Uppfinnaren Dean Kamen, mannen bakom Segway, den trappklättrande rullstolen och andra uppfinningar demonstrerade sin nya vattenrenare på the Colbert Report. Enligt videon ska vattenrenaren klara både havsvatten och arsenikförgiftat vatten, och allt däremellan. Den saknar membran, filter och kemikalier.

Caught for the first time on video, Segway inventor Dean Kamen presented his Vapor Compression Distiller on last night's Colbert Report. The distiller is a chemical-, membrane-, and filter-free water purifier. Kamen claims the box draws pure drinkable water from oceans, poisons—even a 50-gallon drum of urine. He has reportedly worked on the contraption for five years, but early prototypes were pretty ugly.

Läs mer: Colbert: First Vid of Dean Kamen's Miracle Water Distiller

I ett inlägg jag skrev på engelska för ett tag sedan på bloggen så funderade jag på att vetenskapen inte egentligen har någon inbyggd mekanism som styr vad det är man gör vetenskap av. Ett sådant exempel är ju de som letar efter en gay-gen, som det stod om för något år sedan. Man kan ju fråga sig varför man letar efter just det? Här en video som tar upp det, på ett roligt sätt: The Christian Gene.

Notera den nästan autentiska Beyond tomorrow/2000 -känslan (populärvetenskapligt program från Australien).

Here are some numbers on the casualty rates in European countries and the United States. This lists the number of casualties per 100 000 inhabitants, so it does not take into account the number of miles driven:

1. China ~20
2. Greece 15.9
3. Poland 14.3
4. Belgium 13.0
5. United States ~13
6. Slovenia 12.9
7. Hungary 12.7
8. Czechia 12.6
9. Portugal 11.8
10. Slovakia 11.3
11. Luxemburg 11.1
12. Spain 10.3
13. Italy 9.7
14. Austria 9.3
15. France 8.8
16. Ireland 8.4
17. Finland 7.2
18. Germany 6.5
19. Iceland 6.5
20. Denmark 6.1
21. Great Britain 5.6
22. Switzerland 5.5
23. Norway 4.9
24. Sweden 4.9
25. Netherlands 4.6

Source: Grekland farligast för bilisten (in Swedish)

Vad som kommer att hända politiskt och opinionsmässigt innan OS i Kina är lika oförutsägbart som demokraternas primärval i USA just nu. En variant som jag inte tänkt på förut är att man börjar se idrottsmän som högt betalda, överlägsna underhållare istället för som representanter för sitt land, och då kommer människors attityd till dem och spelen att ändras. Detta skulle innebära att andra händelser i Kina får större tyngd gentemot spelen. Att se alla idrottsmän på detta sätet är såklart grovt fel, men jag tror ändå att det perspektivet kan visa sig fruktbart i den internationella opinionen. Förtroendet för IOK är ju inte heller i topp.

En kommentar på Fark uttrycker det så här:

Yes, let's not ruin the good time for all of these priviledged, perfect atheletes just because of some stupid cultural genocide or whatever. They trained reeeealy realy hard and you're making them not feel like champions... If these atheletes were worth a damn, they'd boycott the Olympics themselves.

Jag har tidigare skrivit om dynamiken inför spelen OS kunde inte kommit olämpligare för Kina

Läs mer: FARK.com: (3474098) The chairman of the IOC tells people they shouldn't boycott the Olympics over something like the slaughter of hundreds of protesters in Tibet. Problem solved

De kinesiska myndigheternas agerande mot demonstranter i Lhasa har orsakat en våg av protester runt världen.

Läs mer i DN: "Granska Kinas terrorvälde"

I SvD kan man läsa om Kinas ekonomiska liberalisering. Förhoppningsvis kan det leda til större frihet på sikt.

Mögelinfektioner är ett ökande problem beroende på ökad resistans i patogenerna men framför allt på att intensivvårdens framsteg som sidoeffekt producerar patienter med starkt nedsatt immunförsvar under en tid. Nu forskas det fram nya antibiotika:

Prof. Marx's project meets the urgent need for the characterisation of new, effective fungicides. This need has increased dramatically over recent years as a result of the growing resistance to existing treatments exhibited by pathogenic fungi and, more significantly, due to major improvements in intensive care medicine. Such medical advances often weaken the immune system of patients, which enables fungal infections to take hold that would normally be easily fought off by the body's defences.

Läs mer: Fungus against Fungus - Fungicide from Penicillium | Science Blog

When Russian President-elect Dmitry Medvedev takes the helm in May, powerful technocrats and security barons will be vying for his ear—when they aren’t plotting to undermine him. This week, FP looks at the shadowy figures who will be shaping Russia’s future behind the scenes.

