Pinging stuff I care about.
I came across an article about the newest emacs (Version 22) on reddit or digg or something, and decided to give it a spin on my Ubuntu machine. There’s an article about how to do it. (The comment makes the good point that you ought to give it image support too if you care about good looks…) Followed the directions and you can see the improvement I got here…
The science behind Meyers-Briggs and Kiersey personality/temperament stuff is sketchy. Some of it is evidence-supported, some not particularly. But there is some well-tested personality psychology. The Big Five personality traits (aka OCEAN or CANOE traits) have been shown to be a group of independent axes along which people vary, and people tend to be pretty stable as to where they are on those axes.
They are:
There’s a free online test where you can get a sketch of yourself along those lines; here’s how I came out…
I’m a O84-C2-E12-A50-N76 Big Five
Not as catchy as “INFP” is it?
Colloquial translation: “I am a twitchy slacker recluse, but inquisitive/creative.”
SignOnSanDiego.com > News > North County — Swimming with ‘red demon’:
Cassell researched Humboldt squid for two years before he began diving with them. Humboldts, named for a current in the eastern Pacific, have a sharp beak, eight muscular arms and two retractable feeding tentacles that they use to attack their prey with more than 40,000 needle-sharp teeth at once.
“They shred you when they grab you,†Cassell said. “The fishermen in Mexico would rather fall into the water with a feeding frenzy of sharks than Humboldt squid.â€
Cassell made his first dive with a group of Humboldts that were feeding off Baja California. The squid, which often grow to be 6 feet or longer, immediately attacked, Cassell said, pulling his right shoulder out of its socket, yanking him down so fast his right eardrum ruptured and cutting him so badly his wet suit was destroyed….
Humboldts are the most alien-like creatures on the planet, Cassell said, because they have three hearts, blue blood that is copper-based, the ability to swim at about 24 mph and excellent problem-solving skills. They live in water as deep as 3,000 feet, are as smart as dogs and are able to communicate with one another by changing their skin color from white to various shades of red, he said.
Great googly-moogly!
Surgeon General Sees 4-Year Term as Compromised – New York Times:
Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel Tuesday that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.
The administration, Dr. Carmona said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues. Top officials delayed for years and tried to “water down†a landmark report on secondhand smoke, he said. Released last year, the report concluded that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm.
Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings.
Wait, what was that?
Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches.
No, that can’t be. That’s something that an insecure rock star’s publicist would insist on from a morning radio DJ interview, not something that the President of the United States would require from the person he had appointed as a watchdog over the public health of the people of the United States of America. Let me read that again.
Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches.
I… Wow. Just… Wow.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | ‘No Sun link’ to climate change:
A new scientific study concludes that changes in the Sun’s output cannot be causing modern-day climate change.
It shows that for the last 20 years, the Sun’s output has declined, yet temperatures on Earth have risen.
It also shows that modern temperatures are not determined by the Sun’s effect on cosmic rays, as has been claimed.
Writing in the Royal Society’s journal Proceedings A, the researchers say cosmic rays may have affected climate in the past, but not the present.
“This should settle the debate,” said Mike Lockwood, from the UK’s Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, who carried out the new analysis together with Claus Froehlich from the World Radiation Center in Switzerland.
“This paper re-enforces the fact that the warming in the last 20 to 40 years can’t have been caused by solar activity”
Dr Piers ForsterDr Lockwood initiated the study partially in response to the TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast on Britain’s Channel Four earlier this year, which featured the cosmic ray hypothesis.
“All the graphs they showed stopped in about 1980, and I knew why, because things diverged after that,” he told the BBC News website.
“You can’t just ignore bits of data that you don’t like,” he said.
Maybe you can’t, but Republican-Americans can!