nonTROPPO.org

Most people who try to commit suicide fail (though I doubt it is a high as the 90% value that has been suggested). And sadly, a substantial number of those will suffer the side effects of the unsuccesful attempt, as well as the emotional burdens of the attempt, the guilt and the retributions. I had often thought that there should be not only counselling for those who wanted to commit suicide, but a manual of techniques that minimised the risks if things went wrong. Dying 5 days later, slowly, with your loved ones by your bedside from liver failure regretting your overdose has to be about as traumatic as can be. I obviously wasn’t the only one to think about that, and I just came across an old (1981) article about this :

Some of the stories are tragic. A friend of a friend jumped from a high building and hit a parked car several stories below. She broke most of her bones and punctured several of her inner organs, but didn’t die. Instead she was wheeled, conscious, to the local emergency rom, her most privately conceived act announced to the world by the ambulance siren. She spent the next year in bed, much of it in a hospital ward allocated to critically ill victims of violence, her still suicidal mind the only functioning part of her body.

They also collate a series of suicide notes here …

So, though it it now obviously some kind of liberal sport, this is nevertheless a funny critique of “educational” toys with a twist…

Baby Bush Toys | Simple Products for Simple Minds

The tongue-eating isopod [Cymothoa exigua] causes degeneration of the tongue [through siphoning and consuming the arterial blood supply] of its host fish, the rose snapper, Lutjanus guttatus, and it then attaches to the remaining tongue stub and floor of the fish’s mouth by hook-like pereopods. In this position the isopod superficially resembles its host’s missing tongue. Brusca & Gilligan (1983) hypothesize that these isopods serve as a mechanical replacement for the fish’s tongue and represent the first known case in animals of functional replacement of a host structure by a parasite. This relationship is so-far known only from the Gulf of California.

Amazing! This parasite structurally replaces the organ it removes from its host. This thing first hooks into the fishes artery supplying the tongue, which seems to be the cause of the tongue’s atrophy (rather than it physically eating the hosts tongue); then basically takes over. I wonder if the host can still enjoy its food?

I think I’m not going to French Kiss (especially not fish) for a while; and remember, never open your mouth while swimming in California!

The Isopoda page on Tree of Life
Practical Fishkeeping News Story

London has slid from being the 6th most expensive to the 8th most expensive City in the World. I was hoping that was because of lower costs, but it seems that it is because Oslo (now No. 2) and Rekyavik (No. 4) have leapfrogged over it. Even so, London still seems to have the most expensive toothpaste, maybe that’s why us Londoners have such yellow teeth…

As part of my ongoing, everpresent cephalopodic obsession, here is some fascinating footage; the invertebrate Octopus attacking and snacking on sharks …

Wow, it would be hugely time consuming to keep up with the daily avalanche of revelations over Iraqiville - I haven’t had time to keep up to date in a way that would enable me to write. But, suffice to say, packs of cards are tumbling all around the edifice that justified the war. Sadly, it took the death of a UK government scientist to prompt any sort of ‘coherent’ deconstruction by the media of government lies. This is hugely problematical because it focuses the criticism on a small subset of the lies. The death of one man by suicide should not occlude the REAL issue of the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis in a war which was rammed through the Senate and Parliament based on premeditated lies. This is a scandal of enormous proportions. The UN weapon inspectors, let us not forget them, asked for mere months to work to determine the situation in Iraq. The deafening chorus from the hawks was that it was a program doomed, yet after the war, scientists are still giving the same answers they gave the UN - there was no aggressively pursued weapons program. Maybe it wasn’t the ‘minders’ of Saddam Hussein’s regime after all, but fact - and therefore that the UN was close to the mark in its reports. In this light, Iraq was complying with the UN resolution passed against it, there was **NO** clear non-compliance by the Iraq government. There was belligerence no doubt, which I think is to be expected by most nations subjected to such long term ‘intrusion’ (justified or not). In that respect, there is a nice opinion piece in the new york times, asking whether sanctions had been right?

Of course, the security situation in Iraq is a mess, and little coherent information is coming out about reestablishing electricity and water supplies. There were many many reports that the US was wholly unprepared for governance of Iraq - a point that the anti-war groups repeatedly suggested, and unsurprisingly turned out to be the case. American soldiers are dying daily, I feel some sympathy (mostly for the family), but if I had been a soldier I would have chosen to be conscientious objector - those still in Iraq are responsible for their position. I have a natural tendency to be hugely critical of ‘soldiers’ - the blind assertions that soldiers are there to defend our liberty (like some glowing neutral angels) HUGELY distorts the fact that most military situations are offensive. Were the Vietnamese really planning invasion of Chicago? The geopolitical implications were far more complex than that, and thus the blanket justification of those who are willing to kill in the name of flag is paper thin.

