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It is pretty cool, in a geeky sort of way: music generated by fractally complex cellular automata, in the style of your choice—classical, dance, rock/pop, hip-hop, etcetera. Every composition is unique, and can be downloaded as a ringtone. They lay claim to the copyright on all the generated music, mind you, raising the interesting question of what counts as “fair use”, but I’ll leave that rant to Cory Doctorow. What sort of saddens me about WolframTones is that it’s yet another nail in the coffin of ten million teenage dreams of musical superstardom.

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Ten thousand years ago, people in southern China began to cultivate rice and quickly made an all-too-tempting discovery — the cereal could be fermented into alcoholic liquors. Carousing and drunkenness must have started to pose a serious threat to survival because a variant gene that protects against alcohol became almost universal among southern Chinese and spread throughout the rest of China in the wake of rice cultivation.

The variant gene rapidly degrades alcohol to a chemical that is not intoxicating but makes people flush, leaving many people of Asian descent a legacy of turning red in the face when they drink alcohol.

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I hope I live to see this girl become Queen.

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So relax, Portland.

The study was set to explore the correlation between income inequality and mortality, but the authors found little evidence of this correlation. Instead they found that racial composition plays a key role in mortality rates. “Specifically, they show that white mortality rates are higher in states and MSA’s [“metropolitan statistical area.”] where the black population is a larger fraction of the total.”

I guess Malcolm X was right — black people really don’t like white people.

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The first thing I thought when I saw these was ‘Delta Force’. So we’ll see.

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The decision to issue travel documents to the Tunisians and other Arab migrants has triggered a French warning over the 1995 treaty.

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The spark plug is the limiting factor on how “lean” – how low in fuel – the mixture can be: in order to ignite a leaner mixture the spark must be hotter, and past a certain point this destroys the electrodes.

But designers would like to make leaner-running engines as this would improve fuel economy and cut down on emissions.

Lasers would potentially offer hotter ignition, and they have other advantages too. The timing of ignition would be more precise than with sparkplugs – on the very brief timescales over which cylinder mixtures change, the exact point at which a plug will spark is quite unpredictable.

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In a statement released yesterday, Musk and SpaceX also make the bold claim that the Dragon, once fitted with modifications that the company is now developing under NASA contract, would also be able to land “almost anywhere on Earth or another planet with pinpoint accuracy, overcoming the limitation of a winged architecture that works only in Earth’s atmosphere” (our emphasis).

I’m sorry, but ‘Elon Musk’ sounds like something from Chanel.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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In the early 1900s, scientists discovered that each person belonged to one of four blood types. Now they have discovered a new way to classify humanity: by bacteria. Each human being is host to thousands of different species of microbes. Yet a group of scientists now report just three distinct ecosystems in the guts of people they have studied.

Judging by recent history, there will soon be a dating service to match people by their gut type.

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A man who was plainly an invincible ninja warrior or similar tangled with police in Maryland recently. The sword-wielding scofflaw successfully resisted ordinary meatbag cops, a police robot, gassing with a “chemical agent” and a volley of low-velocity cosh projectiles from a SWAT team before finally succumbing to the crippling electric current of a Taser stun weapon.

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Both became exhibits at the Cairo museum, but when it was broken into during the recent uprising, the bronze instrument vanished. Luckily, the silver one was away on exhibition tour.

Egyptologists were already reeling from the loss of many of the country’s antiquities, and many found the theft of one of the oldest surviving musical instruments in the world particularly poignant.

And this is why the Elgin Marbles are better off in the British Museum rather than back in Greece.

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A dating service set up by biology students in Munich, Germany is testing subjects’ DNA to find the most compatible gene pools.

Yup, those wacky Germans are at it again.

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Imagine John Boehner or Harry Reid trying that. (On second thought: Don’t.)

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Mark this day, folks, because the brainiacs have finally made a breakthrough in quantum teleportation: a team of scientists from Australia and Japan have successfully transferred a complex set of quantum data in light form

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My mother’s father came from Benton Harbor, so I’m somewhat interested in this.

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But of course ‘Star Wars’ has never worked, doesn’t work, and can never work. Just ask the New York Times.

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Researchers from Australia and Japan have successfully teleported wave packets of light, potentially revolutionising quantum communications and computing.

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I’m sure Obama’s ahead of the curve on this one.

The surprising discovery of a fossil of a sharp-toothed beast that lurked in what is now the western U.S. more than 200 million years ago is filling a gap in dinosaur evolution.

