Squeeze play?

The Mac App Store (MAS) requires participating developers to pay Apple $99/year plus 30% of gross sales price; only apps which are approved by Apple may be sold via MAS.

Xcode4 was released today on MAS, for $4.99. It used to be included on the OS X distribution DVDs, as a no-extra-cost optional installation.

The beta distributions of OS X Lion is available only through the MAS. As far as I know it does not include Xcode.

Developers are not forced to sell their applications through the MAS. In fact, some types of software, those which require administrator privileges for installation, must be sold outside the MAS.

Still, Apple seems to be edging down a path at the terminus of which developers must pay an annual fee to sell software for use on OS X, and must have that software approved by Apple before it can be offered for sale.

I sincerely hope this isn't what they have in mind.

Thank goodness for Linux.

Fibers for fuel

And now for something completely incoherent: a ramble about pikas, horned lizards, ruminants, biofuels and genetic sequencing.

Pikas

I recently posted a video about pikas. Like their fellow lagomorphs, rabbits and hares, pikas can live on indigestible grasses thanks to the bacteria in their caecal pouches. A big part of their body mass is devoted to digestive systems, yet unlike ruminants lagomorphs can't pump their food backward and forward to take advantage of the work done by the gut bacteria. So they have to eat their food more than once.

Horned Lizards

Horned lizards also have proportionally large digestive systems, because they eat ants. And that need for a big digestive system is believed to be one reason horned lizard bodies are so spiky. As DigiMorph explains it:

"Ants are small and contain much indigestible chitin, so large numbers of them must be consumed. Hence an ant specialist must possess a large stomach for its body size to process a lot of material. [...] the stomach occupies a considerably larger fraction of the animal's overall body mass [...] than do stomachs of all other sympatric desert lizard species. Possession of such a large gut necessitates a tank-like body form, reducing speed and decreasing the horned lizard's ability to escape from predators by flight."

The full article is well worth reading. It has a lot more interesting info on horned lizards, including the fact that some of them give live birth. I have read elsewhere that the live-bearing species tend to live at higher altitudes, where it would be difficult to keep eggs sufficiently warm.


Ruminants

Ruminants such as cattle can live on grasses. Their food goes back and forward through several stomach chambers while bacteria break down plant fibers.


Biofuels


Cosmos Magazine reports on genetic sequencing of cow gut bacteria aimed at discovering how to break down cell fibers more efficiently. The techniques of the researchers were somewhat gruesome: they inserted nylon sacks of switchgrass through holes in cows' skin directly into their stomachs. The method was considered necessary because the bacteria of interest could not be cultured.

Once they had enough bacteria they removed the nylon sacks and analyzed the bacterial DNA, looking for genes whose products aid in the breakdown of cellulose.

"It is hoped that this research can speed up the process of breaking down switchgrass into sugars including glucose and xylose to be fermented into ethanol."

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation - Press

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation - Press:

"This marks the first time a commercial company has successfully recovered a spacecraft reentering from low-Earth orbit. It is a feat performed by only six nations or government agencies: the United States, Russia, China, Japan, India, and the European Space Agency."

Congratulations to SpaceX.

Just Warm Enough - Science News

Just Warm Enough - Science News:

"a massive fungal bloom swept the Earth about the time of the dinosaur extinction."

"...fungi plague plants, insects and other cold-blooded creatures far more often than they do mammals or birds. Putting two and two together, [Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City ] formulated a theory that the warm body temperatures of mammals and birds might have protected them from fungal pathogens, while diseases caused by fungi might have been a factor keeping the reptiles from rising again."

This is interesting in light of ongoing fungal epidemics: chytrid, which is threatening amphibian populations worldwide; and white-nose syndrome, which is threatening bats in the U.S.

The article does raise questions, t.ex. why would amphibians have escaped this ancient fungal bloom along w. birds and mammals? (The article notes implicitly that body temperature isn't the only factor determining susceptibility to fungal infections.) Is there any causal connection between the fungal bloom and the final demise of the dinosaurs, of which many species were believed to be warm-blooded?

"A fungus called Geomyces destructans infects bats while they are hibernating — a time when body temperatures drop from 40˚ C to about 7˚. “They’re not warm-blooded when they get infected,” Blehert says."

Bizarrely, this could also explain what happens to my feet in the wintertime :)

Goodbye, Carlos

Carlos White, 1942-2010: Restaurateur peddled good food, gospel truth
- The Santa Fe New Mexican

Heavenly Intrigue

Danish astronomer's remains exhumed in Prague - Yahoo! News:

"On Monday, an international team of scientists opened [Tyge Brahe's] tomb in the Church of Our Lady Before Tyn near Prague's Old Town Square..."

The book got poor reviews, but the whodunnit isn't done yet.

The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother - thestar.com

The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother - thestar.com:

"That's the process %u2014 six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes."

It took decades, but in the healthcare reform effort the U.S. finally took a look at what works and doesn't work in other countries.

