Monthly Archives: July 2006

Toynbee Plaques

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Damn Interesting had a well-written look at the mysterious Toynbee plaques/tiles,

In 1992, a chap in Philadelphia by the name of Bill O’Neill starting noticing strange tiles randomly embedded in local roads. They were generally about the size of a license plate, and each had some variation of the same strange message: “TOYNBEE IDEA IN KUbricK’s 2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER.” They varied a bit in color and arrangement, but they were all made of an unidentifiable hard substance, and many had footnotes as strange as the message itself, such as “Murder every journalist, I beg you,” and “Submit. Obey.” Some were accompanied by lengthy, paranoid diatribes about the newsmedia, jews, and the mafia.

So Bill started asking around about these tiles, but nobody knew anything about their origin or meaning. So, he created a website devoted to the mysterious tiles, and in doing so learned that it is not just a local phenomenon. Similar tiles have appeared in many US cities, including Washington DC, Pittsburgh, New York City, Baltimore, Boston, and many more. Some have even shown up in South America; in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. To date, about 130 tiles have been discovered. Somehow, someone is managing to embed these tiles into public roads– some of which are busy 24/7– without being spotted.

Toynebee.Net has a list of locations where the tiles have been spotted in the United States, and the handful of tiles that have been spotted in South America.

The Toynbee referred to is believed to refer to historian Alfred Toynbee, who died in 1975.

Almost as weird as those Andre the Giant Has a Posse stickers.

Will 4g of Caffeine Kill You?

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In another case of everything-on-the-Internet-must-be-true, the widely-read Boing! Boing! is helping to publicize false health information from, of all places, the unreliable Erowid site which seems to promote, if not advocate, the use of psychoactive drugs.

The idiots at the Center for Science in the Public Interest are on one of their anti-caffeine binges and have an analysis of caffeine content in various products. Starbucks 16oz coffee grande tops the list with 550mg of caffeine.

Boing! Boing! then republishes the following comment from one of its readers as if it were accurate,

Reader comment: Aaron says:

I saw your caffine post and it reminded me that according to the Erowid drug information site, the L.D. 50 for caffeine (the amount that is lethal for 50% of a test population) is between one and four grams. So, according to the link you posted, a single grande coffee at Starbucks is just over half of the bottom of that range. It’s also worth noting that they list anything over 400mg as a “heavy” dose.

Okay, a dosage of one to four grams may kill you depending on your weight . . . if you inject that much caffeine intravenously.

If, like most of us, you get your caffeine through oral consumption of food and drinks, the lethal dose for adults starts at 7-10 grams depending on your weight, and increases from there the more you weigh. To start to get anywhere near a lethal dose of caffeine from Starbucks, most of us would be looking at a minimum of 9 or 10 of these 16 ounce drinks consumed very rapidly.

As Mrvos, et al noted in a case study of a woman who died from caffeine overdose from swallowing large numbers of diet pills,

Caffeine has long been recognized as an addictive substance with numerous toxic effects. Death due to caffeine overdose is rare, due in part to its marked gastric irritation resulting in spontaneous emesis.

That’s a scientifically correct way of saying that if you try to achieve a lethal dose of caffeine by downing lattes, the caffeine will give you an incredible stomach ache and you’ll wind up puking the caffeine on the floor long before you are even close to killing yourself.

A look at caffeine-related fatalities from PubMed makes clear that cases of caffeine fatalities are almost exclusively from excessive, often accidental, consumption of diet pills and other drugs.

Symbolizing Dead Soldiers

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Sgt. Patrick Stewart, 34, was killed in Afghanistan last September when his helicopter came under enemy fire. His widow and family are in a dispute with the Department of Veteran Affairs over the religious symbol on his grave. Specifically, Stewart was a Wiccan and the Department of Veteran Affairs doesn’t have an approved symbol for Wiccans/pagans/neo-pagans/witches/whatever-the-hell-they’re-calling-themselves-this-week.

It is a bit strange that there is no approved Wiccan/whatever symbol given that there are almost 40 other approved religious-oriented symbols. On the other hand, the Wiccans might want to be careful what they wish for. As the Associated Press notes,

The Veterans Affairs’ National Cemetary Adminstration allows only approved emblems of religious beliefs on government headstones. Over the years, it has approved more than 30, including symbols for the Tenrikyo Church, United Morovian Church and Sikhs. There’s also an emblem for atheists — but none for Wiccans.

Sounds good, except the atheist symbol is that piece-of-crap symbol that the American Atheists in the 1960s — a stylized picture of an atom with a capital A in the middle. According to the American Atheist site,

When American Atheists was formed in 1963, a contemporary scientific symbol was chosen; this acknowledges that only through the use of scientific analysis and free, open inquiry can humankind reach out for a better life.