The short snout and slanting front teeth of the find _ Daemonosaurus chauliodus _ had never before been seen in a Triassic era dinosaur, said Hans-Dieter Sues of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Sues and colleagues report the discovery in Wednesday’s edition of the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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I know exactly how they feel.

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Bubble sort me, baby.

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Although ‘film’ is something of a misnomer.

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The cast of Red Dwarf are poised to reunite for a new series of the cult TV sci-fi series, twelve years after the spacecraft finally ran out of fuel on the BBC.

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More than one in four European office workers believe that the quickest way to get a replacement phone or laptop is to destroy the one provided to them by their employer, according to a new study by online-backup provider, Mozy.

“Shockingly, over a quarter of the office workers surveyed feel that the quickest and most efficient method of replacing outdated technology, such as laptops and mobile phones, is to deliberately destroy or irreparably damage them,” concludes the study, which surveyed 600 IT managers and 3,000 employees across the UK, France, and Germany.

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Jordan on Tuesday launched the world’s largest online antiquities database, which details every archaeological site in the country and aims to help preserve its treasures. Its creators said the Web platform could be a model for Iraq, where looters have plundered its ancient heritage.

Experts said the Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities is the first such countrywide system. The site uses Geographic Information System, similar to Google Earth, to map 11,000 registered sites in the country _ and a click on each reveals inventories of what they contain and reports on their conditions.

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I first show that respondents who express traditionally racist views (on segregation, interracial marriage, and inborn racial abilities) tend to support greater income redistribution. Traditional racists also tend to oppose free-market capitalism and its consequences, wanting the government to guarantee jobs for everyone and fix prices, wages, and profits. Next, I report a similar pattern for those who express intolerance for unpopular groups on the fifteen Stouffer tolerance questions (regarding racists, homosexuals, communists, extreme militarists, and atheists). Those who express less tolerance for unpopular groups tend to favor income redistribution and oppose capitalism.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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The success of the Iron Dome missile defense system so far – nine interceptions including the system’s first one on Thursday night – has surprised even the air defense troops who have been training to operate the device for several months. Two batteries have been deployed thus far, one north of Be’er Sheva two weeks ago and one near Ashkelon last week.

While most of the media attention has been given to the visible interceptions made over Gaza, the system actually clicks into action automatically when any projectile is launched from Gaza toward Israel. The commanders of the Iron Dome batteries were therefore faced with making dozens of real-time decisions on whether or not to fire an intercepting missile.

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Back in 2005, we reported on a little something called the Prism 200, which allowed its holder to essentially see what folks were doing on the other side of a wall. Since then, we’ve seen plenty of devices that boast the same claims, but it wasn’t until recently that the makers of the Prism 200 created a device that can actually see inside those walls. Looking something akin to an old school punch clock, Cambridge Consultants’ Sprint in-wall radar imaging system provides 3D renderings of items embedded in walls, floors, and even ceilings. Where as existing X-ray systems require access to both sides of a wall, Sprint’s radar setup allows users to see what’s going on inside without dual access.

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Every cloud has a silver lining.

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No doubt regular readers will recall the US military’s cunning plan to develop unmanned submarine-hunting robotic frigates – warships which would prowl the oceans like automated Mary Celestes, remorselessly tracking enemy submarines regardless of how their pale, sweaty, malodorous captains might twist and turn.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it has been decided that the best way to hammer out a set of tactics for ACTUVs is to develop a game-style simulation pitting ACTUV against submarine and get people to play it – so crowdsourcing the methods and tactical principles that will then be coded into the robo-frigates’ AIs.

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Funny thing how we keep discovering more oil and gas. But of course we’re running out and need to conserve and find alternatives.

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Here’s a cause we can ALL get behind.

1. Blue makes for a great icon color and everyone else uses it — be the exception, not the rule.
2. Make the name of your app/service something that a normal person can pronounce, on first try, without help.
3. Spell the name like a normal person. Twitter works because it makes logical sense, spelled as it sounds. Tumblr is hard to explain to a non-tech user — tell your Mom to go to Tumblr.com and see what she types in. I don’t want to remember which consonant you doubled or which vowel you dropped. Things like Digg work because you can tell people: “it has a double g” — stray from the basics too far and your service/app will confuse people.

Etc.

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The “conservative” Washington Times expands on the Australian survey which evaluates the states of the U.S. by how peaceful, i.e., non-violent, they are, but, just like yesterday’s Boston Globe, makes not the slightest reference to the fact that the most peaceful states are, ahem, the whitest states, and that the least peaceful states are those with very high black and Hispanic populations. The Times avers that being a peaceful state is a highly valuable achievement worth emulating and pursuing (“Those who seek the proverbial peaceful life should head to Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont,” the article tells us), but declines to mention the most salient factor in that peacefulness–or any factor.

