Den gamle Byte-skribenten Jon Udell har försökt kartlägga hur lagstiftningsprocessen i praktiken ser ut och hur den påverkar hans intressen. Det visade sig svårt, kanske mer på grund av själva processen än brist på IT-verktyg? Det vore bra att få en genomlysning också av den svenska processen på det här viset, för att inte tala om EU. Udell skriver:

This has been my most comprehensive attempt to open the lid of the legislative sausage factory, peer inside, and try to understand how a specific interest of mine was being processed. What I found is that, even with power tools like GovTrack and MAPLight, it’s really hard to make those connections. That’s partly because we lack good mechanisms to track the flow of bits of legislative language through an evolving assortment of bills, and to relate those fragments to the activities and interests of their sponsors.

Läs mer: A conversation with Joshua Tauberer about GovTrack « Jon Udell

Currently, MIT is working with photovoltaic cell manufacturers to incorporate electrolysis using their catalyst into solar energy systems. By combining the two, excess capacity during the day could be stored as hydrogen and oxygen, then used in fuel cells at night when needed. "Solar cell makers can add super-cheap electrolyzers to their system so that they work 24/7 -- during the day making hydrogen and oxygen, then at night recombining it in fuel cells to generate electricity," Nocera predicted.

Läs mer: EETimes.com - MIT claims 24/7 solar power

Whatever you believe about 9/11, the spreading of false claims helps no-one, and we’d like to play a small part in revealing some of them. We’re not about debunking entire conspiracies, then, but will use this site to zoom in on what we think are the more dubious stories, revealing the misquotes, the distortions, the inaccuracies that are so common online.

Läs mer: 911Myths

Ibland är satirsajten The Onion bara så rolig. Nu skriver de om Obama och att en artikel lyckats med det omöjliga; ingen har lyckats bara skrapa på ytan så konsekvent.

NEW YORK—Hailed by media critics as the fluffiest, most toothless, and softest-hitting coverage of the presidential candidate to date, a story in this week's Time magazine is being called the definitive Barack Obama puff piece.

"No news publication has dared to barely scratch the surface like this before," columnist and campaign reporter Michael King wrote in The Washington Post Tuesday.

Läs mer: 'Time' Publishes Definitive Obama Puff Piece | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

“One of the criticisms of using any biomass as a biofuel source is it has been claimed that plants are not very efficient – about 0.1 percent efficiency of conversion of sunlight into biomass,” Long said. “What we show here is on average Miscanthus is in fact about 1 percent efficient, so about 1 percent of sunlight ends up as biomass.”

Läs mer: Miscanthus can meet U.S. biofuels goal using less land than corn or switchgrass | Science Blog

Flera verkar tro att kristaller kan vara viktiga. Jag har tidigare bloggat om glimmer som något som kan ha hjälpt tidigt liv. Är glimmer en kristallin struktur?

Diamonds are crystallized forms of carbon that predate the oldest known life on the planet. In lab experiments aimed to confirm work done more than three decades ago, researchers found that when treated with hydrogen, natural diamonds formed crystalline layers of water on the surface. Water is essential for life as we know it. Also, the tests found electrical conductivity that could have been key to forcing chemical reactions needed to generate the first birth.

Läs mer: Diamonds May Have Jumpstarted Life on Earth | LiveScience

På motorshowen i London (som jag bloggade om) fanns det ett bås för Bose som gör ljudsystem. Där stod en gitarrist och spelade. Och det skulle ju kunna vara slutet på historien, sådana musiker har ju en tendens att stå och spela covers och vara rätt tråkiga. Men inte den här killen.

Det här var bland det bästa jag hört! Harper spelar extremt rytmiskt på gitarren, sjunger rytmiskt och har ett jäkla reverb på som får ljudet att låta stort, fast det bara är en person som spelar. Det påminner mig om energi och rytm som Polices tidiga spelningar med låtar som t ex fallout. Det här är riktigt bra. Harper har en webbsajt här. Där kan man också ladda ner en del låtar.