Läs mer: Foreign Policy: The List: Seven Kremlin Powerbrokers to Watch

Studien tar upp såväl ekonomiska som territoriella, klimatologiska och militärstrategiska faktorer. De olika strandstaternas intressepolitik står också i fokus. Isavsmältningen är svår att förutsäga, men öppnar upp Arktis som en arena för såväl energiutvinning som möjliga nya farleder för sjöfarten.

Ladda ner rapporten på länken http://www.foi.se/upload/pdf/Foi-R--2469--SEArktis.pdf

Läs mer: Pressrum - FOI, Totalförsvarets forskningsinstitut

In The Guardian, author John Gray argues against atheism in the best way I have seen so far from that "camp". But there are still places in his text where I think he misses the point. Gray's main point is basically, that when people free themselves from religion they are bound to reinvent it, but poorly. He argues for that a lot of the world's more recent woes have sprung from ideologies that have called themselves scientific. He admits that they were in fact pseudo scientific, but seems to argue that humans in general can never hope in the long run to do anything else than pseudo science from science in a religion rejecting society.

First, his argument that rejection of religion can lead to dangerous pseudo scientific beliefs I think is well founded. The communist societies that declared themselves atheist indeed had lots of religious patterns, that they seem to have been too blind to see. So he has a point there.

Secondly he seems to believe that humans cannot hope to develop into science-trusting rational beings, but that religion is needed to fill the "hole in our souls". Here he is on shaky ground indeed. Science can be seen as two things: facts and the scientific process.

• When adhering to a religion it is very easy to discard facts that are not in tune with the religion. If the facts have been well tested (scientifically) they would do people a lot of good, since accurate information tends to lead both to a better life for that individual and a better behaviour against other people. This is true for all people, regardless of the potential size of their "hole in the soul" and indeed it does not matter that the facts came from science. The quality of information is of crucial value.
• The scientific process is important since pseudo science can be discarded quite easily with it, since pseudo science does not follow the scientific process. Knowledge of the scientific process is therefore an insurance against it.

There is however another problem with science that Gray barely touches upon, and where I think he could find fertile ground. Science and scientific facts are often narrow in scope. What you choose to study and what problems you are formulating will therefore have a large impact. Science does not have a built in ability to balance itself in that regard. We have seen this with big pharmaceuticals only publishing the results in favour of their drug. In this way we will not know the conditions that would show something else. For more honest scientific studies the scientists will be blind to some of the assumptions that set them into a certain direction of inquiry.  For science as a whole, we do not know what implicit conditions we start with.  Gray does cover one assumption he believes atheist are blind to that hey have: The underlying assumption that society is ever improving.

One interesting part of the text is where he notes that suicide bombers happened in communist movements before islamic ones. But I see commuism as religion so that is for me not all that strange. His tracking of where the rituals actually came from is nevertheless elucidating:

But Islamists owe as much, if not more, to the far left, and it would be more accurate to describe many of them as Islamo-Leninists. Islamist techniques of terror also have a pedigree in secular revolutionary movements. The executions of hostages in Iraq are copied in exact theatrical detail from European "revolutionary tribunals" in the 1970s, such as that staged by the Red Brigades when they murdered the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978.

Läs mer: The atheist delusion | By genre | guardian.co.uk Books

Tripadvisor har gjort en undersökning bland amerikaner om hur de rankar städer i Europa enligt några kriterier. Här är topp i några kriterier som man vill vinna i - eller undvika:

Bäst för billig shopping:

1. Prag
2. Budapest
3. Lissabon.

Dyrast:

1. London
2.  Paris
3. Rom, Venedig, Oslo, Moskva (delat)

Vänligaste stadsbor:

1. Dublin
2. Amsterdam
3. London

Mest ovänliga stadsbor:

1. Paris
2. London
3. Moskva .

Bästa kök:

1. 1. Paris
2. 2. Rome
3. 3. Florens.

Bäst shopping:

1. 1. Paris
2. 2. London
3. 3. Rom.

Bästa nattliv:

1. 1. London
2. 2. Amsterdam
3. 3. Paris.

Mest romantisk:

1. Paris
2. Venedig
3. Rom.

Vackraste stadsbor:

1. Rom
2. Paris
3. Stockholm.

Renast:

1. Zürich
2. Köpenhamn
3. Stockholm.

Smutsigast:

1. London
2. Paris
3. Rom, Aten (delat).

Tråkigast:

1. Bryssel
2. Zürich , Oslo, Warszawa, Zagreb (delat).

Man kan ju notera att Stockholm alltså har vackra människor i en ren stad.

Läs mer: travel.iafrica.com | bulletin board Which is the most boring city in Europe?,

Även i DN

De nya datacentrum som byggs upp av Google, Microsoft och andra drar lika mycket elenergi som hela aluminiumsmältverk (som tillverkar aluminium genom elektrolys). Så varför inte kalla dem datasmältverk?