When will we stop throwing away time, money and constitutional rights and start studying how other countries have addressed the transportation safety problem?

Rock Recipes

Cooking

Sharp Stone Age spearheads were cooked then flaked - life - 28 October 2010 - New Scientist:

"If you want to make really sharp stone spearheads, do like Stone Age cave dwellers did and cook them first."

Overcooking

Bir Umm Fawakhir: Insights into Ancient Egyptian Mining:

"'The gold-bearing earth which is hardest they first burn with a hot fire, and when they have crumbled it...they continue the working of it by hand..."

Cooking with vinegar

Hannibal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"By Livy's account the crossing was accomplished in the face of huge difficulties.[24] These Hannibal surmounted with ingenuity, such as when he used vinegar and fire to break through a rockfall."

The line between book and Internet will disappear - O'Reilly Radar

The line between book and Internet will disappear - O'Reilly Radar:

"But everything exists within the EPUB spec already to make the next obvious -- but frightening -- step: let books live properly within the Internet, along with websites, databases, blogs, Twitter, map systems, and applications.

"There is little talk of this anywhere in the publishing industry that I know of, but the foundation is there for the move -- as it should be. And if you are looking at publishing with any kind of long-term business horizon, this is where you should be looking[...]

"I don't know what smart things people will start to do when books are truly of the Internet.

"But I do know that it will happen, and the 'Future of Publishing' has something to do with this. The current world of ebooks is just a transition to a digitally connected book publishing ecosystem that won't look anything like the book world we live in now."

Can Nuclear Waste Spark an Energy Solution?

Can Nuclear Waste Spark an Energy Solution?:

"The idea is to reprocess that spent fuel to generate more power. Proponents say the know-how is available now to address the nuclear proliferation concerns that have bedeviled previous recycling plans. And they say the advanced reactors that would run on that recycled fuel would mark a new level of progress on safety."

'“It’s very clear when you get into details that [nuclear] is the best energy system, bar none,” said Tom Blees, president of the Science Council for Global Initiatives, a nonprofit focused on resources and climate, and author of Prescription for the Planet, a 2008 book advocating the technology. “We have to make a choice—provide abundant energy for the planet or be content with these resource wars we have all the time.”'

"The International Panel on Fissile Materials, a group of arms control and nonproliferation experts from 17 countries[...] noted that sodium leaks have sparked major fires in a similarly designed prototype reactor in Japan, as well as in several operating reactors in France. One of them, the Superphénix commercial-sized plutonium fueled reactor, was shut down in 1998 for political and technical reasons after experiencing high operating costs."

DRM-Free eBook sellers

Cory Doctorow, via Boing Boing:

" Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Kobo were all happy to carry my books without DRM, and on terms that gave you the same rights you got when buying paper editions. Sony and Apple refused to carry my books without DRM -- even though my publisher and I both asked them to."

I wonder why Apple responded this way, given their stated position on DRM-free music. It would be interesting to know more about the negotiations.

U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don't Even Know It: Laurence Kotlikoff - Bloomberg

Via Doc Searls:

U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don't Even Know It: Laurence Kotlikoff - Bloomberg:

"This is what happens when you run a massive Ponzi scheme for six decades straight, taking ever larger resources from the young and giving them to the old while promising the young their eventual turn at passing the generational buck."

I and my classmates have known this since high school in the early 1980's. But we haven't successfully done anything about it. I voted for Perot and contributed to the Concord Coalition for awhile; nothing more.

How do you visibly alter the momentum of a social system 3.0e8 times larger than yourself?

iHelp for Autism - - News - San Francisco - SF Weekly

iHelp for Autism - - News - San Francisco - SF Weekly:

"After he began spending 30 minutes at a time on apps designed to teach spelling, counting, drawing, making puzzles, remembering pictures, and more, she sat down at her own computer."

Maybe it is a magical device.

Bai-Baikonur

Russia confirms shiny new cosmodrome - The Register:

"Putin stressed the non-military nature of the project, and indicated that Russia is keen to cut its reliance on Kazakhstan's Baikonur spaceport."

Another Toss of the Shuttle

Life isn't so much a fabric as it is a fascinating, intricate tangle of seemingly unrelated things.

I've long been a fan of Richard Feynman's stories. In 1992 I read about his last adventure, a quest to visit Tannu Tuva: "Tuva or Bust." A central element of the story is Tuvan throat singing.

My grandfather had had a distinctive singing gimmick, one which had helped him establish his character of "Frog Millhouse" in old western movies. As I read the description of throat singing in "Tuva or Bust", I began to wonder whether Grandpa had in fact been a country and western throat singer.

Fast forward to 2005. I was living in Santa Fe, not far from the site of one of Dr. Feynman's early adventures. My friend Bobi, who had once worked at Los Alamos, was getting ready to adopt a baby from Kazakhstan. As we prepared for her trip we came across the story of Paul Pena, a blind R&B musician who among other things had written the Steve Miller Band hit, "Jet Airliner." Listening to a San Francisco radio station, Mr. Pena had heard some intriguing vocal music which turned out to be Tuvan throat singing. The music was being aired because a group of Tuvans was visiting the United States, in a cultural exchange visit which was a posthumous result of Dr. Feynman's efforts to visit Tuva.

