Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, October 11, 2002

Sleeping is good -- Comment()
It is time to go to try to get some sleep. Our children are sleeping, both having the flu. I hope this night is not as bad as the last one, when we had to carry our younger daughter around the house to get her to sleep.

Tomorrow the situation will be much clearer, and perhaps the reason for the explosion will be already know. Now the media sources keep changing the facts, and nothing seems to be fixed. But several dozen people were injured, a few were dead, this seems certain.

-- Comment()
If you can read Finnish, the best way to keep track of the Myyrmanni explosion is to visit YLE Teksti-tv, page 114.

Update to the explosion -- Comment()
According to the latest news, there were 5 dead and 55 injured (10 seriously). To make matters worse, 10 of the injured were children. Thus, what happened at the Myyrmanni shopping mall was serious. It is not yet known if this was an accident, or a deliberate bombing. Police is investigating the matter.

-- Comment()
Scientists unveil mummified dinosaur find: "Scientists have unveiled the mummified remains of a 77 million-year-old dinosaur at a paleontologists' convention in the US." [Google Technology News]

-- Comment()
Three Win Nobel for Work on Suicidal Cells: "An American and two Britons won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine yesterday for their discoveries of how healthy cells are instructed to kill themselves." [Google Technology News]

The time of the explosion -- Comment()
The time of the explosion at the Myyrmanni shopping mall has been set at 19:36 this evening. The time on my pharmacy receipt is 19:39, so the clock of the cash register must have been a few minutes off.

I have phoned my father, and tried to phone my sister about the explosion. My wife phoned her sister, and her parents phoned us. When something like this happens we need to affirm the connections to our closest people.

I'm now waiting for the next additional news broadcast on tv. It starts just about now. I have been browsing through the weblog RSS feeds with the Radio news aggregator, but haven't been able to focus on the postings.

Explosions and world peace -- Comment()
Which is more important, the explosion which almost touched me, or the following news item which affects the world peace?

As Jimmy Carter wins Nobel Peace Prize, Bush criticized about Iraq: "Former President Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his "untiring effort" to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts and to advance democracy and human rights." [Google World News]

Lucky escape -- Comment()
It seems that I and my daughter were lucky today. Earlier in the afternoon I was inside the Myyrmanni shopping mall buying batteries for our thermometer. When the explosion occurred in the mall I was outside, about 30 meters away from my car.

It seems that due to the explosion the glass room the of shopping mall fell down, which killed five and injured 30 people. It took about two hour for all the casualties to get medical attention. According to the tv news many of the injured were treated at the same place where I was half an hour earlier to get a prescription of antibiotics for my daughter.

I made the correct decision of loading my sick daughter to the car and making room in the parking lot. Some cars did the opposite and generated a small traffic jam in the parking lot.

Update on explosion at Myyrmanni -- Comment()
There was updated information about the explosion at the Myyrmanni shopping mall here in Vantaa, Finland. There are five dead, 10 seriously injured, and 30 injured in all. About 20 ambulances are outside the shopping mall, and all the big hospitals in the Helsinki region are on great emergency status.

Here is an image from "text-tv" for those who can read Finnish:

Random happenings -- Comment()
Some time ago I wrote about random acts. After the explosion for a while I was thinking about terrorists or criminals, but now it seems that the explosion at Myyrmanni was due to an accident. But I would never have guessed that this kind of high-profile situation would happen to me.

The strangest thing is that my daughter fell asleep at the pharmacy and slept through the explosion. She didn't wake up even when I moved her to the car from the baby carriage.

-- Comment()
I was outside the Myyrmanni shopping mall this evening because my younger daughter was sick. I went with her to see a doctor at about 17:30. We had to wait over one and half hours to have her examined. She has an infection in her ears, and is now on antibiotics and painkillers.

Explosion at Myyrmanni -- Comment()
There is a lot of updated information about the explosion at the Myyrmanni shopping mall in the tv news broadcasts here in Finland. The current theory is that the explosion was due to some gas bottles either leaking or exploding. Part of the roof has collapsed, and at least four people are dead, several injured.

