STRAY neuron

Most brilliant work from Microsoft in years…

UPDATE (6/2/07): The Register questions whether all this hype about Surface Computing is more “smoke and mirrors” than actual breakthrough. Good reading.

Great car TV show on the planet - TopGear - presents an incredibly enthralling clip of the fastest car on the planet - Bugatti Veyron.

Watching clips of “Top Gear” makes you wonder why the show is nowhere to be seen in US. Come on Discovery, buy rights to this damn thing instead of spending money on bikers in tight shorts!

UPDATE: I thought about embedding this, but decided it to link it instead - DailyMotion’s viewer is much bigger than the embedded one and you want size to experience this.

Here it is: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x157l2_bugatti-veyron-at-top-speed

UPDATE #2: If you love the first clip, check out this (even more unbelievable) one by TopGear (linked by Roy in the comments). Awesome stuff. I’m adding Atom to my shopping list for my 45th b-day.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=WaWoo82zNUA

More nature reading…

One of the most bizarre groups is the genus Apocephalus, whose species are commonly referred to as the ant-decapitating flies. Darting from above, an Apocephalus female lands on its ant victim, pierces it with a sharp, swordlike ovipositor, and lays a single egg inside the ant’s body. Depending on the species of fly, the egg is laid in the head, thorax, or abdomen of the host.

Once the egg hatches, the fly’s larva journeys through the internal tissues to the host’s head (if it is not already there) and begins feeding on the muscles and tissues that fill the head capsule. Eventually, the ant’s depleted head falls off, sometimes while the body is still living and walking about. In Costa Rica, we have found leaf-cutting ants still wandering along trails with their nestmates, in spite of the fact that there is nothing inside their heads except for a mature, fat phorid maggot.

That’s pretty messed up. Read full article here.

I was watching a Florida-FSU game earlier today and one of the players came out of the game with an injury later dubbed a “stinger”.

I decided to Wikipedia the term, as I was curious whether a precise medical definition of a “stinger” existed. It did not, at least not on Wikiepdia, but I did run into an interesting pain index of various stings.

Having been stung by every type of bee, wasp and ant himself, entomologist Joseph O. Schmidt rank various stings this way:

• 1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
• 1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch.
• 1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
• 2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
• 2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine WC Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
• 2.x Honey bee, Africanized bee and European hornet.
• 3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
• 3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic & burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of Hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
• 4.0 Pepsis wasp: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath (if you get stung by one you might as well lie down and scream).
• 4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.

If you’re thinking you should stay away from bullet ants, you should not have too much trouble…unless you’re planning on visiting South American rainforests, of course.

Bullet ants are used by some indigenous people in their initiation rites to manhood (Bequaert, 1926). They are first knocked out by drowning them in a natural chloroform, and then hundreds of them are woven into sleeves made out of leaves, stinger down. When the ants come to, boys slip the sleeve down their arm. The goal of this initiation rite is to keep the sleeve for a full ten minutes without showing any signs of pain. When finished, the boys’ (now men’s) arms are temporarily paralyzed because of the venom, and may shake uncontrollably for days.

Are you a big fan of cheese? So am I. But I know I’m not trying this Sardinian delicacy any time soon. Check out the following fragment of Wikipedia’s Casu Marzu page.

Casu marzu (also called casu modde or formaggio marcio) is a cheese found in Sardinia, Italy, notable for being riddled with live insect larvae. Casu marzu is Sardinian for “rotten cheese.”

Derived from Pecorino Sardo, casu marzu goes beyond typical fermentation to a stage most would consider to be decomposition, brought about by the digestive action of the larvae of the cheese fly, Piophila casei. These larvae are deliberately introduced to the cheese, promoting an advanced level of fermentation and breaking down the cheese’s fats. The texture of the cheese becomes very soft, with some liquid (called “lagrima”) seeping out. The larvae themselves appear as transparent, white worms, about 8 mm (1/3 inch) long. When disturbed, the larvae can jump for distances up to 15 cm (6 inches), prompting recommendations of eye protection for those eating the cheese. Some people clear the larvae from the cheese before consuming; others do not.

Larvae jumping from the cheese into your eye? Are you kidding me? And people eat this stuff? Wow.

P.S. My dad also noticed how the name of the cheese kind of sounds like our last name. Good stuff.

I’ve consumed my last McDonald’s Deluxe Breakfast - I’ll never be able to pull the trigger on it again after reading this article on 10 worst fast foods.

McDonald’s Deluxe Breakfast is a smorgasbord of bad-for-you foods—including eggs, sausage, pancakes smothered in syrup and margarine, hash browns and a biscuit. In moderation, any of these items could be an OK (if occasional) breakfast, but add them together and you’re looking at a grand total of 1,220 calories, 550 of them from fat, including 17 grams of saturated fat.

