Super heroes to save us from the zombies?

If you haven't read 'Ex-Heroes', I highly recommend it. (Ex-Patriots was good, but not great ... I haven't read the other two)

... Brandyn White, a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, and Scott Greenberg, a PhD candidate at MIT ...

At least this time we can blame Network World for the crappy headline, and not someone here at Slashdot. We can just blame them for not bothering to read the summary, much less the article.

The good news about being late to post stories (that aren't for nerds and don't matter), is that they've already been debunked:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com...

Are we going to have to use Swatch Time with this calendar?

All kidding aside, they mention:

MINUTES, SECONDS, & FRACTIONS OF A SECOND
Both minutes and seconds have a range from 0 to 59. If including a fraction of a second, write it as a decimal at the end: 41.13.27.23.59.59.999 TC .

... so no handling of leap seconds. I know some people would be happy about this, but if you're not going to care about solar noon, why deal with leap days and such, too?

(and for those who complain that UTC shouldn't have leap seconds ... I say go and use TAI or GPS, but don't change UTC because you don't want to deal with the complexity)

Last month, I was at the International Digital Curation Conference, and Atel Butte started talking about outsourcing lab tests .... and put video of rat colonoscopies in the talk. It's about 32 min in, but you should watch the whole thing for the context:

  http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/id...

He went downhill after Meet the Feebles. He should go back to docmentaries

The day before this article came out, the AAAS released a report on The Reality, Risks and Response to Climate Change, and seems to be starting a publicity push on the topic.

Here's what I see -- the majority of scientists believe that there are real problems with global warming, even if there may be some cyclic effects (heat kills off all the humans, they stop causing problems, everything cools back down).

So instead we have groups trying to sow disinformation with questions about the incidence of some severe weather events (are we just monitoring better and catching more, in part because humans are in more places, or are they actually increasing), and are the increases in intensity statistically significant?

And at this point, I've seen some data that might've been tainted (eg, temperature monitors that have had buildings encroach), but the general concensus is that yes, storms are getting worse.

I'm not going to say his results are completely bunk, as he's likely right in that some of the problems can be explained by how and where people build (eg, in the flood plain -- but the flood plain was resurveyed and is growing in my area ... that might be because of silting up of rivers from construction, it could be because of increased rainfall))

Where I do fault the article is for referencing a 'recent' UN report that hasn't been released yet (website says "The Summary for Policymakers will be released on 31 March 2014"), so we can't actually get to the underlying data that he's basing his claims on.

He also did a slashdot interview last year:

What do you want?
by frakfrakfrak

Hey, someone else was going to do it if I didn't!

jms: Your head on a pike. Or a pickerel. Or the freshwater fish of your choice.

Or even Netflix, Amazon, or some other form of episodic content.

The problem was that Max Brook's World War Z was a bunch of interwoven stories. Some of them didn't end so well. (eg, the story w/ fuel air explosives).

They *did* have someone trying to get to the bottom of what had happened, but in the book it seemed that it was years after the fact, as interviews, rather than as things were going south.

If you have good backups, you should still be able to restore. Sure, you trash whatever you might've done since the upgrade, but sometimes it's worth it.

Of course, that's not the case on the iPad -- you might've done the smart thing and backed up everything before testing a new iOS update, but once it's applied, it *will* *not* let you restore the old OS.

It's possible to actually write good code in VB?

If that's the case, can someone finally explain to me how to figure out when operations are functions, and when they're methods of the 'DoCmd' object in VBA?

(I'm serious ... this has bugged me for years ... and I haven't had to do VB programming since about 1999 ... that experience has told me that I should walk away from any job offer or interview that mentions VB, and has tainted my views of .NET as well)

Um ... I've developed cyanotype, as I've had almost 3 years of drafting classes between high school and college.

After you finish your technical drawing, you trace the whole thing onto velum, which is semi-transparent. To make copies, you then place the drawing against the cyanotype paper, and expose it to UV light. (you can use sunlight, but most shops will have a system of rollers and UV lamps to handle longer drawings, or a large lightbox that might be able to handle 3'x4' or so.)

After the UV exposure, the dye on the (white) paper will turn blue where the drawing didn't block the light. You then wash off the paper to remove any of the uncured dye, and you might send it through another chemical wash to deepen the colors.

So ... you have a white paper, that's coated in a blue ink. Where you see white lines on the blueprint, you're seeing the paper, not the dye.

And there's a similar product used in the screen printing industry. I'm not sure what it's called, but it's this sheet of coated acetate. You place your image on it, expose it to UV, and then when you wash the unexposed part away, the whole thing gets kinda gooey. You then press the sheet against your silkscreen (and by press, I mean, with a *lot* of force ... rollers, etc, to force it into the screen), let it dry, and then peel away the acetate. You mask off the surrounding area, and you're reading to print shirts or whatever. (for single colors, at least ... you'll want a carousel & spot dryer for multi-color)

Blueprints aren't blue paper.

It's actually a light-sensitive chemical reaction (cyanotype). The back side of blueprints (without the dye) are white. Before it's been exposed to UV and cured, the dye is kinda yellow-ish.

Some of the complaints is in how much it costs to scrub out all of the soot, CO2, etc, and how the costs from going to 80% to 90% clean is so much more expensive than cleaning the first 50%.

How about just fund to put the cheap technology to get at least some level of scrubbing in China or whoever else is using coal?

(yes, I know ... there are two major flaws in this argument; (1) the particles that aren't caught may be the ones that have more significant health effects; (2) if coal is then seen as 'clean', when only less bad relative to unscrubbed coal (and not other alternative energy sources), we reduce the arguments for why people should cut off coal all together ... but it still seems more cost effective than just thinking you'll buy out all of the production)

Check to see if there's an ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Service) in your area.

They might have some useful contacts to get things moved, with the simple request that they be able to use your tower when there's an emergency. (I think they also like some inside space where they can set up their gear, but it doesn't have to be dedicated space ... they were looking at using our conference room 'til they determined that we didn't have good propagation from our town hall))

If they don't have the contacts, they might be able to help you raise funds ... like at their various hamfests or relay events. Cash might seem like the best thing to ask for, but in-kind donations go a hell of a lot further and can sometimes be easier to get ... it just requires having good contacts or lots of cold calls (trucking companies, crane companies, etc ... might also ask telecom companies)