techyum ::

I have to admit up front that I am a huge fan of Oliver Sacks and narrative medical literature in general, especially when it deals with the further reaches of our treacherous brains. This is just a warning to those suffering from ADHD (or whatever bizarre name and/or acronym it hides under this week) that you may want to skip this post.
In my inbox today appeared a wonderful edition of Cerebrum from the Dana Foundation. The lead story is about a British Neurologist and amateur pianist who lost his ability to read or play music from a score following a stroke which damaged a small area of his brain. He also lost his ability to appreciate music emotionally, though the damaged parietal cortex is not typically associated with emotional response, suggesting that:

part of the parietal cortex might be a gateway through which the emotional systems of the brain find out whether a sequence of events and actions merges into a coherent experience.

I doubt that the editors realize that music long ago lost its coherent musical notation and can often lead to absurd emotional chaos.
A bonus feature, and one close to my own current experiences, deals with the idea of “Cosmetic Neurology” and The Problem of Pain.
Image of the score for Brain Eno’s “Music for Airports.”

Having been properly chastised by our fearless leader, I drag myself up from the murk of contemplating the future of my bionic spine, to shed light on some treats from the nether regions.
I am not the most faithful gamer on the planet and freely admit to not owning any flavor of console, but the only proper way I have found to recover from any surgery is to combine your pain meds with whatever version of Final Fantasy is currently on the market. Soon we’ll be able to combine all of this with the proper potion. Be sure to check the caffeine content, or you’ll be sorry. If anything goes wrong, it wasn’t your fault.
The return to the Juvenile is upon us like some new plague. It has a smell and a favorite restaurant and I have to admit I’m falling for it. Proof lies in the fact that I anguished over posting about the Transformer/Darth Vader mash-up for days and can finally admit my infatuation now that everyone, including Laughing Squid has mentioned it. The only thing remaining is that glorious and final Dargon Vs. Helicopter apocalypse. Another good way to relive your youth is to ressurect your favorite dead crooner or build a greener SimCity.
If you’re feeling too old, just create a real city or run off to that island hideaway. At least there no one can burn your man or annoy you with “blinky lights furry legwarmers body paint glitter pimp hats.” Your innocence will be your own to squander.
Now I’m off to sniff out the meaning of that 200 yards of spidery goodness which my morning news tells me has quite a smell and a distinct buzz from all the dead and dying insects.
And you can blame this surreal and winding trail of this rant on Borges.

According to BBC News, Dr. Paul Moller’s Davis, California company Moller International is just about ready to start selling the M 200G, a vehicle they like to call the “flying saucer.”
The M 200G is a flying car, sort of, that operates on eight turbofans which can be run on gasoline, diesel or ethanol. The turbofans utilize opposite-motion to eliminate the need for a rear stabilizer propeller to keep the damn thing from spinning around in a circle. The M 200G hovers “like a helicopter” up to 10 feet off the ground, mostly because to go any higher the operator would need a pilot’s license.
Promising that their “flying saucer” will be on sale in the next few months for around $90,000, Moller International sees the M 200G as a precursor to their “Skycar,” which I wrote about way back in 1999 when it was first announced. The plans on that puppy have it operating like a real flying car; it’ll be driveable on the ground and will fly at 400 miles an hour — a lot more than 10 feet off the ground, since it can climb at 6,000 feet a minute.
Part of the problem with getting the M 200G to market is that it’s unclear whether the FAA or the US Department of Transportation has authority over the thing. Ten feet’s sort of, you know, that gray area.
The Skycar, however, is very clearly in the FAA’s realm, and will require a pilot’s license to fly, since Moller is no longer counting on the original plan proposed in ’99 — to have a fly-by-wire system that would be fully automated. Moller hopes to have the Skycar to market within about six years.
Link.
See also: I Got Yer Flying Car
Image: From Moller International, via Wikipedia.