Paul Pena taught himself to sing in the rumbling style of kargyraa, somehow became connected with the author of "Tuva or Bust", Ralph Leighton, and ended up traveling to central Asia, where he won a prize in a throat-singing competition.

Mr. Pena's adventure, and some of his life's trials, were captured in the bittersweet movie "Genghis Blues."

Almost a year after Mr. Pena died, Bobi departed to Kazakhstan. I went along, and we came together with one of the most wonderful people I've ever known. She's now Bobi's daughter, and my god-daughter.

We made a video of the trip. The obvious choice of background music for the air travel segments was Mr. Pena's "Jet Airliner."


With all of this as background, today I came across an NPR interview with Billy West, who provides much of the voice of Futurama:

On Popeye

I loved Jack Mercer, and I got him. I understood him. And what helped me understand that Popeye voice — it's a high voice and a low voice at the same time — cause when I was a kid, we all used to try to do that and we all stunk. It didn't sound right. So one day, I see this film — it was an independent film called Genghis Blues. And it was about [Paul Pena] ... And he was listening to a world-band radio one night, and he heard this strange noise. And it was a program about Tuvan singers. And Tuvans had a way of singing where they could do one and two voices. And I realized, 'Oh man, that's how this guy did it. Jack Mercer.' [He imitates both voices.] There'd be two voices, an octave apart. And he'd put them together."

---

• The Last Journey of a Genius - Richard Feynman - Nova - Google Video
• Kargyraa Rap - Kongar-ol Ondar and Richard Feynman - YouTube
• Momma Don't Allow No Music Playin' Round Here - music by Smiley Burnette - YouTube
• Jet Airliner - Paul Pena - YouTube
• Kargyraa Moan - Paul Pena - YouTube
• Genghis Blues - DVD
• NPR Interview w. Billy West

Smart grid emergent

Virtual power plants fill supply gaps in heat wave | Green Tech - CNET News:

"...automated efficiency technology, particularly dialing back electricity usage during peak times, is becoming one of the most effective smart-grid tools for maintaining the balance between electricity supply and demand."

Scratch for your Phone

App Inventor for Android:

"To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app's behavior."

PhysOrg.com: Sharp-eyed robins can see magnetic fields

Sharp-eyed robins can see magnetic fields:

"a new study shows that [birds'] internal compass also depends on the birds having clear vision in their right eyes.

Cryptochrome also affects the light sensitivity of retinal cells, which suggests it may also affect sensitivity to magnetic fields. In effect, the magnetic fields create light or dark shadings over what the bird usually sees, and the shadings change as the bird turns its head, giving it a visual compass from the patterns of shading."

Wow.

The urge to quote Shakespeare is almost irresistible.

Via Engadget

Juxtaposition: American jobs

BusinessWeek posted this on 1 July:
Andy Grove: How America Can Create Jobs:

"A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. The U.S. lost its lead in batteries 30 years ago when it stopped making consumer electronics devices... U.S. companies did not participate in the first phase and consequently were not in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up...

These [Asian] countries seem to understand that job creation must be the No. 1 objective of state economic policy. The government plays a strategic role in setting the priorities and arraying the forces and organization necessary to achieve this goal..."

BBC News posted this today:
BBC News - US to provide nearly $2bn for two solar energy projects:

"Nearly $2bn... in loan guarantees will be given to two companies to kick-start the US solar energy industry, President Barack Obama has announced...

Abound Solar Manufacturing, will manufacture state-of-the-art thin film solar panels...

Plants will be built in Colorado and Indiana, creating 2,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs, the Associated Press reports...

'We're going to to keep competing aggressively to make sure the jobs and industries of the future are taking root right here in America,' he said on Saturday."

Groves's article contains many thought-provoking assertions. Well worth reading.

GIS + global warming = k * Archaeology

CU Researcher Finds 10,000-Year-Old Hunting Weapon in Melting Ice Patch | News Center | University of Colorado at Boulder:

"Over the past decade, Lee has worked with other researchers to develop a geographic information system, or GIS, model to identify glaciers and ice fields in Alaska and elsewhere that are likely to hold artifacts. They pulled together biological and physical data to find ice fields that may have been used by prehistoric hunters to kill animals seeking refuge from heat and insect swarms in the summer months."

"Ninety-five percent of the archaeological record that we usually base our interpretations on is comprised of chip stone artifacts, ground stone artifacts, maybe old hearths, which is a fire pit, or rock rings that would have been used to stabilize a house," Lee said. "So we really have to base our understanding about ancient times on these inorganic materials. But ice patches are giving us this window into organic technology that we just don't get in other environments."

(Via Stone Pages Archaeo News)