Category: Uncategorized

Australian Cities Approve Circuses with Exotic Animals

The Rockingham and Cockburn city councils in Australia recently voted to allow circuses with exotic animals to per form in those municipalities. In Rockingham the vote was 8-2 to allow the Lennon Bros. Circus — which includes elephants, tigers and other exotic animals — to perform in the city.

This comes after the Stardust Circus was banned in January from performing with exotic animals in the city of Perth. The Sunday Times (Australia) reported that 17 cities in western Australia have instituted similar bans on circuses that include exotic animals.

According to The Sunday Times, Australia’s Royal Society for the Protection of Animals opposes the use of exotic animals in circuses and had urged the two cities to ban the circuses.

Animal Liberation (WA) president Michael Zampogna complained to The Sunday Times,

No matter how much these circus operators purport to care for their animals, there’s no way they can give them the conditions they require. . . . I’ve actually seen the performance in question and having Arna [an Asian elephant] trot out and sit on a barrel . . . it’s a parody of what you would expect an elephant to be.

Rockingham mayor Chris Elliott told The Sunday Times that he didn’t care that other Australian cities had banned circus animals,

What the City of Perth chooses to do is its business; we’re in the business of providing good government for Rockingham

Source:

Council nod to circus animals. Tim Ayling, The Sunday Times (Australia), April 27, 2003.

The Upgrade Saga

One of the things I like about using Conversant, aside from the fact that it’s the only content management/groupware system that can meet my personal knowledge management needs, is that Seth Dillingham always goes above and beyond what most people would do (or at least what most people would do from my experience).

A few weeks ago I ran out of disk space on the 18 gig hard drive that hosted this site. With more than 70,000 messages in the database and with my sites serving up 25,000+ page views daily, I really needed a new hard drive.

But Seth suggested that other upgrades would also improve performance, and since hardware is all but dirt cheap these days I decided to overhaul this server. So out would go the 1 ghz Athlon, the 768 mb of RAM, and the 18 gig hard drive, and in would come a 2.4 ghz P4, 1 gig of RAM, and a 60gb 7200 RPM Barracuda drive. No problem, right?

Except that pretty much every time Seth and I have done anything with the hardware something goes wrong (typically bad parts).

So I order the components and have them shipped to Seth, and he’s busy putting it together. Except the old server had an ISA video card and the Gigabyte motherboard I’ve ordered doesn’t have any ISA slots, so Seth runs out and picks up a cheap used one (and you have to keep in mind here that Seth lives in the middle of nowhere).

And then comes gotcha #2 — although it isn’t explicitly documented anywhere that I could find, the board is shipped such that it has to be booted at least initially with an AGP 4X card. Yet another trip.

So Seth’s got the AGP 4X card, but when he boots the system the hard drive fails. It looks like maybe there’s something wrong with the cable or maybe a jumper issue on the board. Nope — it turns out to be a power supply issue. We were going to use a 250W power supply which is simply not putting out enough juice.

This means Seth makes a 90-mile round trip drive to CompUSA on Sunday to pick up a nice 400W power supply (and, of course, these additional parts are adding to the expense, however moderately). On that trip, the transmission in Seth’s truck starts acting funny. As I told my wife, “I think I just broke Seth’s truck.”

So, the server is finally working and Seth’s installing and copying all of the software and data, but will his truck make the 90-mile or so trip to the ISP? Fortunately, he takes the car to his mechanic and they find nothing wrong with it.

But now we’re long past the time to make the drive, which is why the server doesn’t get back up until this afternoon.

Whew!

The end result, however, was worth it, though. Most pages render in under a second on my broadband connection which is a pretty amazing feat given how much of the content is generated dynamically. Some of the pages that rely on a lot of intensive search of a large message base went from taking 15 to 20 seconds to render to down to 3 or 4 seconds. Since the sites I run are first and foremost for my own reference purposes this is a huge time saver and increases the value of the site to me above and beyond the improved user experience for everyone else.