Info about the explosion at Vantaa, Finland -- Comment()
Here is an image from the "text-tv" of Finnish broadcasting company for those of you who know Finnish:

I was bombed this evening -- Comment()
Less than one hour ago I was outside the Myyrmanni shopping mall here in the city of Vantaa, Finland. There was a loud sound, like an underground explosion, and the fire alarm bells started to ring. People ran out of the building in panic, and some people yelled for help.

I had just came out from the Myyrmanni pharmacy, and my receipt is time-stamped at 19:39. So, the bombing happened at about 19.42. My youngest daughter had been prescribed antibiotics (for her ears).

I drove away from the parking lot just as the first ambulance arrived. Now in the news they say that four people are dead and several injured. First they suspected a bomb, but now the suspicion is on a gas explosion. It is said that the roof of the building has partly collapsed.

Quick review of Mathematica 4.2 -- Comment()
I updated my quick review of Mathematica 4.2 with some additional material. This program is nice, but the price is high.

-- Comment()
Announcement of Nobel Peace Prize: "Text of Friday's announcement by the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarding the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize to former US President Jimmy Carter." [Google World News]

iPod instead of iBook -- Comment()
I ordered the 20 GB iPod mp3 player today. I have been thinking about this for some time, and finally decided to take the plunge. At the same time I used up the rebate coupon Apple sent to .Mac early adopters.

I believe this is a good buy. Now I can listen to my cd collection even when not having the iBook with me. This model of the iPod was reviewed in the recent issue of MacWorld, and got 4.5 stars.

Creative commons -- Comment()
Copyright and the Commons: "There's the old saying that good artists copy and great artists steal, and that's not based on outright theft, but the acknowledgement that we are all influenced by others' work, and things like hip hop music and photoshop collages point out how great new art can be created when combining other works into new works." [Daypop Top 40]

-- Comment()
Robot hand and vision snatches objects from the air: "This robot hand, coupled with a computer-vision system, is freaking eerie. Click through for a bunch of MPEG clips of the robot's master taunting the hand by waving objects before it, while it, and its vision-mount, chase them, eventually reaching out and snatching them out of the air. The hand-shaking demo is killer." [Boing Boing Blog]

-- Comment()
Hungarian Novelist Wins Nobel Prize in Literature: "Imre Kertesz, a Hungarian novelist and Holocaust survivor with a small but devoted readership in Europe, won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature" [Google World News]

-- Comment()
Viruses infect 80pc of China's computers: "Viruses have infected at least 80 per cent of China's computers, the official China Daily newspaper said on Thursday, highlighting the vulnerability of one of the world's biggest PC and Internet markets." See also Reuters: 80% of Chinese Computers Virus Infected and Viruses find easy pickings in China. [Google Technology News]

-- Comment()
Deep Fritz Forces Draw with Kramnik: "Deep Fritz kept its chances alive by forcing a tough draw with world champion Vladimir Kramnik in the crucial game four of the eight-match "Brains in Bahrain" series on Thursday." [Google Technology News]

-- Comment()
David Weinberger on Microsoft's Palladium digital right managmeent system: "Ultimately, I think you have to ask what world will be better, one with enforceable usage rights that drive out the leeway and hard-codify fair use, or one in which there's reasonable (and even unreasonable) leeway where some genuine piracy happens, a lot of genuine cash-for-use happens, and a whole bunch in between goes on at every level of society." [Werblog]

-- Comment()
Apple Pitches Mac OS X To Linux Fans: "At this year's Expo the business giants and Linux geeks were joined for the first time by consumer-friendly Apple, which is pitching its Mac OS X operating system as the ultimate workstation environment for developers, researchers and system administrators." (ZDNet UK via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

-- Comment()
Googling Your Email: "Any data that's public, and that Google can see, is hardly worth storing and organizing. We simply search for what we need, when we need it: just-in-time information management. But since we don't admit Google to our private data stores -- Intranets [1] and mailboxes, for example -- we're still like the shoemaker's barefoot children. Most of us can find all sorts of obscure things more easily than we can find the file that Tom sent Leslie last week." [( blogdex : recent )]

