Cthulhu Day (4th day of ICAD12)

This is the fourth day of the International Cephalopod Appreciation Days, dedicated to the mystical cephalopods. The greatest of these is, of course, Cthulhu. Here I'll collect a few nightmares of the last year (following Danna Staaf's real-world ceph example).

1. You can have your own pocket Cthulhu idol. This is practical if you are travelling in remote landlocked regions where no temple is near (via Kristian Köhntopp, https://plus.google.com/117024231055768477646/posts/PskEoDvaEH3).
2. Tentacle wedding cake - because you inadvertently said your vows over the Necronomicon
3. Why Cthulhu hates the world now more than ever
4. Cthulhu lemon (via Jane Shevtsov, https://plus.google.com/109678189789435119043/posts/e2HuhsZ1s6y)
5. Pimoa cthulhu – a spider named after Cthulhu (via The Unspeakable Vault of Doom)
6. Lovecraft's collected stories in a single huge txt file or Lovecraft's collected works in various formats (epub etc.) by Cthulhuchick
7. Edward P. Berglund collected a Chronology of the Cthulhu mythos" (via Ricarda Riechert, https://plus.google.com/116039508088265621542/posts/MSq6x9AqgGC)
8. Cthulhu christmas tree (via Marcus Hammerschmitt, https://plus.google.com/115724490218563645089/posts/RXLPJvhqvbj)
9. Evolution of man
10. Anorganic matter (Mercury thiocyanate, Hg(SCN)₂) worships Cthulhu as well (via Todd Pressler, https://plus.google.com/112756981655596411280/posts/G3tYwQ3ZQZw)
11. Everybody probably knows the Laundry books by Charles Stross. Here is a list in case somebody doesn't have them yet:
    • 1 The Atrocity Archives, ISBN: 1-930846-25-8
    • 2 The Jennifer Morrgue, ISBN: 1-930846-45-2
    • 2.5 Down on the Farm (freely available novelette)
    • 3 The Fuller Memorandum, ISBN: 1-84149-770-3
    • 3.5 Overtime (freely available novelette)
    • 4 The Apocalypse Codex, ISBN: 1937007464

Sarah Palin and Lyssenko

I just began to understand Sarah Palin, and here is how:

Under Stalin, Darwinism was outlawed (they had Lyssenkoism[0]). If the secret police found fruit flies in your house, you were shot or sent to Gulag because one can test Mendel's rules using them. Sarah Palin recently told she wants to stop fruit fly research. And her name rhymes with Stalin. And she can see Russia from her bathroom window. This is all really scary now when we know the connections.

I'm just reading "Weiße Gewänder"[3,5] by Wladimir Dmitrijewitsch Dudinzew[2,6].



The original is "Белые одежды" by Дудинцев, Владимир Дмитриевич, an english translation exists ("White Garments", ISBN 9780091736095, the author's name is spelled "Dudintsev" there).

[0] A crude version of Lamarckism kept alive by police violence (and by publishing fake experimental results or mistaking disease-caused plant deformations for species transmutations).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Dudintsev

[2] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wladimir_Dmitrijewitsch_Dudinzew

[3] Sorry, no Wikipedia page except for the russian one: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8B%D0%B5_%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%B6%D0%B4%D1%8B_(%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%BD) but google-translate gives a readable result (except for the word "shearer" which is the name "Strigalev"[4]). The Belorussians even made a movie from the book: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8B%D0%B5_%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%B6%D0%B4%D1%8B_(%D1%84%D0%B8%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BC)

[4] I think google-translate should really start parsing the text now (currently they are only doing a search-and-replace using their huge corpus of texts available in multiple languages). This gives funny results: "начатую Стригалевым" means "begun by Strigalev" (the preposition "by" is silent in russian and requires the instrumental case, ending in "ym") but comes out as "begun Strigalevym".

[5] ISBN 3.353-00508-0, Verlag "Volk und Welt" Berlin, 1990.

[6] "Dudinzew" is the ancient german transcription of Dudincev[1]).

Building pidgin on Kubuntu

Since Ubuntu (and related systems like Kubuntu) stop maintaining their own updates of pidgin shortly after the release of a new distribution, normal updating becomes impossible.  After a few hours of experimentation, I found a way to build pidgin 2.8 from source.

