Man who helped unlock DNA dies
The BBC obituary has further details on his life, including this great snippet:
He dabbled in science from an early age, once attempting, unsuccessfully, whilst in primary school, to make artificial silk. The process involved putting explosive material into bottles and blowing them up electrically.
That sounds like a really fun/cool thing to try, even if it didn’t work.
One of the “In the News” names is… “Senator John”.
I guess it’s twice as common as either “Senator John Kerry” or “Senator John Edwards”.
It’s been announced by the X Prize Foundation that the Scaled Composites group (Paul Allen & Burt Rutan) have officially given their 60 day notice and scheduled their first X Prize flight for September 29.
In addition, the Canadian da Vinci team plan to roll out their Wild Fire balloon-launched spacecraft in Toronto on August 5, en route to making their own prize flight attempts.
I’m really excited to see multiple teams going forward and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the Sept 29 flight.
Emacs editing keys work in a lot of places in Cocoa apps. Try them in Safari TEXTAREA boxes, or iChat’s text entry area! This is a great feature for me, since those keys are practically hard-wired in my brain. Note that Ctrl-K and Ctrl-Y will in fact Do The Right Thing, and don’t affect the clipboard (but the “kill ring” isn’t implemented, and the “kill buffer” only works within one app).
Somewhere along the way, iTunes got the ability to use Playlist is/is not X as a Smart Playlist criterion, and I didn’t know this until recently. This lets you get Boolean nesting, if you can put up with the intermediate playlists. Now I have a playlist of all the 4-star songs not played in 70 days and all the 5-star songs not played in 14 days, shuffled together. Yay!
Lukas also pointed out that you can use this feature to get a playlist of all the unchecked songs. First, make a playlist of all the songs added after 1901, “limit to checked songs”; then make another playlist, “Playlist is not” the first playlist.
No real effects in this part of Cambridge as yet. There will be no parking on one side of the street starting tomorrow, but if you just think of it as a week of street cleaning it doesn’t sound so bad.
I just hope we don’t have to listen to the “no pahking on the even side of the street, you will be TAGGED and TOWED” recording every day this week. Gaah!
Another week, another SGS. Kevin and I played a game of Awful Green Things (TSR edition) to start while waiting for other folks to show up. Even with a 5-dice-to-kill comm beamer, I couldn’t get enough other weapons together to make a difference…and the robot was taken out in turn 2. Ouch.
After that, we had enough folks together for a four-player Attika. Loads of fun again; I was able to pull off a win through sneaking within 5 spaces of the other shrine, then building three streets, burning an amphora to build the fourth, collecting a replacement amphora, and then building another building to close the gap.
We then played Magic using some of Carl’s pre-built decks in a two-against-two configuration, with Carl and I against Kevin and Richard. I wound up drawing far too few creatures and so we lost fairly quickly as the tide went against us.
Finally, the nightcap was the traditional Can’t Stop, which was close and was finally won by Richard (IIRC). Then home to crash.
My iTunes Music Library has just passed 21 days of total music (and the stuff I load on the iPod is over 20 days). I’m sure this is what many people would still consider a small collection, but…sheesh…three weeks, 24/7, with the only repeats being those songs I haven’t weeded out multiple copies of (or have covers, live/unplugged versions, etc)? Wow. That’s what ripping a CD collection going back to the mid-1980s will do, I guess.
Almost two weeks of this is just my 4- and 5-star stuff; I don’t tend to keep 2-star songs in the library, and 3-stars are usually tracks I like as part of an album but don’t want to come up in the usual shuffle play.
Between the heat, the humidity, the lines, and the obligatory overly-amplified music, by the time I finished with the Taste of Cambridge I had no energy left for hauling across town to the blog meetup. Maybe next month. Instead, I headed home and cooled off in the breeze from the air conditioner.
(I think the traditional September date for ToC is better for being outside in. Chalk it up as yet another way that the DNC has made life around here more irritating.)
There was plenty of good stuff to eat, and in small enough amounts that I didn’t feel stuffed. I definitely want to check out Brother Jimmy’s BBQ in Harvard Square some time soon; they had great Carolina-style pulled pork. Finale also had a wonderful dark chocolate dessert.
Duplication was the order of the day, though. I think there were four or five Mexican options, and it seemed like many of the high-end dinner places were serving some kind of ceviche. A bit more variety wouldn’t have hurt.
So a Boston hotel now has a copy of Britney Spears’s bedroom, designed by her mother, that can be booked for a mere $349 a night ($259 in the off-season, which by the article apparently means “winter”)–Britney not included.
The mini-bar is stocked with some of Brit’s favorite treats — Cheetos, strawberry Pop Tarts, Starburst, Red Bull, Pepsi and orange juice. Her CDs and a DVD of her movie “Crossroads” are also on hand.
I don’t think I want to know what their target market is. I really don’t. Not even with 10% of the room charge donated to the Britney Spears Foundation, which “helps sick children and funds a performing arts camp in Louisiana” according to the AP article.
If it were the RNC coming to town instead of the DNC, would Bob Dole get that room?
As suggested by Sooz’s comment, I’m going to split the difference and go to both events.
Is anyone else going to the Taste of Cambridge and want to get together there? I’ll probably get there around 1700-1730, and stay until at least 1800-1830. Bonus points if you’re also going to the Boston Blog Meetup of course.