-- Comment()
Microsoft Warns on E-Mail Security: "Microsoft Corporation disclosed a security flaw Thursday of "critical" severity in its Outlook Express e-mail programs. By The Associated Press." [Headlines From The NY Times]

-- Comment()
Understanding the Privacy Space: "This paper reports on an ongoing research project focusing on privacy tools, and services available on the Internet. A detailed examination of 133 different privacy-related software tools and services rendered a list of 1,241 features relating to privacy." [Privacy Digest]

-- Comment()
Ars Technica writes about IBM's upcoming desktop Power4 derivative and quotes Peter Glaskowsky, the EIC of The Microprocessor Report:

Unlike IBM's original Power4, the device to be described next week will use one, not two, internal processor core and will support extensions that make the Power4 compatible with the PowerPC architecture. "Because it supports a full 32-bit environment, this chip should be able to boot the Mac OS just fine," Glaskowsky said... "Apple would have to be crazy not to use this part," said Glaskowsky. "Its performance will be in the upper reaches of any CPU. I can't comment on its speeds, but they are good numbers. Apple would be able to produce for the first time machines that not only have great performance but support full 64-bit addressing.

-- Comment()
Gene therapy for Parkinson's shows promise in rats: "A new gene therapy tactic appears to protect the brain cells damaged in Parkinson's disease when given to rats with a Parkinson-like condition, according to researchers." [Reuters Health eLine]

-- Comment()
...radio free beowulf points to Fortune.com:

Because media companies see intellectual property as their only asset, they're willing to risk totally alienating their entire customer base in order to protect that asset. ... instead the companies should learn to view their the customers themselves as the asset and figure out ways to partner with them, or treat them as what he calls "co-participants, rather than an inert audience that merely consumes media".

Knowledge processing in weblogs -- Comment()
Seb's Open Research points to Re-Grouping of Traditional Teaching and Support Roles:

Our article examines how Weblogs offer a way to initially cloister, organize, assess and criticize, and then re-distribute knowledge and information for the purpose of convening a community that will then function to amass knowledge, each member sharing, collaborating, redistributing and redefining themselves in the act of knowledge production. Members of weblog communities enter into apprenticeships with one another that constantly enhance intelligence in knowledge spaces because the guiding principle is that we dont know everything so we are looking to "the other" to complete us, and therefore complete the community.

-- Comment()
Quantum Transistor May Put a New Spin on Spintronics: "The ubiquitous transistor may go from common to quantum sooner than later if physicists in China and Canada succeed with a design that puts a whole new spin on spintronics -- the burgeoning application of an electron's spin to chips, circuits and, eventually, a revolutionary line of consumer electronics." [osOpinion]

-- Comment()
Supersize IT: From Megabytes to Petabytes: "A deluge of digital data in life sciences and astronomy has scientists at Johns Hopkins University and Microsoft concluding that the titan of supersized data storage, the petabyte, may be as commonplace as the megabyte in less than a decade." [osOpinion]

-- Comment()
Nuclear Research Supercomputer 'Q' To Get Bigger, Faster: "A newly constructed simulation facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is putting $93 million and 30 teraOps [^]- 30 trillion floating point operations per second [^]- to work for nuclear and other research. The Nicholas C. Metropolis Center for Modeling and Simulation houses "Q," one of the world's largest and fastest supercomputers." [osOpinion]

-- Comment()
'Cell' Supercomputing Chip Closer to Completion: "The initial design phase for IBM's mysterious new chip architecture, known as Cell, has ended and is now in the hands of engineers, company officials said. A supercomputer on a chip, Cell is a joint project of IBM, Toshiba and Sony. It is expected to be more than 100 times faster than a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4 chip." [osOpinion]

-- Comment()
Creating the Poor Man's Supercomputer: "It costs less to make a cluster computer out of a group of personal computers or workstations than to buy a supercomputer to perform enormous mathematical tasks. But, getting all those machines to talk to each other presents challenges of its own." [osOpinion]

-- Comment()
Researchers Claim New Chip Technology Beats Moore's Law: "A Princeton University researcher and his team have claimed a new method can increase the density of transistors on silicon chips 100-fold while decreasing the cost of the production process. The new technology is called 'laser assisted direct input.'" [osOpinion]