mardi 20 avril 2004

For a sweet from a stranger Would you swap your computer password for a bar of chocolate? If you're not quite that insane, then join fewer than 30 percent of people questioned by street poll at a London tube station. In a second survey, the multinational RSA Security discovered that "79% of people unwittingly gave away information that could be used to steal their identity when questioned." The report's at BBC Tech. Thanks to Dana (Note-It Posts). I was inclined to pass the morsel on to 'morons.org', but they've made a meal of it already. 9:07:13 PM  link   your views? [] Backdating the creativity boom In job calls to friends working in Africa, I often waste a moment or two of Factory 'phone time by asking about the weather, especially during the long months it's horrible in Paris. I like being able to shut my eyes for an instant to imagine the T-shirt and shorts days the Apprentice Dragon was hoping -- in vain, I fear -- to find this week in Italy. Lara Pawson has headed up from Abidjan on Ivory Coast's Atlantic shore into Mali, which lies next door to Niger, the place Dubya's regime showed a sudden interest in when it came to supposed WMDs and uranium. Her first impressions have that agreeable freshness you sometimes find in reports before journalists settle in and cease to tell us about the environment: "The other great bonus that Mali has over her southern neighbour, is the light breeze which blows over your body, leaving your skin tingling. But the breeze comes at a price. With the wind comes red dust - billions and billions of particles of red earth coat the entire city. You could clean your home 100 times, and you would never wipe away all the red dust. The dust is felt on your hands, in your hair, and in your throat - my voice has dropped an octave, I am sure, since arriving in Bamako." Lara wrote 'Sipping Saddam's tea' for the Beeb. It's autumn now far to the south of Lara, where the 'Cape Argus' has spun the discovery in a South African coastal cave of ancient shell beads, "accurately dated to 75 000 years ago," into the eye-catching claim that 'Africa Was 30 000 Years Ahead of the Times' (allAfrica picked up the story): "...the 'new' beads' presence is incontrovertible evidence that humans displaying fully modern behaviour - such as abstract thought, aesthetic appreciation and the ability to communicate through mutually understood symbols - evolved in Africa at least 30 000 years earlier than anywhere else in the world." Credit for the find and the picture go to Professor Christopher Henshilwood (his bio on the site of the Cape Field School) and his research team. Here's why the name rang a bell: in January 2002, the media was full of his discovery of engraved ochre stones in the same place, Blombos Cave (BBC Science). This was regarded as inconclusive by some, but knocked a dent in the widespread view that "modern" patterns of human behaviour first emerged about 45,000-40,000 years back. "Genetic and fossil evidence indicate anatomically modern humans emerged in Africa around 120,000 years ago. Whether modern behavior evolved gradually in tandem with anatomical modernity, or emerged suddenly around 45,000 years ago, has long been a bone of contention among anthropologists and archaeologists. A great divide exists in the archaeological record," explains a report on the beads in 'National Geographic'. "Waves of modern humans began leaving Africa to colonize the rest of the world around 45,000 years ago. There is extensive evidence that 'modern behavior' existed in Europe around 40,000 years ago: cave paintings, jewelry, more elaborate burial rituals, and more specialized tools. 'A creative explosion took place sometime around 40,000 years ago that is strongly expressed in the archaeological record over a very large geographical area,' said John Bower, an archaeologist-paleoanthropologist at the University of California, Davis. 'The question is whether something happened to affect the architecture of the brain.'" There's a further write-up at EurekAlert!; you have to pay to read the academic article in 'Science Magazine. Seventy thousand years? So that's how long it may have taken us to get from the origins of "modern behaviour" to the stage where medical researchers and biologists are saying we're at the point when the next phase of human evolution will depend far less on the workings of nature than on how we decide to change (I mentioned this in February: 'Spilt milk and split genes'). I can't help wondering whether African weather -- that other thing we have begun beginning seriously to affect in the name of "progress" -- played a part in making that continent an auspicious place for the earliest manifestation of communication and adornment. 12:52:53 PM  link   your views? [] Delayed in transmission In honour of Tony's experiences and to the shame of a Parisian hospital where the medical care is fine but the administration awful, what happened yesterday might be called "doing a St. Anne's". That's when you turn up for an appointment to find it's changed and "please come back in three hours' time". When you oblige, you find yourself being unexpectedly anaesthetised and having biopsy devices rammed deep into you to grab samples. What an afternoon! I'm glad the surgeon knew what was going on because I didn't, until the last minute, but it seemed best to go through with it. The Faithful Five ¾ can do without more pictures of my insides, since there aren't any yet, but one set of tests led to another and two and a half medical rendezvous in a day. If anybody needs any leukocytes (Wikipedia), I've got lots to spare, along with other extras, including an infection in the small intestine. So tomorrow's a day of rest -- and guilt. The newsdesk at the Factory is already stretched thin in this holiday season. I return to work tomorrow, come what may. After a week with the Kid where nothing went as planned since we were both sick for much of it, Sunday saw a welcome remission in the Condition. I remembered to take a 'phone pic (hence the low quality) of the famous Menu Marianne à la façon de Sam before devouring the Sunday special. The secret of spinach which may not look appetising lies in the north African extras. The spices were mild by request: none of those