According to Wikipedia…

A tetromino, also spelled tetramino or tetrimino, is a geometric shape composed of four squares, connected orthogonally. This is a particular type of polyomino, like dominoes and pentominoes are. The corresponding polycube, called a tetracube, is a geometric shape composed of four cubes connected orthogonally.

Sound familiar? It should. Here are a couple of examples:

I find the etymology here particularly interesting…

The word polyomino and the names of the various orders of polyomino are all back-formations from the word domino, a common game piece consisting of two squares, with the do- beginning fancifully analyzed as a version of the prefix di- meaning “two.” The origin of the word domino for the game piece is not certain.

Most of the number prefixes are Greek. Polyominoes of order 9 more often take the Latin prefix nona- (nonomino) than the Greek prefix ennea- (enneomino).

If you’re interested in learning more about the Japanese culture, check out the outstanding JAPAN SAQ (Seldom Asked Questions).

Q. My Japanese wife and friend both insist that Japanese babies have a blue spot on their butt when they’re born. Is this true? - Question submitted by Glen.

A. Most Asian babies have blue marks on their rear-ends and lower backs called moukohan. Known as Mongolian Spots in English, they are a dense collection of Melanin-containing cells called Melanocytes. Melanin is the chemical which gives our skin its colour, and if the melanocytes are deep under the skin, they appear blue. The spots generally fade within a few years and almost always disappear by puberty. These spots have given rise to an interesting Japanese idiom, “shiri ga aoi”. It means “his butt is blue” and is used to describe a person that is childish or inexperienced.

References to Takahashi-san and Sasada-san are pretty frequent in the Ruby world and I wanted to be clear about how to interpret the -san suffix in the Japanese culture…

San

San (さん, San^?) is the most common honorific title, used when addressing most social outsiders, for example, non-family members. San is used unless the addressee’s status warrants one of the other terms mentioned below.

San is often translated as “Mr.”, “Ms.”, “Mrs.”, and the like. San may also be used in combination with things other than the name of the person being addressed. For example, a bookseller might be addressed as honya-san “Mr. Bookseller”, and a butcher as nikuya-san “Ms. Butcher”.

Train disagreement about the correct way to pronounce Petr Čech (Czech Republic’s star goalie) motivated me to study up on diacritics tonight.

Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of the term “diacritic”…

A diacritical mark or diacritic, sometimes called an accent mark, is a mark added to a letter to alter a word’s pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words. The word derives from the Greek word διακριτικός (diakratikos, distinguishing). Note that diacritic is a noun and diacritical is the corresponding adjective.

…and here are types of a diacritic listed by Wikipedia…

• dot
• ( ˙ ) anunaasika superdot
• ( . ) anusvaara subdot, used in Sanskrit and in Old Irish spelling
• ( ¸ ) cedilla or “cédille” in French
• ( ˛ ) ogonek or “Polish hook”
• ( ° ) kroužek or ring; unlike in Czech, in the Scandinavian languages this is not considered a diacritic but an integral part of the character å.
• ( ˘ ) breve (literally “short”); part of the character when used in Esperanto; also used in Romanian and Ko
• ( ˇ ) caron or háček (”little hook” in Czech). In Slovak it is called mäkčeň (”softener” or “palatalization mark”), in Slovenian strešica (”little roof”), in Croatian kvačica (”little hook”).
• ( ^ ) circumflex, part of the character when used in Esperanto, also in Slovak is used on “o” and it is called vokáň
• ( ¯ ) macron, also known as a “long mark” in English; used to mark long vowels in Maori, Hawai’ian, Japanese Rōmaji, Sanskrit transliteration and elsewhere.
• ( ¨ ) diaeresis (also dieresis) or umlaut, a diacritic in some languages (such as German), but part of the character in the Swedish and Russian languages. Also used in French and Spanish.
• accent
  • ( ` ) grave accent
  • ( ´ ) acute accent
  • ( ˝ ) double acute accent
• ( ̔ ) spiritus asper or rough breathing mark
• ( ̓ ) spiritus lenis or smooth (or soft) breathing mark
• hook (dấu hỏi), as used in Vietnamese

Marks that are sometimes diacritics, but also have other uses, are:

• ( | ) bar through the basic letter
• ( , ) comma
• ( ~ ) tilde
• ( ҃ ) titlo, used to indicate abbreviation in the early Cyrillic alphabet
• ( ‘ ) apostrophe
• ( : ) colon, used to attach native affixes (such as case markers) to foreign words and abbreviations
• ( - ) hyphen - in English, hyphens can be used to break words between syllables, to resolve ambiguities in pronunciation:
  • repair (fix) compared to re-pair (pair again).
  • Kuringgai becomes Ku-ring-gai.

As far as Petr’s last name goes, I was right. “Čech” means an inhabitant of the Czech republic, and is therefore pronounced exactly like his country’s name.

I have to say, I’m quite fascinated by this method of increasing road safety.

An amazing first person account of one developer’s passion for software.