Now, however, we're talking about companies such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, IBM and Sun Microsystems building data smelters - a line we stole and tweaked from Horst Simon, a computer scientist at Berkeley. The costly information plants of these technology giants eat up just as much energy as, say, an aluminum smelting center, but there's no physical product that appears as a result of the consumption. Instead, the data smelters just swap around and store bits.

In my company we are standardising more and more on Linux. The servers have been running it for a long time, but since our workstations are used for development with tools such as buildout, I have started using Linux as a desktop machine as well. Buildout and some other tools work without tweaks on Linux, while we have had problems on other platforms.

I held off on Linux on the desktop for a long time, using Windows XP on my desktop and using VNC to a local Linux machine instead. But now I've built a Core 2 Duo Workstation with 4GB of RAM and a 24" monitor. It sits well in our new offices and can be used by anyone in the company that needs it.

Linux on the desktop hasn't been a pain free experience, due to one thing: Sound, or lack thereof actually. Sound is essential for running things like Skype, and producing screencasts.

I'm running CentOS 5 and my motherboard is a "MSI - Socket 775 - ATX IP35 (P35 NEO-FI) - DDR2 / SATA II / Gblan". After starting the machine up, sound usually works. A couple of hours or days later it stops working. Sometimes it is just the audio input, sometimes all of it disappears.

Now granted, CentOS is not the first distribution that springs to mind when thinking about Linux on the desktop, but my colleague to the left of me has the same problem and he's running Ubuntu, and he even managed to find the correct driver for his particular motherboard sound chip. Still sound suuport on his machine is at leastas erratic as on my machine.

So, it is time to use Google to get some solid knowledge. Unfortunately there isn't much. Most questions people field seem to go unanswered. Most hardware compatibility lists I have found are out of date and the cards listed can not be bought anymore. On one site, linuxmce, they actually do list two compatible cards. However the cheaper one needs "some configuration", and the expensive one is expensive enough that the price plus the time and resources needed to install it would probably mean it is cheaper to buy a new computer.

On that front there is some good news: Red Hat keeps a list of certified hardware systems. I haven't tried any of those systems, but I guess certification for Red Hat EL 5 ought to mean that sound should work on a CentOS 5 (CentOS is a free version of RH EL 5). One guy in the company swears by HP servers and workstations, so I will probably refrain in the future from building a computer on my own and go for HP. It was good fun though building it, although the fun starts to wear off.

For any future workstations, it is going to be certified ones. And what with the fate of my current workstation? I suppose I can live with some restarts as one way of containing the problem. I have tried a USB sound card that came with the Philips headset I am using. That card displays the same erratic behaviour.

As it stands now, I may either put in a Soundblaster card and hope for the best or retire the workstation to Windows XP and get a certified workstation There is a guide for compatible sound cards at LinuxQuestions.org. A lot of hardware is reviewed and rated on that site and that site is probably the best hope for finding compatible components. Some of the Creative sound cards have 10 out of 10 ratings there and some close to zero on compatibility.

Here is mention of what chip is best supported in the Sound Blaster cards, which seems to be the emu 101k chip.

A third option is to figure out what motherboards the certified hardware use. Unfortunately there is no Red Hat guide for motherboards on their site, but it should not be impossible to glean what mobos are in e.g. the certified Dell or HP systems.

Update 18:49

My latest attempt is to look at this page with configuration parameters for ALSA. They go into the /etc/modprobe.conf file on CentOS and I selected the

6stack-dig

 for

ALC883/888

and I appended the modprobe.conf to have a line like this:

options snd-card-0 index=0 model=6stack-dig

We'll see if that helps.

I got the hint to do this from this posting in this thread. Sound is working right now but then it usually is after a restart.

“Young brains operate like Ferraris – shifting between forward and reverse, making and breaking memories with a facility that surpasses that of older brains, which are less plastic,” said Dale Bredesen, MD, Buck Institute faculty member and leader of the research group. “We believe that in aging brains, AD occurs when the ‘molecular shifting switch’ gets stuck in the reverse position, throwing the balance of making and breaking memories seriously off kilter.”

Läs mer: Paradoxical Alzheimer's finding may shed new light on memory loss | Science Blog

At my work I have reasonably fast Linux workstation running CentOS 5. It also has a good 24" screen.  I prefer not to switch it off between work sessions and sometimes one of the other guys would like to run his stuff on my machine.

Problem is I am logged in and the screen is locked with my password. My colleague is running Ubuntu and he has a nifty "switch user" option on the menu.

Now I have figured out how to get the same functionality in CentOS 5. You need to follow these steps.

Install the Gnome configuration editor. Start "Add/Remove Software" from the "Applications" menu

and search for "gconf".

Select gconf-editor and apply.

