Early life resembles 5th form Computer Studies project.
Early life resembles 5th form Computer Studies project. Complexity formed through simple fractal patterns seen in Ediacaran period fossils.
Rob Brennan
16 July 2004
12 July 2004
16 March 2004
Open the door, get on the floor
Open the door, get on the floor
Tom’s post reminded me of another childhood notion that was altered by a shift in scientific thinking.
In the picture books of our youth, yer bipedal dinosaur varieties walked upright with their tails dragging along the ground. Films helped to cement the image, in the public’s mind, of awkward lumbering beasts that could easily be outrun by a nippy, historically out-of-place caveman.
Not for the first time, paleontologists revised their ideas. Along came the 90s and Tyrannosaurus had been down the gym. He now bent forward and held his tail off the ground. Nu-T-Rex looked agile and capable of getting a wriggle on (although it’s still unlikely one could outpace Jeff Goldblum in a jeep). The quadrupeds were given a make-over as well and even completely fictional Saurians were buffed up.
Of course, this could all have been a bit of flim-flammery, on the part of Spielberg, to get a decent car-chase into his dinosaur film. Come to think of it, I’d never heard of velociraptors before 1992.
16 February 2004
Good question, Riley.
Good question, Riley. The answer is: 10 inch, solid aluminium costing $5000 each. Bling! etc
21 October 2003
This used to be easy.
This used to be easy. The prosecution points out that the gun belongs to the accused, the defence points out that the fingerprints are someone else’s, the jury nods to one another, the accused goes free.
In the case of The Port of Houston vs. Aaron Caffrey, the gun belonged to Caffrey, so his defence was, naturally, that someone else had used it without his knowledge. The prosecution explained that whoever had used it would have left fingerprints and these could not be found. The defence countered that the perpetrators could have wiped their prints immediately after use, and anyway, the investigators could never have checked every part of the gun. The jury believed Caffrey’s explanation. The only problem was that, at the outset, none of them knew how the gun worked, how it was used or how someone else could have picked it up and fired it from another part of the World.
The case highlights the continued problems of trying computer-based crimes before non-technically literate juries. Caffrey was acquitted, not because someone else had fired the gun, but on the possibility that somebody could have done so without leaving a trace of evidence. A more clued-in jury may have changed the outcome of the case but as it was, the explanations of logfiles and fractured hard disk blocks and subsequent counter-arguments proved baffling. Reasonable doubt came all too easily for the jurors, making it almost impossible for prosecutors to refute the Trojan Horse defence in future cases.
6 October 2003
Hey you, SUV driver!
Hey you, SUV driver! Fed up with being persecuted because your gas-gobbling family tank is causing ice caps to melt every time you drive the kids to school? Maybe you’re a frequent flyer worried about the millions of tonnes of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by increasingly common air travel? Do you feel a twinge of guilt every time you leave a light on or boil a full kettle to make one cup of tea? Well stop worrying and start driving – while you still can.
According to a new study by the IPCC, the much feared climate change through global warming will never come about simply because there isn’t enough oil to burn. Of course, this will mean goodbye cars, planes, plastic etc. But until then, you can drive your Hummer H2 safe in the knowledge that it’ll be useless heap of scrap before it raises the sea level.
Oh and don’t worry about the energy shortfall. There’s still plenty of coal.