A few days ago I wrote about the maiden flight of Mistral Air, which provides budget flights for Catholic pilgrims courtesy of the Vatican. As if providing material for a Father Guido Sarducci skit, French transportation officials have taken away the passengers’ holy water out of fear of terrorism. Officials said the bottles exceeded the maximum allowable size for liquids in carry-on luggage, which in France is 100ml.
This week, the Vatican’s Mistral Air started offering budget flights from Rome to Lourdes, France, for Catholic pilgrims intent on visiting the holy shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes. Routes to other holy sites in France, Poland, Spain and the Middle East. (Oh, yeah, that last one’s gonna go well).
Everyone who’s ever watched a James Bond movie knows terrorists can just pour two bottles of “holy water” together and blow up an airliner, so it’s no surprise that holy water is verboten on international flights, especially given the fact that Mistral Air’s seats bear creepy inscriptions like “I search for your face, Lord.” And the fact that in France, air transportation officials are actually Satanic vampires who burst into flame at the touch of aqua vita, just like Christopher Lee in Taste the Blood of Dracula. I made that last part up. You hope.
Airline officials responded to the problem by providing each Mistral Air passenger with a small vial of holy water from Lourdes in a bottle shaped like the Virgin Mary. I vividly remember these bottles from my Catholic childhood — every fellow Papist who went to France brought ‘em back and the Mary-shaped bottles sat on the mantel being holy for a while. I never once succumbed to that nagging voice in my head that told me to drink them.
Link.
Image: The Blessed Virgin of Lourdes, via Wikipedia.

In case you missed the news last summer that we’re all gonna die gonna die gonna die — relax, Spazzy — we’re not. At least not, probably, from 99942 Apophis, the near-Earth asteroid that briefly held a coveted “4″ on the Torino Impact Scale, which designates the likelihood that we’re all gonna die gonna die gonna die gonna die from a given near-earth object.
Apophis, which was named for the Egyptian god who tried to assassinate the Sun during its passage through the sky each day, is making a close approach to Earth in 2029, and a “4″ means that upon that passage there is greater than a 1% chance that Apophis would impact Earth and cause vast destruction on a countrywide scale — scouring most of of the United States, say, or wiping out life in North Africa, or turning Poland into a lake of seething lava. Fer instance.
After closer observations and a whole lot of number crunching, astronomers downgraded Apophis to a “1″ on the Torino Scale, which means no impact event for us, with a slightly higher chance that its close approach to Earth in ’29 (closer than many communication satellites) would perturb its orbit so that it bitch-slapped us on a subsequent passage, in 2036. Still not much chance of that, but enough to keep us Apocalypse nerds fidgeting.
Enter the UK company Astrium, which is competing for a $50K space exploration development prize from the US-based Planetary Society, as reported today (tomorrow, actually, damn that Greenwich Mean Time) by the BBC. Astrium’s plan is to land an unmanned spacecraft called Apex on Apophis during its close approach in 2029. For the subsequent three years, Apex would collect data on Apophis’s “size, spin, composition and temperature,” giving scientists more data with which to calculate the chance of an impact, and its likely result.
The idea isn’t so much to prevent an impact event from Apophis in 2036 — which is considered very unlikely at this point. Rather, the goal is to get more information about near earth objects in general, with an eye toward fueling future plans for deflecting a future object that looks like it might have Earth’s name on it.
Apocalypse geeks as old as I am may remember a season of hysteria on such cable television stations like the History Channel, Discovery Science, etc, ’round about 2000 and early 2001, shortly after the Millennium Bug didn’t murder us all as we all sipped Martini & Rossi. Back then, it seemed like every other hour featured yet another documentary on impact events, in which TV producers trotted out scientists who would say things like what British MP Lembit Opik told the BBC today in relation to the Astrium story: “The question isn’t whether Earth is hit by an asteroid — it is when.”
Truer words were never spoken, Lembit old chap, but the probabilities involved in such events — Apophis included — often boggle the mind of average Joes and Janes, as does the fact that Bruce Willis and a nuclear warhead might just piss the thing off (as they’d piss off most of us).
Of course, a guaranteed planet killer, whether in 100,000 or 100 million years, makes for hella good television, which is why it shows up on pay-for-play TV and in cheese-ass movies from the late Clinton years. Oh, yes. Remember when global death came from above? I grow nostalgic.
Link.
Image from NASA.gov, via Wikipedia.