tiny chillies that can take the roof off the top of your mouth, though you'd not guess it to look at them. The Kid, who gave her name to this dish, has a nice term for food which hides its secrets, such as veggies containing garlic cut too fine to see or the mango sorbet that Sam gave her the other day, which she found delicious until: "Aarggh, it's got bits in it!" She calls it "la bouffe vicieuse". Try running that through your desktop translator: Lycos and BabelFish offer "puffs out vicious", Free Translation gives "the incorrect food" and InterTran suggests "her grub dirty-minded". My efforts to get her out of the house when I could were in vain, even when the sun came out. Marianne would let me nowhere near what she was up to on her Mac. She said all the chat and the rest was absolutely vital since she'd be deprived of Internet access for a whole week once in Brittany, where she and her mother were getting heavily rained on when I got news tonight. I filled in my own time between my hours with the Kid keeping appointments arising from the Condition almost completing belated correspondence, pruning my unruly porn collection and acquiring books promised to the Wildcat from Amazon. It wasn't too hard to get to the local tailor occasionally to review successive stages in the mending to my oldest and favourite jacket. From the moment samples of leather were compared and choices made, the man warned me it would be ferociously expensive. I didn't want to know how much until it was almost done. "Three hundred euros?!" Sam gasped when I told him. "I wouldn't pay more than half that for a repair job." However, the work included improvements such as deeper pockets in stronger fabric than before. Comparing prices on the Web, I found I could otherwise only hope to stay warm enough in winter to avoid hibernation was to buy something similar second-hand at eBay. My jacket has the merit of being ... well, mine! The tailor did such a fine job that it should be good for another decade and longer. The equipment on my Mac, once the OS was upgraded to Panther 10.3.3 (Ars Technica -- though impressed, the Kid declares herself quite happy with Jaguar for now), refused to play DVDs. In its wisdom, Apple has rendered iDVD compatible for now only with built-in DVD players, and my latest upgrade appears to have "broken" Trans Lucy, which annoys me because I paid for it. I can probably find out what's wrong if I delve, but instead I explored previously unsuspected options in the free VideoLAN Client, testing it on recent DVD purchases. VLC works well and gives me a fuzzy glow inside because it's "home-made", or used to be when a bunch of clever students at the Ecole Centrale Paris began devising the open source VideoLAN multi-platform software. It's "now a worldwide project with developers from 20 countries." Though the interface is user-friendly, it helps to be just a bit of a geek if you want to get the most out of VLC, and probably a wizard to understand its most advanced features. The Russian imperial family in a flurry of disarray at the opera is a screenshot I snapped while testing VLC on 'The Barber of Siberia', which gets a lousy review from the British Film Institute, can't be found at Amazon UK, and radically divides people at the IMDb. Regardless of the nay-sayers, I still include this film in my top 10 movies, have already seen it at the cinema several times and liked it better each one. I couldn't care less if Nikita Mikhalkov's epic love story is considered flawed by cliché and unhistorical; it is also wildly romantic and glorious to watch. Being as romantic and frustrated in idealism as I'm increasingly cynical when I write about the antics of politicians explains, in part the "psycho-" side of the Condition, though the latest relapse is for purely "-somatic" reasons. It can be sorted out quickly enough and last week gave me all the excuses I needed, if any, to sit in the waiting room chez bloghero Yang and his fellow doctors flirting with the Apprentice Dragon. This highly enjoyable activity has the added bonus of making (most) of the women present laugh while some of the other men look disturbed. Ariane, who bears a passing resemblance to somebody livening up this entry, should have become a fully trained Dragon by now, but puts her academic studies in psychology to better use. "You'll come back and wish me a good holiday on Friday, won't you?" she asked last Wednesday. "Where are you going?" "Italy. I'm half-Italian, you know." I didn't, but that made sense. "Just think of it, with luck I'll be back with a tan. And soon, it'll be time to wear skirts again. Won't that be wonderful?" Yes. Well. I hope she's got the weather she wanted. Recalling her legs from last summer, shown to the uppermost limits of the most liberal definition of decency, is enough to set my heart racing. If her conversation wasn't so entertaining, I'd remind her that it's supposedly her job to nurse the patients, not leave some of us impatiently nursing uncomfortably growing impulses we must keep in our trousers. Tony says he's "fortunately too old now" for such difficulties. According to the Wildcat, even if that's true, it would be a case of only just over the hump. The night she laughed even louder than Dr F did at my alarm at being dangerously attracted to some women much younger than me, she added that I should instead consider myself lucky and informed me that I could possibly even expect such fortune to be reciprocated until I'm "about 72"! That was such an educational chat that I'm ready to pay for the occasional long-distance 'phone call again, while also determined to deal rapidly with the resurgence of the Condition, since she also pointed out that "there's nothing very sexy about that!" Nevetheless, most of her notions were such heavenly harmony to my ears that I stopped bemoaning wasted years. For good measure, I said that since people sometimes told me that I've got "so much to give", I planned to settle for nothing but the best, which made the Wildcat hiss and spit. However, I claimed that there was nothing dismissive or unusually arrogant in this and suggested she adopted a similar policy when it came to men. That seemed to inspire her. 12:18:34 AM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.