The only problem? Human beings are too good at adapting to such changes in speed. Give me a couple weeks and I’ll be pricing 15K SCSI drives thinking I might get that 3-4 second load time for the resource-intensive pages down to 1-2 seconds (and then, imagine taking two of them and putting them in a RAID array — of course, I’m not sure if Seth’s truck could take that sort of upgrade!!) And of course it won’t be too long before we see 4 ghz processors . . .

Up and Coming or Already There

Right Wing News lists Henry Hanks’ Crooow Blog as an up and coming weblog. As far as I’m concerned, though, there’s no up and coming about it — the blog is definitely already there.

I’m not usually a big fan of weblogs that are largely just links, but Hanks really excels at the form, in part because he seems to have a photographic memory of political events. If you want to see (largely left/liberal) politicians and commentators skewered by their own contradictions and hypocrisy, nobody else does it better.

Wisconsin Legislature Says State Should Investigate, Possibly Sue PETA

Wisconsin State Rep. Scott Suder apparently wants to replicate the Oprah Winfrey/Mad Cow lawsuit fiasco in Wisconsin by asking the state Attorney General to investigate claims made by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in ads disparaging milk.

The Badger Herald (Wisconsin) reported that Suder had contacted Wisconsin’s Consumer Protection Legal Division and asked them to investigate whether or not PETA’s claims that milk causes health problems are violating Wisconsin law. Suder told The Badger Herald,

They’ve crossed the line this time. They state in their letter [to Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle] that milk causes breast cancer, osteoporosis and a whole host of other diseases.

As the Badger Herald summed up Suder’s legal case (emphasis added),

It is these claims, Suder says, that are potentially in violation of Wisconsin’s false advertising laws, which prohibit any person or organization from making claims in the media that contain untrue or deceptive messages.

Now I’ll be the first to jump on the bandwagon that PETA’s claims are ridiculous. Does Bruce Friedrich really think anyone takes him seriously when he Friedrich says in a PETA press release (emphasis added),

Beer in moderation is good for you, while even one glass of milk supports animal abuse and harms your health.

What’s next for Friedrich? Claiming that milk is the gateway drug to red meat consumption? (How about a film called Diary Madness showing kids sitting around drinking milk and then dropping dead?)

But going after PETA with false advertising laws is a strategy that will inevitably backfire. Rather than making PETA look like idiots — which the organization already does a fine job of on its own — such a lawsuit will have the effect of making PETA look like a victim of an overzealous legislature and produce a flurry of news articles that will have the effect of giving PETA’s dietary claims a lot more serious coverage than they deserve.

Source:

State representative calls for legal action against PETA. John Buchel, The Badger Herald (Wisconsin), April 29, 2003.

Cancer-Resistant Strain of Mice Discovered

Researchers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center made news in April when they announced a strain of mice that appear to be especially resistant to cancer.

The mice strain was discovered accidentally by researchers doing cancer research. The BBC reported that researchers noted that one male mouse remained resistant to the cancer they were researching despite repeated injections with cancer cells.

So the researchers bred that male mouse and discovered that the mouse’s cancer resistance was genetically inheritable. Of the 700 mice they bred, some were completely resistant to cancer while others would get cancer when exposed to it, but the tumor would be stopped spontaneously in its tracks within a day.

Dr. Zheng Cui of Wake Forest told The BBC,

The mice became healthy and immediately resumed normal activities including mating. . . . They are healthy, cancer-free and have a normal lifespan.

The cancer resistance was attributed to an immune response that the mice exhibited in response to the presence of cancer cells.

As Dr. Susan Aldridge said of the discovery in an article for Health and Age,

Clearly this colony of animals will be a valuable model for studying mechanisms of immune protection against cancer. Immunotherapy is one of the most exciting new approaches in cancer treatment. This research may help show how it can be made more effective.

Sources:

Scientists breed cancer-beating mice. The BBC, April 28, 2003.

Researchers develop mice resistant to cancer. Associated Press, May 7, 2003.

Mice that fight off cancer shed light on human remission. Susan Aldridge, Health and Age, April 2003.