="0" device="0" hardDisk="{58a58064-e589-47c0-baba-de38fa621c80}"/>
    </HardDiskAttachments>
  </Machine>
</VirtualBox>

Paste in the corresponding parts from your Bogus machine in between. You may get away with editing the file in a more fine grained way, but I have not tried that. Place the .xml file in the same directory as the bogus xml file is already in.

You must now move the downloaded vdi file to a location where VirtualBox can find it, and tell VirtualBox that it exists.

Edit the VirtualBox.xml file, and add the following sub element inside the <HardDisks> element

 <HardDisk uuid="{58a58064-e589-47c0-baba-de38fa621c80}" location="VDI/ubuntu-8.10-x86.vdi" format="VDI" type="Normal"/>

I moved the .vdi file to the VDI sub directory of VirtualBox to make the above XML declaration to be correct.

The username and password needed to login is not documented. it is 'ubuntu' and 'reverse'  respectively (without the quotes).

Once Ubuntu is booted you will want to install the guest extensions. Select this from the menu. It will mount a virtual CD for you and try to auto run it, which will fail. Run the appropriate script from the command line instead.

Each time you update the kernel, it seems like you need to reinstall the guest extensions.

I then ran Ubuntu in rootless mode under Mac OSX, and I can mingle windows from OSX and Ubuntu. I tried Kate and it works including sftp with kioslaves. I have now returned the Mac due to a mechanical problem, and hence can give you no screen shots but everything worked fine!

Well I actually I made screenshots, but I (duh!) stored them on the Mac's hard drive...

(Sorry about not being specific in all places in the instructions, this is of course due to my not having the Mac anymore. Maybe I also edited the Virtualbox.xml file to indicate the new virtual machine. Please check if the bogus machine is registered there, and if so, register the other one accordingly.)

Homeland Security i USA håller på att testa en lögndetektor som ska kunna användas på på flygpassagerare när de går igenom en korridor. En kommentar på Slashdot påpekar dock det roliga i nedanstående citat från artikeln, att systemet när det testades på frivilliga, kunde plocka ut de med onda avsikter. För då kommer ju frågan: Hur f-n hittar man frivilliga med onda avsikter till ett test??

Homeland Security ran a test in September of 140 volunteers using a FAST prototype. The system was very accurately able to pick out people with hostile intent.

The FAST system detects physiological signs of stress. In testing it detected "hostile intent" in volunteers. The obvious question is how can volunteers have valid hostile intent? You can't test deception with fake deception. The generalizability of physiological response to stressors is a basic tenet of physiological psychology (the folks who brought you FAST's grand dad, the polygraph)

Läs mer: Slashdot | Security Checkpoints Predict What You Will Do

James Lovelock, den gamle NASA-forskaren som skrev en bok om jorden som en levande organism - Gaia - är dyster om jordens framtid, enligt The Daily Galaxy.

Lovelock menar att vi rubbat planeten ur ett jämviktsläge. Lovelock menar att olika fenomen, som global uppvärmning men också "global dimming", gör att vi kommer att få en klimatmässig berg- och dalbana i framtiden, och under denna period och när jorden finner nästa jämviktsläge så kommer det att bli bistert för oss människor.

Vad ska man säga? Mer kärnkraft!(Det säger Lovelock också, om än inte skildrat i denna artikel)

Today, Lovelock believes that a rapid drop in carbon in the atmosphere could actually do more damage than good. He believes that the global warming that we are currently experiencing is offset by a cooling of 2-3ºC, caused by Global Dimming -essentially, the reduction of direct irradiance at the earth’s atmosphere as a result of industrial pollution, known to others as aerosol particles. It’s a horrible catch 22 situation that leaves only a very small gap for any joy at all. If we continue to do nothing (note the use of the word continue), then we will doom ourselves. If we do do something, like a massive cut back in the emission of carbon in to our atmosphere, Lovelock believes that we would further damage Earth.

Läs mer: The Status of "Spaceship Earth"

Tyska hackers visar att många samtal med trådlös telefoni inte inte följer säkerhetsstandarden ordentligt och  kan avlyssnas med en Linuxdator med ett billigt Dect-kort i. Även Dect-samtal som följer säkerhetsstandarden för Dect kan avlyssnas med hjälp av samma dator, och en man-in-the-middle-attack, där datorn låtsas vara basstationen för den lokala telefonen..

Uppdatering 16:20

Här är artikeln på engelska:

Tews explained that the boffins quickly noticed there was sometimes no authentication or encryption process between the transmitter station and the handheld device. In many cases, as with the GSM mobile communications standard, the telephone only authenticated itself against the network, even though, according to the DECT protocol, the network can in principle also authenticate itself against the receiver.

Keine Probleme mit dem Abfangen von DECT-Ferngesprächen habe diese Vorrichtung, wenn ­ wie sehr häufig ­ eine Verschlüsselung überhaupt nicht aktiviert werde. Aber auch bei einem anfangs verschlüsselten Informationsaustausch könne die Steckkarte eine Basisstation vortäuschen und die Kryptierung dabei deaktivieren.

Åskväder på hög höjd kan ge rejäla doser gammastrålning:

"Everywhere we look, we're seeing x-rays and gamma rays flying out of thunderstorms and lightning," said Joseph Dwyer, a physicist at the Florida Institute of Technology and lead author of the study. "The gamma rays coming out of thunderstorms are so intense we can measure these 600 kilometers away and so bright that it almost blinds the spacecraft."

Läs mer: Lightning-Storm Gamma Rays Could Harm Air Travelers | Wired Science from Wired.com

In a 4,200-square-mile Atlantic ocean swath off the coast of Namibia, bacteria converted lethal sulphide into foul-smelling but otherwise harmless sulphur and sulphate.

Läs mer: Toxin-Gobbling Bugs Could Clean Ocean Dead Zones | Wired Science from Wired.com

This behavior of intentionally gathering together and going out to kill members of our own species is an extremely rare behavior. Humans do it. Chimps do it. There is some evidence that wolves and hyenas do it. But it's pretty much a human and chimp innovation. You have a very intelligent animal and a social animal. And when you're a social animal, all of the evolutionary pressures are toward living in a group. There are hierarchies. There are mechanisms for resolving disputes in nonlethal ways. That can all be summed up under empathy. But humans and chimpanzees, when they are fighting an out-group, have the ability to turn off the empathy. By turning that off, you dehumanize the enemy or dechimpize the enemy.

Läs mer: How Biology and Technology Shape Sex and War | Wired Science from Wired.com

Mycket mark i världen är inte odlingsbar därför att den t ex är infiltrerad med saltvatten från kusten. Men det finns växter med hög avkastning som kan växa i dessa förhållanden.

Overly salty land could play a large and previously underappreciated role. That's because there's plenty of previously uncultivated territory in the world's coastal deserts, inland salty soils, and over-salinized agricultural land.

Läs mer: Food vs. Fuel: Saltwater Crops May Be Key to Solving Earth's Land Crunch | Wired Science from Wired.com