This is a bit like approving a single image of Akhnaton to be used by Jews, Christians, Muslims and other monotheists (and, in case you haven’t noticed, atheists for some reason are litigious-prone — someone’s bound to sue at some point). And the explanation for the symbol makes no sense. Hundreds of years from now, future generations are going to come along and think people buried in those graves were some strange electron worshipping cult or something.

Frankly, I’ve always thought that a better choice for an atheist symbol would be the logical negation symbol: ¬

Then again, I think we should put Cthulhu on the $5 bill, so I may be a bit out of the loop with my fellow atheists.

Source:

For Wiccan soldier, death brings fight. Associated Press, May 25, 2006.

Toward An Annotation Standard

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At his excellent TeleRead.Org blog, David Rothman tackles has an intriguing look at initial attempts to create annotation standards for e-books, web sites and other electronic documents.

One existing initiative trying to move toward open standards for annotation of web documents is the W3C’s Annotea project where “annotations are stored externally in annotation servers and presented to the user by a client capable of understanding annotation metadata and capable of interacting with an annotation server.” The Annozilla project is work to create an extension for Firefox to implement the Annotea method of annotation in that browser.

Rothman has a long list of suggestions for what an annotation system should address, including:

  • Provisions for a universal spec that would encompass not just e-books but every conceivable digital object, from Moby Dick to a JPEG of Herman Melville or the sounds of a whale. . . .

    • . . .

  • Provisons for moderation as needed.

One of the things that an annotation system should have is the ability to easily choose from among different annotators and groups of annotators, which would eliminate the need for any moderation system to be built into the annotation system. What I need is the ability to say I want to see annotations from X, Y and Z and only annotations from those individuals/groups.

Firefox Extended Statusbar Add-On

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Back when FireFox 1.0 was release I complained that the developers had eliminated one of my favorite features — statistics in the status bar that would tell you, among other things, how long it took for the page you were visiting to load. It was removed supposedly because normal users don’t care about that sort of thing, but more likely the developers didn’t want users citing the numbers as proof that Firebird/Firefox was slower than IE.

Anyway, there is an extension for Firefox, Extended Statusbar, which displays a number of statistics in the statusbar including load time, total bytes downloaded, number of images loaded, etc.

The Star Trek/X-Men Crossover

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I can’t believe I’d never run into this before, but I was browsing at a bookstore the other day when I ran across Planet X which — and I’m not making this up — is a Star Trek: The Next Generation and X-Men Crossover. From the Amazon.Com description,

On the planet Xhaldia, ordinary men and women are mutating into bizarre creatures with extraordinary powers. But is this a momentous evolutionary leap or an unparalleled catastrophe? The very fabric of Xhaldian society is threatened as fear and prejudice divide the transformed from their own kin.

Dispatched to cope with the growing crisis, Captain Picard and the crew of the

Starship Enterpriseâ„¢ receive some unexpected visitors from another reality — in the form of the group of mutant heroes known as the uncanny X-Men®. Storm, leader of the X-Men, offers their help in resolving a situation that is agonizingly similar to the human/mutant conflicts of their own time and space.

Interesting. Would have been better with TOS, though.

Backing Up and Managing Very Large Amounts of Data

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The other day I read Mark Pilgrim’s look at the problems with backing up large amounts of data. Mark wrote,

But it’s not enough. I’m creating a lot of data, and I want to keep most of it for the rest of my life. This includes video of my children growing up, but also things like video footage of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In 2004, I generated 35 GB of such data. In 2005, I generated just shy of 150 GB. This year I’m on track to generate about 100 GB. I foresee doing this for about 20 more years, and then maintaining the archive for another 30 years after that. After that I’ll be dead and it will be Somebody Else’s Problem.

I don’t know how to back up 100 GB of video.

. . .

How do you back up 100 GB of data per year for 50 years? Or even 10 years?

I can sort of understand where Pilgrim is coming from, though at the moment I wish my backup problem was that simple. Currently I am generating about 150gb of data every week. How do you backup and manage 7.8 terabytes of data every year? Especially assuming that given the pace of things, that could be 15 terabytes/year within 5 years?

Looking at PriceWatch, a terabyte worth of SATA hard drives costs about $410. So 8 terabytes worth is just shy of $3,000 at the moment.

Currently the way I manage such large data is simply to archive it to DVD. Obviously that’s a temporary solution that I would not rely on for more than 2-3 years. Of course in 2-3 years, a) higher volume optical media (Blu-Ray/HD-DVD) should be cheaper, allowing me to cut down on the thousands of DVDs I’m currently storing, and b) the cost per terabyte of HD space will eventually fall below the current cost per terabyte of optical storage (DVD storage costs roughly $69/terabyte for the physical media).