Then start gconf-editor from the command line:

gconf-editor&

Select "Find" from the "edit" menu:

Search for "user_switch" and rember to also search in keys:

find the key user_switch_enabled in the top right pane and tick its value:

Close the editor (there is no save button or command).

Now select Lock Screen" from the "System" menu.

The password box will now have a "Switch User" button! remember that the user you're switching to must also have his settings changed as above to get a "Switch User" button from his or her account.

FOI rapporterar detta:

Om ett par år börjar oljan att minska och gasen har redan gjort det. Ryssland importerar gas som man sedan exporterar till väst. Och vad kan Medvedev göra? Enligt Jan Leijonhielm säger han de rätta sakerna, men hans förflutna talar ett annat språk. Medvedev har själv bäddat för dagens problem och är en fånge i systemet. Han kan inte bekämpa korruptionen. Det är för många mäktiga som är beroende av den. Vid seminariet tecknade amerikanska och brittiska experter en dyster bild av Rysslands framtid där den ekonomiska krisen står för dörren och där man nu har en regering som inte kan klara den.

There was no evidence that subjects with poorer lung function were more likely to quit. A 45-year-old who was told her lung age was normal was as likely to stop as one told her lung age was 65. Although the study could not prove it, merely being presented with the facts of lung function in a vivid and understandable way was apparently enough to encourage people to stop smoking.

Läs mer: Reminder to Smokers: Your Lungs Are Aging - New York Times

Hela texten om läderlappsbombarna är så välskriven att den skulle platsa som monolog i en Quentin Tarantino-film. Utsnitt:

Because bats can carry a good amount of weight and tend to sneak into buildings and such, the plan was to make an army of flying rodent suicide bombers and release them over Japan. The little fellas had small napalm explosive kits made for them, which were probably the cutest incendiary devices ever

Jag har faktiskt inte kommit längre än den till den texten när detta postas...

Läs mer: The 10 Most Bizarre Military Experiments | Cracked.com

I attempted to tell Jim what was happening and to stay with the airplane until we reached a lower speed and altitude. I didn't think the chances of surviving an ejection at Mach 3.18 and 78,800 ft. were very good. However, g-forces built up so rapidly that my words came out garbled and unintelligible, as confirmed later by the cockpit voice recorder. The cumulative effects of system malfunctions, reduced longitudinal stability, increased angle-of-attack in the turn, supersonic speed, high altitude and other factors imposed forces on the airframe that exceeded flight control authority and the Stability Augmentation System's ability to restore control. Everything seemed to unfold in slow motion. I learned later the time from event onset to catastrophic departure from controlled flight was only 2-3 seconds. Still trying to communicate with Jim, I blacked out, succumbing to extremely high g-forces. Then the SR-71 . . literally . . disintegrated around us. From that point, I was just along for the ride. And my next recollection was a hazy thought that I was having a bad dream. Maybe I'll wake up and get out of this mess, I mused. Gradually regaining consciousness, realized this was no dream; it had really happened. That also was disturbing, because . . I COULD NOT HAVE SURVIVED . . what had just happened.

Läs mer: 916 Starfighter

Ända sedan 1926 då man började mäta pulser i djurs neuroner, har man trott att det är antal pulser per tidsenhet som är det viktiga. Man kunde inte se någon precision i tajmingen direkt. Nu har man simulerat en flugas naturliga omgivning mer precist, och si, då avfyras pulserna med stor precision.

“Biological organisms have an interest in conserving energy,” Nemenman said. “Fly eyes account for about one-tenth of the fly’s energy consumption. The fly wants to be very efficient, but it costs energy and molecular resources to emit many precise spikes in the neurons. “If you are presenting simple stimuli where little changes with time, then the most efficient way to encode them may be to generate few randomly positioned spikes, which would be sufficient to convey whatever small changes, if any, happened. Similarly, if the stimulus is unnaturally fast, the neurons may not be able to encode it well.

Vi får se om modernare teknik och metoder gör någon skillnad. Vi är ju dock helt säkra på att en rysk U-båt varit långt inne på svenskt territorialvatten, eftersom den gick upp på land.

FOI genomför för närvarande en analys av inspelningar från ubåtsjakten i och utanför Hårsfjärden 1982. Totalt rör det sig om drygt en timmes inspelningar som FOI har fått i uppdrag av Försvarsmakten att analysera. Av särskilt intresse är en sonarliknande signal och vad den härrör från.

Läs mer: Analys av ubåtsljuden ordentligt igång - FOI, Totalförsvarets forskningsinstitut

Enligt Times Online så beror hatet mot plastpåsen på felaktig information:

The central claim of campaigners is that the bags kill more than 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds every year. However, this figure is based on a misinterpretation of a 1987 Canadian study in Newfoundland, which found that, between 1981 and 1984, more than 100,000 marine mammals, including birds, were killed by discarded nets. The Canadian study did not mention plastic bags