Jag hörde faktiskt bara en låt med honom eftersom han slutade spela, men det var bland det bästa jag hört live: "Love Junky". Låten går att ladda ner från sajten, men den har inte alls samma energi som live. Faktum är att trummorna gör låten mycket lamare, det är som om studioversionen ha tagit bort det som gör låten bra. Harper sjunger också mycket bättre live än på skivan: Den här lugna live-låten från webbsajten visar det. Och låten Knuckle Draggers påminner om den energi som Harper utstrålade.

Det inhägnade området framför Harper är ett VIP-område. Jag frågade vakterna vem det var som spelade, de trodde det var Nick Harper, men var inte säkra så de föreslog att jag skulle gå in och fråga artisten själv. Det gjorde jag och skakade hand med mannen och sa att det var bland det bästa jag hört vilket verkade göra honom generad (eller besvärad). Han nämnde webbsajten och jag gick vidare, eftersom Harper inte spelade mer.

Jag har sökt runt lite på nätet och det visar sig att Nick Harper är en s k erkänd artist och gitarrvirtuos, som ännu inte har slagit stort.

Det fanns ett litet inhägnat område med s k superbilar. Hör holländska Spyker:

Och här svenska Koeningsegg: 

Den här Toyotan visar bakhängda bakdörrar, s k suicide doors:

Visst finns det Wunderbaum i  Storbritannien, fast det heter "Magic Tree" så klart. Så kom ihåg att köpa Wunderbaum till din nästa superbil! 

Den här Opeln kan man fälla ut två Segways ur där bak: 

En ram med vätgasmotor och vätgastankar:

Närbild på vätgastankarna. Notera påfyllningsmunstycket för vätgasen till vänster högt upp i bilden:

En avdelning var till för mindre företag som säljer tillbehör och tidningar och där stod den här fina gamla mercedesen:

"Dietary deficiency of omega-3 fatty acids in humans has been associated with increased risk of several mental disorders, including attention-deficit disorder, dyslexia, dementia, depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia," he said. "A deficiency of omega-3 fatty acids in rodents results in impaired learning and memory."

For instance, in the past two weeks we have had discussion of obesity and of knife crime. Social norms have hardly figured. If everybody thinks that everybody else is getting fat, then more people will put on weight. The campaigns designed to reduce obesity may be spreading it. Similarly the very idea that every young person is carrying a knife increases knife crime. The obvious route of making such behaviour seem odd and isolated appears not to have occurred to any major politician.

Doody said this is only the first study looking into the effects of Dimebon on Alzheimer's disease. She also noted that it involved only a relatively small population from one specific region of the world. The ongoing Phase 3 study will include several international locations including the United States.

Läs mer: Russian antihistamine shows promise treating Alzheimer's | Science Blog

Lysande satir:

Demand for a new investment bubble began months ago, when the subprime mortgage bubble burst and left the business world without a suitable source of pretend income. But as more and more time has passed with no substitute bubble forthcoming, investors have begun to fear that the worst-case scenario—an outcome known among economists as "real-world repercussions"—may be inevitable.

Läs mer: Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble To Invest In | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

It's not hard to have system B check that system A is on/off line, and step in if the latter is the case. But what happens when A is *mostly* or *sorta* online? Does system B check that ALL functionality done by A is being done appropriately? Almost never. And that's why, even in the best, most carefully designed, fully redundant high-availability systems, you never, ever see 100% uptime. It's just not possible to anticipate everything that can go wrong. So design a system that fails gracefully! That's what nature did.

Läs mer: Dublin Air Traffic Contol Brought Down By Faulty NIC

Well, my assessment is that there is indeed some content, much of it interesting. The question of bogosity, however, is a little more difficult. It is clear that the forms used by academicians writing in this area go right off the bogosity scale, pegging my bogometer until it breaks. The quality of the actual analysis of various literary works varies tremendously and must be judged on a case-by-case basis, but I find most of it highly questionable. Buried in the muck, however, are a set of important and interesting ideas: that in reading a work it is illuminating to consider the contrast between what is said and what is not said, between what is explicit and what is assumed, and that popular notions of truth and value depend to a disturbingly high degree on the reader's credulity and willingness to accept the text's own claims as to its validity.