1. Uninstall the existing pidgin (2.7.3 on Kubuntu 10.10) and pidgin-otr
2. Get the current sources for pidgin (2.8.0), libotr (3.2.0), and the pidgin-otr plugin
3. Install the following packets:
   libglib2.0-dev intltool libgtk2.0-dev
libxml2-dev libidn libidn-dev libidn11-dev
libperl-dev libgnutls-dev gnutls-dev
tcl-dev tk-dev libdbus-1-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev
libgtkspell-dev
4. Configure pidgin 2.8.0 using the command line
   ./configure --disable-screensaver \
--disable-gstreamer --disable-vv \
--disable-meanwhile --disable-avahi \
--disable-nm
   
5. Build pidgin, install it
   (i.e. make; sudo make install)
6. Build libotr, install it
   (i.e. ./configure; make; sudo make install)
7. Build the plugin, install it
   (i.e. ./configure; make; sudo make install).
8. After completely stopping any running pidgin (including the tray icon) and restarting, the OTR should appear in the plugin list.

This method will soon stop to work (pidgin tends to require more recent versions of glib and gtk with each version, and adding them to a system without breaking the existing infrastructure is probably hard). If you need any of the features I disabled above, you are on your own. I tried to find out what "screensaver" requires, but with no result.

Test link to other post in the future

Voltcraft hybrid solar charger SL-2

Dieses Teil habe ich vor ein paar Tagen bei Conrad entdeckt.
Funktionen: Aufladen von 2 NiMH-Zellen (ein Paar liegt bei) mit Sonne oder USB-Eingang; Laden von USB-Verbrauchern am USB-Ausgang.

Maryam Namazie: The Islamic Inquisition

Her keynote address at the Dublin World Atheist Conference is here.

Islam per se is fundamentally no worse than any other religion. The tenets, dogma, and principles of all religions are equal. I don't believe in good or bad religions; in my opinion all religion is bad for you. Religion should come with a health warning like cigarettes: ‘religion kills.’

...

Religion in general and Islam in particular can only be considered liberal and reformed (at face value at least if even that is possible) when it has been pushed in a corner and out of the public space - when it has been forced to run soup kitchens rather than courts and Islamic Assemblies.

Read the whole thing at http://maryamnamazie.blogspot.com/2011/06/islamic-inquisition.html

Hände dreckig durch Waschen

Dass allerlei Dinge im Haushalt wesentlich sauberer oder schmutziger sind als gedacht, hat sicher jeder schon mal gehört (ahnungslos gelandete Aliens würden (nach Durchführung der notwendigen Analysen) aus dem Klo trinken und sich auf Zahnbürste, Tastatur oder Küchenschwamm entleeren).

Aber es geht noch besser: Flüssigseife aus dem Spender kann so versifft sein, dass die damit gewaschenen Hände hinterher verkeimter sind als vorher. Das Paper (frei verfügbar) ist hier:

http://aem.asm.org/cgi/content/full/77/9/2898

Auf dem Bild sieht das dann so aus (das ist etwas groß, aber die Copyrightbestimmungen auf
http://aem.asm.org/cgi/content-nw/full/77/9/2898/F1 verbieten das Herunterladen und Wiederveröffentlichen, deswegen muss ich auf das Original verlinken - eingebettet ist ein kleines GIF, der Link zeig auf das große JPG, beide liegen bei AEM):



Die linken Bilder sind von vor dem Waschen, die rechten danach.
Die Bilder der oberen und unteren Reihe entsprechen verschieden stark kontaminierter Flüssigseife (zu Testzwecken mit Serratia marcescens angesetzt), die verwendete Konzentration in der unteren Reihe liegt ein wenig über der, die in den Spendern in öffentlichen Toiletten gefunden wurde. S. marcescens ist übrigens der Keim, mit dem man im Mittelalter Blutwunder (blutende Hostien usw.) vollbrachte, wenn man Juden ermorden wollte. Bei immungeschwächten Personen kann diese Art Krankheiten verursachen, im Versuch diente sie einfach als Marker.

Eine Aufschlüsselung über die Kontamination der Händer auf die verwendeten Spender sieht so aus (die beiden Balken rechts sind die Kontrollgruppe, dort wurden unverseuchte Spender verwendet):


Jetzt die gute Nachricht: Ernsthaft verkeimte Waschlösung fand sich nur dort, wo nachfüllbare Spender verwendet wurden. An Spendern, in denen die gesamte Flasche und die Dosierdüse nach Verbrauch getauscht wurden, bestand das Problem nicht.

Gefunden habe ich das alles im Blog von Jonathan Eisen (das ist der, der Meerwasser sequenziert hat und dabei eventuell eine vierte Lebensform entdeckt hat).

Störmthaler See again

Calling buzz from inside maps crashes the latter, and mobile buzz doesn't allow adding pics, so I have to test blogger as well.
Edit: it says "authenthification fail". Trying again.