Australian Bioscience News & Views

Big answers, bigger questions

In a surprisingly real good news story, it appears humanity has been able to decrease the damage we did to the ozone layer with CFCs etc.  Of course, it's taking longer than we first predicted it would, but never the less, it's happening. Being able to clean up after our selves is a good sign of progress towards intelligence ;-) Of course, the flip side of that is the increasing use of gases which speed the greenhouse effect. I'd rather not focus on the negatives today though.

A further sign of progress, even if I'm a little too dull to follow it, is that the Poincaré conjecture  was resolved by full mathematical proof recently. That itself is not evidence of our growing wisdom as a species, what is good news, is that a mathematics institute in the USA lavishly rewarded the humble person who did the work. I have heard that he may not accept the prize money, but I hope he does.   

Closer to home, Rick Shine received a well deserved Eureka while the collective intelligence quotient of the moviegoing public is drained away by this tasty little morsel called (turn your PC speakers right down before clicking)  ... Snakes on a Plane.  To add to the depression this induces, I learn that the film was better until the voting public on the internet got their hands on it. Where's an eyelash viper when you need one?

Mealtime

Snakey 'capturing' a defrosted adult mouse on the evening of 2006/08/21. Her strike is rather leisurely, likely a result of the fact that she ate three adult mice last Sunday. Sadly we didn't video her even lazier strike at a 'hopper' rat, which she ate after the mouse seen here.

Dolphin 'intelligence' article not

Recent newspaper articles have claimed that research on the structure of dolphin brains demonstrates they are not intelligent. The findings are indeed interesting, but they do nothing to contradict the soundly gathered experimental evidence that dolphins understand that changing word order changes meaning of a communication, and other complex language related ideas. I challenge anyone to find a rat that can demonstrate that!

Personally, I was more enlightened by the sensationally captioned article: Quake hits Antarctic, penguins affected :-)

Fight spam with one click!

It's just so easy! I love it, spam and hoax busting is a little hobby of mine. I'm nowhere near as proficient as some of my more determined and technopowerful friends, but I've always delighted in thwarting spammers. Now my little internet sport has become the right of every Australian resident.

SpamMATTERS is a handy little add-in for common email programs, created by the government, for the people of Australia.

You can download it, and the instructions guide one through installation with no grief, though I have to admit I didn't bother reading them, predicting it would be as painless as it was. In default mode, it only reports the offending piece of spam to the Australian Communications and Media Authority. Scrolling down the user guide page after the installation instructions, there is information on how to set it to delete the unwanted emails.

Ahh, the  simple pleasures of the internet!

Political tuna

The politics of whale hunting is no doubt the reason that Sydney Morning Herald made the effort to publish an article about Richard McLoughlin's seminar At ANU on the 1st August. You may find the presentation by the managing director of the Australian Fisheries Management Authority interesting listening. Is there anyone else out there like me, who uses their MP3 player (mobile phone in my case) to listen to more than just music? The growth of sites dedicated to podcasting regular programmes, and the various media outlets providing material in different file formats, I would guess there must be a few ...

One thing that does puzzle me about this new miniaturised, portable MP3 player culture that's developing, is the amazing willingness of so many to have the music they purchase "restricted" to a particular device, file format, number of copies, or CD burn limits, etc ad nauseum. I guess I should have been warned there was something odd about this particular consumer space when the shuffle was marketed as a good thing! Any digital device without a screen is unlikely to be worth its salt.

Large music production companies can be likened to the tunas of the ocean of music. Lean, big, fast, and out to get you. Hence all the 'restrictions' inflicted on us by retailers of music files and digital music players. My personal view is that they're pushing themselves to market extinction.  Independent artists and their medium sized promoters are already taking the lead in this household, sellings files as .wav and other techno-musician friendly formats, no restrictions on how they are burned, and often far more reasonably priced, I guess because they do not have the enormous advertising and distribution overheads of the 'idolmakers'.

This is not to say I even remotely support turning artists into paupers by not paying them for their creations. Rather the opposite, I enjoy a free market in arts, where I can buy from the most obscure as well as the most obvious, without having to visit a dozen tiny CD shops strewn across the greater Sydney basin.