Kikkoman

Saving for future reference.

Mutation Tied to Need for Less Sleep Is Discovered

The scientists were searching the samples for variations in several genes thought to be related to the sleep cycle. In what amounts to finding a needle in a haystack, they spotted two DNA samples with abnormal copies of a gene called DEC2, which is known to affect circadian rhythms. They then worked back to find out who provided the samples and found a mother and daughter who were naturally short sleepers. The women routinely function on about 6 hours of sleep a night; the average person needs 8 to 8.5 hours of sleep.

Even under the reproductive selection pressures brilliantly outlined in the first 10 minutes of Idiocracy, needing less sleep would still be a handy trait.

Interesting story of how a small local bank handled and is handling the re-de-session-pression.

Nice flash slide show showing how lending and other financial innovations balloon the money supply.

Election night I got home early-ish to watch the returns. While a great night overall, it started out slow. That and I wanted to play Little Big Planet.

So I’ve made the first “productive” use of any of my TV’s Picture-in-Picture capabilities; news talking heads in a small picture and Little Big Planet on the big screen. The trick was that the TV could output the sound from the “smaller” picture.

Watching Obama win stirred a combination of pride, excitement, and historical significance. The nature and strength of the emotions stirred was similar to the feelings I got from the Pathfinder landing and exploring Mars.

It was between my sophomore and junior years and college, and I was back on Guam for the summer. I remember being glued the computer, downloading the “live” images of Mars from NASA’s website over our piddly 56k modem. Truly amazing.

Both of those events made me proud of mankind, excited about the future, and awed at the accomplishment.

Awesome book. Went from good to great to awesome. It’s right up there with “Snowcrash”, but with a better ending.

Is the phrase that came to mind when I saw an add for Satellite TV on hulu….

Link to NYTimes science article.

“In fact, the dominant females ordinarily eat a little more than the subordinates. The lower status monkeys can get as much food as they want but seem to have less of a desire to eat, perhaps because of the higher level of stress hormones in their brain. The anxiety of constantly toadying to their social superiors seems to curb their appetite, researchers suspect, at least when their regular high-fiber, low-fat chow is on the menu.”
…
“Once these foods were available, the low-status monkeys promptly developed an appetite. They began eating significantly more calories than their social superiors. While the dominant monkeys dabbled in the sweet, fatty pellets just during the daytime, the subordinate monkeys kept scarfing them down after dark.”

Practical upshot: If your at the top, you don’t crave the comfort of comfort food.

Normally I love chuckling at the absurdities of daily life, but this one is just stupid.

I switched from cable modem service and the cheap $15 a month Vonage service to DSL and a regular phone line which is $16.
Why? Well at this point I need unlimited local calling more than 500 mins long distance on Vonage, and I want a phone that works regardless of what the network is doing.

Unfortunatly, having been spoiled by Vonage for several years now, I didn’t realize that CallerId isn’t a “standard” feature, and we need CallerId. It is an extra $10 a month.
So at this point, the stupid “regular old phone line” ($16 + $10) now costs me more per month than the DSL ( $20 ). Which is just Absurd.

The net result is I am paying just as much as before but:

1. I get a “stable” phone line with unlimited local calling.
2. Any long distance we need to do will have to go on our cell phones, which most of it was anyways.
3. My downstream bandwith is the same, but I do get another 15 kB/s upstream, which is nice.

I just got spam adverstising”A Genuine College Degree in 2 weeks !” to my Duke Alumni email address.

here

Quite cool looking, cheapish hardware, sensors, and motors that with interface kits that are USB enabled on Win/Mac/Linux with Java too supposedly. Spiffy.

Non Profit CA Certs
Good and small drive imager for Windows

techdirt entry that kicked off the search

A company called Swivel Technologies makes one already

… in that we might actually be able to innovate/engineer our way our of fossil fuel dependance.

Oil from farm byproducts

More efficient solar cells

Home rooftop installable wind power

Good thoughts on Status Reports

THE J2EE 1.4 Tutorial

Nifty program design

The underbelly of Japan FAQ

Bio Diesel Jet Fuel 40/60 Soy/JetA

How to use Built-in GarageBand audio filters

Muhahaha MS caught by Word Doc changes

Nice gadget site

Show on the Discovery channel.

In the 60′s and 70′s they did an experiement to teach a few chimps sign language. In the 80s one of them had a baby, and the baby learned sign language from its mother. How cool is that!

DNA wise, Chimps are closer to humans than Gorillas.

Wow, FEMA disaster search dogs. In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing the search dogs would get bummed out at the end of the day of searching and only finding dead people. It would get to the point where the dogs didn’t want to work anymore. It got to the point where they would stage a successful find of someone so that the dogs could end the day on a good note.

Regulatory Capture is when, “when regulators serve the interests of those they’re allegedly regulating in the general public interest.”
See post here.

There are two key parts:
1 Over time the regulators and regulatees become friendly &
2 The established businesses come to find that the regulatory environment is beneficial to them by keeping new competators down/out, in that it raises the barriers to entry in that market.

Anyways the whole point of introducing the concept of regulatory capture is to link to this article. Aka, California AG position paper doc on P2P networks turns out to have been written or edited by someone from the MPAA. Mmmm, smells good don’t it?

here

Very true. No I will not fix your computer.

So I just bought my first bit of indie music: on the internet via paypal no less.

Tramplinehouse won a web award at SXSW and they have music playing in the background on the site. Voyager One – Wires was one of the songs, and I had to have it. Google pointed me to AudioLunchBox where I was able to listen to the tracks and buy the album as mp3s. Fantastic! I’m going to have a great time sampling the techno there.

Joi Ito: Activist in Japan frustrated with the political process in Japan and found out that this is problem with democracies worldwide. Wrote it out there

Problem with the Republic method is that you vote and walk off, and the leaders go off and do their own thing.

Emergent Democracy as in order arising from chaos. The printing press changed the nature of the “public”, in the same way won’t the internet do the same thing?

Wilcox: Note that while the printing press revolutionized things it only did it in half of Europe. The Ottoman empire managed to squelch and supress the progress of the printing press very effectively.

Rosen: check this out indymedia
ausion indymedia

Joi Ito: chat room I am not the leader, I am a custodian.

How is emergent democracy resist outside influence to co-op it / usurpt it? Wilcox: Actually networks are more resistant. Take for example the Sierra club, there is radical wing trying to take it over and basically take over its endowment. They aren’t very resistant because they aren’t in active contact with their constituents.

Direct democracy is scary, its the market. Emergent democracy is needs to be a little more mediated.

Ito: In the US the is a functioning democracy so it only makes sense to replace it with something that is markedly better. Interesting stuff is going on in other countries, eg Iran. There are around 100,000 Iranian bloggers and some of them are being thown in jail.

How do you protect the system from the users: Flash back to Wienberger’s talk last year about constitutions.