Archive for February, 2008

A poetry blog

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

Quite some time ago, I put up a few poems here on Samadhisoft. At the time, I thought of it as an experiment. But, in truth, I wasn’t very happy with it. It was awkward, it was the wrong venue and the way I’d developed for displaying and indexing the poems was clumsy at best. I never really came back to it or gave it any more attention.

oldman-writing.jpgSince I’ve been in New Zealand, I’ve had some time on my hands and as one of my favorite pastimes is computer programming, I turned my attentions towards developing a better venue for my poetry. I’ve created a Blog called, SamadhiMuse. And, I’ve written my first WordPress plug-in to facilitate transferring my voluminous poetry into this Blog.

At the moment, it is a work in progress. One minute, I load a few poems onto the site to run a test on some function within the transfer software and then 10 minutes later, I’ve cleared all the poems off again for the next test. I’m currently working with an initial pool of 752 poems and at any point, you may find them all there and then a few minutes later, all gone again.

The software development efforts (in the PHP language) are coming along well, however, and I’m nearly to the point where things will be stable enough for an initial batch of work to take up permanent residence on the site.

Poetry is not everyone’s cup of tea. I know that. But, if you are curious to read a bit, I think you’ll finds sides of me that you were probably unaware of. You will, of course, have to decide if that’s good or bad.

Cheers

Update 15 Mar 08 – Things are now basically stable over at Samadhimuse.  Please feel free to browse the site.

Ice: A Catalyst for Life in the Universe?

Monday, February 4th, 2008

The unusual properties of frozen water may have been the ticket that made life possible. Over the decades, several notable scientists have began to suspect that life on Earth did not evolve in a warm primordial soup, but in ice—at temperatures that few living things can now tolerate. The very laws of chemistry may have actually favored ice, says Jeffrey Bada, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. “We’ve been arguing for a long time,” he says, “that cold conditions make much more sense, chemically, than warm conditions.”

If Bada and others are correct, it would not only answer how life arose on our planet, but would dramatically change how we search for life in the Solar System and beyond. At that point, our chances of finding life elsewhere may be better than previously understood.

More…

The Monty Hall Problem

Sunday, February 3rd, 2008

The Monty Hall ProblemBack on May 4th of 2007, I wrote a piece entitled “Trust Your Brain?” in which I discussed a problem I called “The Three Box Problem”.

The Three Box problem has been around for awhile and I now know that it is better known as “The Monty Hall Problem”.

Over forty papers and news articles have been published over the years about this little logical conundrum and there’s a nice write up on it on Wikipedia that I didn’t know about when I wrote my original piece.

If you still ‘trust your brain‘ or if you like amazing little puzzles, I suggest you have a look.

– thanks to Rolf A. for this new information

Western U.S. Faces Drought Crisis, Warming Study Says

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008

The U.S. West will see devastating droughts as global warming reduces the amount of mountain snow and causes the snow that does fall to melt earlier in the year, a new study says.

By storing moisture in the form of snow, mountains act as huge natural reservoirs, releasing water into rivers long into the summer dry season.

“We’re losing that reservoir,” said research leader Tim Barnett, an oceanographer and climate researcher at the University of California, San Diego.

“Spring runoff is getting earlier and earlier in the year, so you have to let water go over the dams into the ocean.”

Summers are also becoming hotter and longer. “That dries things out more and leads to fires,” Barnett added.

“Our results are not good news for those living in the western United States,” the scientists write in their report, which appears in today’s online edition of the journal Science.

Unnatural Changes

Barnett and his team used computer models to study water flow in Western rivers over the past 50 years.

The researchers found that the changes currently affecting the U.S. West have less than a one percent chance of being due to natural variability, Barnett told National Geographic News.

His team verified that by running a variety of control tests under pre-industrial conditions that mimicked known natural cycles.

(Related: “Ancient “Megadroughts” Struck U.S. West, Could Happen Again, Study Suggests” [May 24, 2007].)

What’s been occurring recently, he said, is different from natural variability and is driven by the buildup of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere.

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Sentenced to die for downloading report on women

Friday, February 1st, 2008

– Remember, this is the government we (the US) put into power and are supporting in Afghanistan.

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A young man, a journalism student, is sentenced to death by an Islamic court for downloading a report from the internet.

The sentence is then upheld by the country’s rulers. This is Afghanistan – not in Taleban times but six years after “liberation” and under the democratic rule of the West’s ally Hamid Karzai.

The fate of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh has led to domestic and international protests, and deepening concern about the erosion of civil liberties in Afghanistan.

He was accused of blasphemy after he downloaded a report from a Farsi website which said Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the oppression of women had misrepresented the views of the prophet Muhammad.

Kambaksh, 23, distributed the tract to fellow students and teachers at Balkh University in Mazari Sharif, capital of Balkh province, with the aim, he said, of provoking a debate on the matter. But a complaint was made against him and he was arrested, tried by religious judges without – say friends and family – legal representation and sentenced to death.

More…