Yes, the Baathist regime was a bitter and cruel one, and the chorus of the hawks has magically changed to: we did it for those oppressed by the Baathists. Wonderful to have such tangible concern for innocent lives - although it is a shame such a chorus is applied so selectively. There are many ‘regimes’ backed by those very hawks so ‘immaculate’ in its concern for the then opponents of the Baathist regime.

Looks like the heat is sure to go up this summer…

My site has been down for about 12 days - the host server hacked into and all data destroyed. I’ll have to rebuild this blog from scratch - thanks to google cache I have all the text, but reentering the text will be tedious to say the least. I HATE wasting time I could spend on important things. This is a valuable lesson to keep 2 backups of all my data…

Update: Well I actually was more diligent than I thought - I had a backup of the MT database on my current working machine - so I didn’t even need to reenter any text (thus didn’t waste time). However line breaks are all in the wrong place - so many entries have had their formatting screwed up…

Like me, you may have been desperately^[1] trying to find a friendly source of information about your pet cephalopod! Well, here is the definitive source:

The Online Octopus and Squid Magazine

Don’t you just love the sheer diversity of the passions of humanity (so transparently accessed through the web)?

[1] Only kidding, although I would love to have a pet giant squid, think of the fun when taking it for walks…

Some funny stories in a couple of the recent Onion articles, for example this one. on the new US Bill of Rights. Sometimes truth and fiction walk together in such a way as you have trouble distinguishing one from the other…

I’ve been to a conference in Orlando, and have been super-busy with scientific papers and stuff, thus I haven’t updated this page for a long time. Of course, while I’ve been away - Opera 7 beta was released. I’ve finally had a chance to play with it. My conclusions?
* CSS2 implementation is really great! Quite a few bugs naturally (many on this page!), but for the first beta release it is quite incredible.
* DOM appears well supported, although it is more difficult for me to critically evaluate it. Nevertheless, pages that didn’t work because of DHTML are working now
* CSS user modes - “VERY COOL!!!” apply and configure a whole range of user-specified CSS styles, such as text-browser emulation, accessibility mode etc.
* Navigation bar: as first used in Mozilla - very nice
* User interface - MDI and SDI have been merged. I was at first highly dubious about this, and still have some reservations. But as I’ve used it, I realise the logic in simplifying this duplicity. Tabbed browsing is still leagues ahead of Mozilla. Don’t like the icons too much (far too big) but looking at the skinning interface it is far more flexible (and thus complex) than OperaV6, so some very nice skins will be on their way — I want a version of the Mozilla skin, Breeze.
* F A S T - my god! loading a complex pure CSS page locally off the harddrive and comparing Mozilla V1.2b, Opera V6.05 and IE6 against Opera V7b1 — Opera 7 trounces the others. DHTML seems faster at least compared to Mozilla. IE6 is always slower with :hover and other CSS rendering to me…
* Email — tiny DLL with a lot of function. People complain about Opera having built-in e-mail, feature bloat they say - but when the email function is 170kb DLL and the total EXE file is still a staggeringly small 1.2mb, these arguments are rather pointless (email module can be removed if wanted too). Email seems nice — SPAM filters need some extensive tuning though. I liked the automatic folder generation for mailing lists. The email module (called M2) uses something called access-points (pointers into the email database rather than folders) - which has a wonderful potential for very flexible and robust email mangement. Actually thinking about this, I think it is going to be truly revolutionary change in email mangement and I can’t wait until M2 is polished off. Still going to stick with The BAT! for day-to-day use at the moment, but quick checking may get off-loaded onto M2. I really hope Opera can pull off M2 into a polished product. If the true potential of access points are fulfilled — I think people may buy Opera7 just for the built-in email. Very very promising…
* Memory use: It seems to use about 1mb more than Opera V6.05 when freshly loaded with a local page, but handles its memory very tightly.

Overall? My bias is towards CSS and DOM support, as ‘standards’ is the whole point of Opera, and I’m now very happy with the current state of play. It has certainly stopped me from switching over to Mozilla as my primary browser (which I promised to myself if CSS/DOM didn’t improve substantially in 7). Opera has so many unique and positive user-interface features, now that the rendering engine is top-notch (minus bugs in the beta of course), I think i’m definately sticking with Opera…