Today’s National Geographic feed has an amazing photo gallery of the Italian island of Lazzaretto Vecchio, an Italian site where victims of Bubonic Plague were sent. 1,500 of them have been found in a mass grave on the island.
Just a few miles from Venice’s Piazza San Marco, the island was the site of a hospital in the mid-1800s when the Plague struck the city. However, it had been used for isolating Plague victims as far back as the 15th or 16th century, and the earliest graves on the island are neatly constructed. Later graves are just huge pits where “monatti,” or “corpse carriers,” were upended with great loads of bodies.
Link.
Photo via National Geographic.

The Museum of Hoaxes recently posted a list of the 20 strangest experiments in science. It makes for a fascinating and incredibly disturbing tour through the bizarre byways of inquiry. Don’t read it immediately before or after visiting Cute Overload.
On the list, there are a lot of well-known examples of scientific malfeasance and experiments-gone-wrong, like the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment — the latter helpfully featuring a link to YouTube clips for your torturelicious entertainment. But there’s also a freaky dose of lesser-known science fun, like the Russian case of surgically created two-headed dogs, the monkey head transplant, recording the death heartbeat of a man as he was executed by firing squad, and the mating of male turkeys with progressively dismembered female turkeys.
If you’ve ever wondered whether one really can create a two-headed dog, this is essential reading.
Link.
Image: Milgram Experiment diagram, from Wikipedia.

If you’re as big a geek as I am, you’ve often wondered how people found anything or got anywhere before Google Maps. I mean, how did Horatio Hornblower figure out if he was just entering the Bay of Biscay, rounding the Irish Sea or crawling straight up Napoleon’s froggy wazoo?
He, and everybody else navigating the seas way back when, used a marine sextant, which gives rise to Thursday’s picture of the day on Wikipedia. The animated GIF shows you how to use the marine sextant to determine your lattitude by sighting the sun at noon, the angle of which will vary with latitude. Couple that with a nice Rolex for fixing longitude — which can be measured based on the difference between the celestial time wherever you are and absolute time usually measured to Greenwich Mean — and you can leave your GPS at home… as long as it never gets cloudy.
Learning (in theory, at least) to use a sextant reminds me of the time my grandfather, who’d been an analyst in Reagan’s California gubernatorial cabinet, tried to show a six-year-old yours truly how to use a slide rule. Dude, my brain is still hurting from that one.
Link and image via Wikipedia.

Without a doubt, sometimes Google Maps does some really weird stuff when stitching together images (like above), or catches the unexpected and preserves it for the rest of us to laugh (or cringe) at. That’s not new news, but Map of Strange is a lovingly compiled selection of maps, errors, weirdnesses and more, with easy-to-use Google Map navigation. Above image: “#13: what’s going on here“ “#11 Weird Angles in Las Vegas” map error, found in the “strange” tag category. (via)

It might be a post-mortem issue for spinn3r and Tailrank, but Jonathan Moore writes up this incredibly detailed post about uncovering one of the most advanced spam tactics (attacks) he’s seen yet, and goes into detail about how the spammers are using .edu domains (and other high-ranking blogs) to attain high page ranks in searches — discovered when Tailrank/spinn3r saw something was putting spam into their crawler’s database. In this post, Jonathan writes a detailed analysis of what they found, like contents of what people would get when they innocently clicked on a .edu (or unwitting high-ranking blog’s) page:

Content of the Attack Page
The attack page contains a DHTML application that pretends to scan the victims computer for malware and then offers a windows .exe that will supposedly cleans the computer of the malware that it “found.”
In reality, the .exe is almost certainly itself malware. The Ajax was very well executed and looked identical to a Windows dialog box:
[example]
The code was also written to customize itself depending on what version of windows was running and if the browser was Internet Explorer (…)
(…) The attacker tracked the referrer to detect which SEO spam campaigns and keywords were successful on specific doorway pages.
They can then use this data to determine which campaigns were most successful and focus their efforts on improving conversion.

Link.
As you can see (if you dare), some of the examples he cites are still affected, and he writes in the post he thinks it took considerable work and thought to execute what might be a pretty widespread problem, “All of these steps adds up to make this a very advanced attack. The attack probably took one-two man months of work to achieve.” Expect a follow-up post soon (I’ll update here, too) from Jonathan about how the attacker was getting links into the .edu domains. Jonathan tells me that what the attackers are doing is virtually invisible to the people who own the blogs and .edu domains — until their page rank disappears off Google and they wonder why.