The truth that dare not say its name.

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For years, Angray Kang at Westminster University and colleagues have been testing whether they could genetically tweak a fungus to kill the malaria parasite carried by mosquitoes.

Now they’ve found that in lab experiments, mosquitoes exposed to the fungus show a sharp drop in levels of the parasite. If it works that way in the wild, that should make it harder for the disease to infect people.

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For many mayors across the country, including New York City’s Michael Bloomberg, the recently announced results of the 2010 census were a downer. In a host of cities, the population turned out to be substantially lower than the U.S. Census Bureau had estimated for 2010—in New York’s case, by some 250,000 people. Bloomberg immediately called the decade’s meager 2.1 percent growth, less than one-quarter the national average, an “undercount.” Senator Charles Schumer blamed extraterrestrials, accusing the Census Bureau of “living on another planet.” The truth, though, is that the census is very much of this world. It just isn’t the world that mayors, the media, and most urban planners want to see.

I love that name, ‘urban planners’. What a marvelous reflection of the innate statism of those who are in control of city life these days! I suppose it must be a lot like ‘cat wrangler’ — lots of failure, but hey, you still get paid.

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Michael Arrington loves stirring the pot, but here he may have a legitimate long spoon.

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In other words, the Koran. But you knew that.

Evidently Lindsay Graham’s RINOness didn’t sit well with a young woman in Colorado, who did a couple of YouTube videos expressing her displeasure.

The second video shows her tearing out pages — bookmarked with strips of bacon — from the Koran, and burning them one by one.

Now THAT is hard core.

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We have the technology.

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The traditional, thin plastic bag, though increasingly demonized and taxed, has better environmental performance and is likely to be considerably safer for human health than alternatives.

Two recent studies might end the great grocery bag debate. The debates over which type of grocery bag is best break down into two issues: which are better for the environment, and which are better for your health.

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Most archeologists agree that the use of fire is tied to colonization outside Africa, especially in Europe where temperatures fall below freezing, wrote Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University in the Netherlands and Paola Villa of the University of Colorado.

Yet, while there is evidence of early humans living in Europe as much as a million years ago, the researchers found no clear traces of regular use of fire before about 400,000 years ago.

After that, Neanderthals and modern humans living in Europe regularly used fire for warmth, cooking and light, they found.

Their results raise the question of how early humans survived cold climates without fire. The researchers suggest a highly active lifestyle and a high-protein diet may have helped them adapt to the cold, adding that the consumption of raw meat and seafood by hunter-gatherers is well documented.

Hey, if it were easy, anybody could do it.

A dog with a prosthetic foot.

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To become an exorcist you must be a Roman Catholic priest and have permission from your bishop to join the International Association of Exorcists.

No doubt Federal tuition assistance programs and the usual ‘diversity’ affirmative action regulations apply, so don’t get discouraged if you aren’t a priest or a Roman Catholic.

(‘International Association of Exorcists’ looks funny without ‘AFL-CIO’ after it, somehow.)

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So all you ‘activists’ can STFU. (Yeah, I’m lookin’ at *you*, Michelle.)

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A genomic survey of the microbial life in an Antarctic lake has revealed a new virophage — a virus that attacks viruses. The discovery suggests that these life forms are more common, and have a larger role in the environment, than was once thought.

Let’s watch the race to patent it.

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Cademartiri and his fellow boffins at Harvard uni have tested their flame-zapping gizmo in the lab, using a 600-watt amplifier hooked up to a “wand-like probe”. This setup was apparently able to snuff out test flames “more than a foot high”. The team think that it should be possible to get similar effects with a less power-hungry system using 60W or less, raising the possibility of portable equipment.

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Scientists have found the strongest evidence yet that a puzzling gap in the electronic structures of some high-temperature superconductors could indicate a new phase of matter. Understanding this “pseudogap” has been a 20-year quest for researchers who are trying to control and improve these breakthrough materials, with the ultimate goal of finding superconductors that operate at room temperature.

“Our findings point to management and control of this other phase as the correct path toward optimizing these novel superconductors for energy applications, as well as searching for new superconductors,” said Zhi-Xun Shen of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science (SIMES), a joint institute of the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University.

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It’s basically a version of graphene constructed out of silicon, which doesn’t naturally align itself into the same eminently useful honeycomb shape — but, given a little prod here and a layer of silver or ceramic compound there, can do much the same thing, and with better computing compatibility.

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Better living through chemistry. Such people make our lives better but don’t get the attention that accrues to those who make our lives worse.

May his memory be eternal.