Det är vad juridikprofessorerna James Bessen och Michael Meurer kommer fram till i sin bok "Patent Failure" i en studie av amerikanska patent. Vi får väl hoppas att den nedåtgående ekonomin i USA kan ge argument att reformera patentsystemet

New empirical research by Boston University law professors James Bessen and Michael Meurer, reported in their book, "Patent Failure," found that the value of pharmaceutical patents outweighed the costs of pharmaceutical-patent litigation. But for all other industries combined, they estimate that since the mid-1990s, the cost of U.S. patent litigation to alleged infringers ($12 billion in legal and business costs in 1999) is greater than the global profits that companies earn from patents (less than $4 billion in 1999). Since the 1980s, patent litigation has tripled and the probability that a particular patent is litigated within four years has more than doubled.

Läs mer: Information Age - WSJ.com

he performance of the countries of North Africa has been mixed, with insignificant rises by Algeria (123rd) and Tunisia (145th) and disturbing falls by Morocco (106th) and Egypt (146th) because of the large number of prosecutions brought against the press. Coverage of police abuses, use of torture during interrogation and the lack of judicial independence stang the Egyptian authorities into tightening the vice on independent journalists. Despite all the harassment, the independent media have openly displayed their lack of enthusiasm for the possibility that Gamal Mubarak could succeed his father as president. Although better off than their Egyptian colleagues, Morocco’s journalists have in the past 12 months been the target of repeated attacks for which they were not prepared.

<blockquote>Equally important, HIV does not want this constant region to provoke the body&rsquo;s defense system. So, HIV uses the same constant cellular attachment site to silence B lymphocytes - the antibody producing cells. The result is that the body is fooled into making abundant antibodies to the changeable regions of HIV but not to its cellular attachment site. Immunologists call such regions superantigens. HIV&rsquo;s cleverness is unmatched. No other virus uses this trick to evade the body&rsquo;s defenses.&rdquo;</blockquote>
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Läs mer: <a href="http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/pathologists-believe-they-have-pinpointed-achilles-heel-hiv-16900.html">Pathologists Believe They Have Pinpointed Achilles Heel of HIV | Science Blog</a></p>

At this point, channeling Kim Cameron, I launched into an explanation of the laws of identity and the identity metasystem. Well, sort of. I didn’t say anything about cryptography, or digital certificates, or XML web services. But I did paint a picture of a world in which individuals interact with many identity providers and many relying parties, in which all actors trust one another in exactly the ways they already do today, and in which disclosure of personal information is minimal and context-dependent.

Summary: A lot of the formatting, such as tab stops cannot be done from the normal stylesheet editor. The settings you set there will be overridden. Use the context menu item edit index/table instead. The menu item is available when you right click directly at the table of contents in your document:

See below for a guide of how to use it in Open Office.

I'ven been trying to get my table of contents to look good, and previously failed. The table of contents of my document has style sheets, called "Contents 1" and "Contents 2". However changes I make there, particularly tab stops, seem to be ignored.

It turns out that there is another place to change the formatting of the table of contents and that is in the edit index/table context menu:

.

Once selected you get to a tabbed dialog where one of the the tabs shows the following:

It contains a rather weird widget that helps you format the table of contents entry for a particular level. It is a row of cells where every second cell allows for inserting verbatim text, and every second is a place holder for entry text, page number or a tab stop.:

You can only have a page number place holder once ("#"), and the same goes for entry text ("F"). You assign a placeholder to a cell by clicking at the cell so that it looks depressed, and then click at one of the below buttons:

In the above picture two of the buttons are greyed out, beacuse theses placeholders have already been assigned to cells in the row. To get the buttons back to the active state, select the cell that contains the page number or entry ("#" or "F"), and replace it with a tab entry instead by clicking at the tab button.

For each tab entry you make, you can format it by selecting its cell, and then format its position and other things:

For each text entry or page number, you can format it with a character style sheet:

In the above screenshot I have made a BigNumber character style sheet for the page number, that together with other settings makes my table of contents look like this:

Sometimes when updating the table of contents, OpenOffice.org will lose the formatting and you will need to reapply the formatting.

The very rare black swan formation - note both feet and neck are complete and the rare vampire tooth variation is in place. This is very bad. Very very bad.

Läs mer: Forums - A rare and dangerous Black Swan formation is almost complete!

Tack till Martin för länken!