According to an article by Louis LaPointe posted the Open Source Energy Network on Pure Energy Systems News, as little as 0.0003% acetone in your gasoline can increase your gas-mileage by as much as 35%! That's a pretty hefty claim, but the article is riddled with warnings about acetone and its use, as well as often encouraging the reader not to take his word for it, but try it and find out for yourself. The additive doesn't change the combustion properties of gasoline, but merely lowers the surface tension, allowing for a more complete vaporization in the combustion chamber, thus allowing for a more complete combustion. LaPointe also says it'll reduce black smoke from diesel engines. However, it does not slice, dice or julienne potatoes. There's is also an FAQ on the PESWiki.

According to a NASA newsletter, the Spitzer Space Telescope has found a lot more quasars than previously was observable. It turns out that while a quasar outshines any other object, dust and gas can shield us from their radiation, both visible and Xray. Spitzer has been instructed to look in the infrared end of the spectrum, and has thus in a small patch of the sky discovered 21 previously unseen quasars. This of course means that reality finally matches another one of our theories.

Scientists at NASA have now heard proof (called "Saturn kilometric radiation") that Saturn has a phenomenon similar to the earths' Northern Lights (aurora borealis). Talking about the eerie sounding noise, Dr. Bill Kurth with the University of Iowa, says "We believe that the changing frequencies are related to tiny radio sources moving up and down along Saturn's magnetic field lines." It couldn't sound any spookier if they added a Theremin.

Sun Microsystems has bought StorageTek for $4.1B. The question is - will this save Sun, or doom StorageTek too?

While listening to NPR this morning, I heard about the ridiculous 1675 law that orders the arrest of all American Indians entering Boston, and just now, 330 years later, is ready to be repealed. My question is - there are a LOT of really outdated and/or inappropriate laws out there; would an 'open' Wiki-style approach to law-making (with appropriate supervision, of course) be able to catch more of these 'bad' laws? Should the law-makers be able to keep track of all these laws, or are the number of laws simply too large for that relatively small group of people to keep track of? The more and more outdated copyright laws also come to mind as an area that could stand some more scrutiny.

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has taken pictures of whirling dust clouds. Spirit began seeing dust devils in isolated images in March 2005. At first, the rover team relied on luck. It might catch a dust devil in an image or it might miss by a few minutes. Using the new detection strategy, the rover takes a series of 21 images. Spirit sends a few of them to Earth, as well as little thumbnail images of all of them. Team members use the 3 big images and all the small images to decide whether the additional big images have dust devils. For this movie, they specifically told Spirit to send back frames that they knew had dust devils. The Sun heats the surface so that the surface is warm to the touch even though the atmosphere at 2 meters (6 feet) above the surface would be chilly. That temperature contrast causes convection. Mixing the dust, winds, and convection should trigger dust devils.

Professor Marcello Ferrada-Noli of The National Institute of Public Health in Sweden says that there's no such thing as burnout (depression from exhaustion) - it's all made up (Swedish only) by people who do not like their work environment. People tend to take medical LOA for other reasons, for instance a bad manager/supervisor, and a lot of people who are on medical LOA should really be working. Part of his reasoning is that if stress in society increases, so should the general health decline - which he means it doesn't. Professor Ferrada-Noli has also collaborated on published papers on "cross-cultural analysis of fatal injuries due to accidental poisoning", "Impact of unemployment on cause specific suicide & self inflicted injury mortality", "Lifestyles, stress and social support in Chilean, Swedish, and Chilean immigrant middle aged women during the climacteric and menopause period" as well as multiple papers on the effect of PTSD on POW and torture victims. So, IT workers - are you really burnt out, or are you just whining?

Per PhysNews update 724, scientists have for the first time been able to detect extrasolar planets directly. That is, previously the only way to detect these orbiting bodies was to either detect the minute redshift in the companion star due to orbit wobble in the gravitational tug-of-war, or to detect the drop in light intensity when the planet passes between us and the star. The Spitzer Space Telescope has detected infrared radiation directly from two planets, HD 209458b (135 ly away) and TrES-1 (489 ly away). Unfortunately, this will not yet aid our search for M-class planets - the two found are Jupiter sized, but orbits their respective stars closer than Mercury, which renders them hot enough to be seen by the telescope.

Volvo has a sweepstake that makes you think you're going to space. You're basically competing for a seat on the suborbital Virgin Galactic. They will even give you $100,000 to help pay the federal and state taxes on the Grand Prize, which is estimated at a value of $350,000. Of course, the disclaimer/official rules are 7 miles long.

SANS has reported a possible MySQL Bot. Apparently it's TCP port 3306 that is being scanned. From the SANS page: "You should not expose any MySQL servers to unsolicited connections. If you run MySQL, make sure you block port 3306."

As a Sysadmin (UNIX, NT/2k and OpenVMS) I see an immense potential value in a USB jumpdrive. Aside from PuTTY, WinSCP and other such tools - what do you sysadmins put on your 256M jumpdrives, and what would you put on there, had it been larger? What are the essntials?

Wired has a story where Sharman Networks, the Australian company behind the P2P file sharing software Kazaa, has donated money to the International Red Cross. The Australian Recording Industry Association has asked the Red Cross to freeze their funds, stating that the money belongs to them. Michael Speck of Australia's Music Industry Piracy Investigations says "It would be incredibly disappointing if we had to sue [ the International Red Cross ]". Merry Christmas!

I run a very small bulletin board with just under 700 members. I recently had to make an uncomfortable decision, and received negative response from a certain faction of the members, crying foul. I explained that this board is a dictatorship, running on my hardware, on my inetnet connection, and has no other financial dependencies. My question is - you out there running boards, are you running Dictatorships or Democracies, and would you like to change - if so why?

The SCO site seems to have been p0wned. As of 6:35am CST, a big banner stating "WE OWN ALL YOUR CODE" and "pay us all your money" was clearly visible on the site. Of course, this will not really help the case of The Worls vs. SCO, and they're bound to make the OSS/FSF crowd into grafitti painting, skateboarding hooligans.

...for he may be subtle, and quick to anger. Or so it seems, at least for this guy, who seems to have a mean-spirited web builder after him. Let this be a lesson - pay your web developer. On time.