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Wednesday, May 26, 2004 |
Something to look forward to. Washington Post: The White House put government agencies on notice this month that if President Bush is reelected, his budget for 2006 may include spending cuts for virtually all agencies in charge of domestic programs, including education, homeland security and... [The Stakeholder]
10:01:20 PM Permalink
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Swirls on Saturn.
To celebrate Cassini's arrival at Saturn, the imaging team is going to
be releasing a new photograph every day detailing some different aspect
of the planet and its moons until the spacecraft enters the system in
July. The latest photograph was taken on May 10, and is of swirling
bands of turbulent clouds in Saturn's atmosphere. It was taken when
Cassini was only 27.2 million km (16.9 million miles) away from the
planet. [Universe Today]
Fantastic, some wondrous images. The
next few months are going to be pretty exciting with these images
coming back from Saturn. Alas, I couldn't find an URL that would always
give me the latest image from Saturn. Hope one turns up.
3:04:24 PM Permalink
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The Wilder Side of Sex
Consider the humble two-banded
anemonefish (Amphiprion bicinctus) nestled like a sultan upon a bed of
pink-tipped sea anemone tentacles. Here in the shallows of the Red Sea,
this small, orange-and-white fish lives in cozy symbiosis with its
flower-like protector, rarely ever venturing farther than a tentacle’s
reach from home. When our male anemonefish chances upon another male of
the species, what happens? Does he puff himself up, large and
frightening, challenging the interloper to a battle royale? Not at all.
Mr. Amphiprion starts to transform into a Ms. and invites the other
fish to mate. Nobody gets hurt and in time both get to loft their genes
into the next generation. Perched upon their anemone, the two will live
in prim monogamy until death do them part. At which time, the survivor
may once again shift gender to secure a mate.
But of course, this isn't possible. According to those who talk to God,
he created sex and marriage, and that's that. Animals can't
change sex, people can have sex only with those of the other gender.
But of course, the dirty word "evolution" appears here, and there's no
mention of the Bible, so this is all probably made up by scientists
anyway.
8:58:04 AM Permalink
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Update: SQL4X Manager J 2.8.
The graphical database manager adds an improved interface, support for
Oracle 10g, enhanced support for DB2, and other changes. [MacInTouch]
This isn't a bad SQL tool, at least
as good as Navicat, but a lot less expensive. A big shortcoming, as it
is with most SQL utilities I've looked at is the tool for creating and
running queries. This one won't let you select a chunk of a query and
run just that selected portion. It also does a very bad job of
presenting the results; essentially all it seems to do is give you the
same results as you get from running the mysql command-line client:
results aren't presented in resizable rows, instead bars are used to
separate columns. This makes it hard to really look at the values. I
also don't see a way to dump results to a delimited file. On the other
hand, the DBA functions are fairly nice. So it's close, but
nothing I've seen yet is as good as SQLyog on Windows.
8:15:06 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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