At Gene Expression, David Burbridge writes about the "Barbary Pirates"...#

``From the late Middle Ages down to the early 19th century, pirates from the Barbary Coast - roughly modern Morocco and Algeria - terrorised the Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic coasts as far north as the British Isles. The pirates captured numerous Europeans and carried them back to North Africa, where they were sold as slaves. Many of them were sailors and fisherman captured at sea, but the pirates also raided on-shore and took male and female captives.

[...]

The wealthier captives were often ransomed by their relatives, and even the poorer ones were sometimes bought by Christian philanthropists and returned to Europe (in Britain funds were set up for this purpose). Of those who stayed behind, the men were mostly worked to death as galley slaves, while the younger boys might be castrated. Either way, no contribution to the gene pool.

For women and girls, it was a different matter. European women were much in demand for the harems of wealthy Arabs and Turks. It wasn't always a fate worse than death. One captured English girl became the Queen of Morocco.''

Godless writes "Why do Americans fear Nuclear Power?" at Gene Expression...#

``But uranium is really not quite so scarce, and fuel cost is not the dominating factor here. The real issue is that banning the closed fuel cycle dramatically increases the amount of nuclear waste, and waste disposal is the real obstacle to public acceptance. Anti-nuclear activists knew this , which is why they pushed for a ban on the closed fuel cycle:

At the same time, the leading anti-nuclear activists fully recognized that without reprocessing , the nuclear power fuel cycle could not be closed, the breeder reactor would be stopped, and nuclear power's future would be limited, if not ended. This fit their own personal and organizational goals.

[...]

Point: secular leftists can be just as afraid of progress as Christian fundamentalists...but GNXP readers know that already, after reading about leftist opposition to GM crops, human differences, genetic engineering, etc.''

Moxie writes about spam filters...#

``At last, email does seem to be arriving selectively (mostly spam) not that I mind since I have 2,457 real emails in my inbox to respond to. But I can't help thinking that this is a lot like a Doctor saying, "Sure, I can cure your insomnia but the treatment will give you a disfiguring flesh eating bacterial infection and you'll want to take your own life." ''

At Kuro5hin is Mars in 186 Seconds - #

``In the past, scientists studying Mars via space probes have been stymied by the same problem online video game players have - lag. During the late 70's, it would take more than 44 minutes to receive a response from the space probes. When the Soujourner Rover drove around Mars in 1997, it took 17 minutes for radio commands and replies to journey between Mars each way. But on August 27th, it will only take 3 minutes, 6 seconds for a radio or light wave to travel between Earth and Mars. That's a mere 186 seconds. To go from 22 minutes to 3 minutes explains just how close Earth and Mars will come to each other. ''

Jason Marshall write about Prioritizing Optimizations...#

``The low-hanging fruit analogy is perhaps the worst analogy in the history of computing analogies. It encourages a dangerous and short-sighted policy for dealing with performance problems. Farmer Joan, the fruit grower, doesn't pick the low-hanging fruit, she picks all of the ripe fruit at the same time. If she didn't, then the ripe fruit in the high branches would rot on the tree.

[...]

If a module has one problem, it frequently has more than one problem. The module may be owned by one person who doesn't have a good grasp of writing performant code. Alternatively, the module may get passed around a lot. So many hands have touched it that no one person has a good grasp of everything that's going on, resulting in decay. Based on the Economics of Optimization, the rule of thumb is: *It's cheaper to fix all of the problems in one module than to fix half of the problems in two modules.* You pay fewer costs in regression testing and retraining if you reduce the number of times the structure of the system changes significantly. Restructuring one module in one release of the product, then restructuring the other in the next results in two such incidents, whereas changing both now and both again later results in four. ''

Nova writes about awareness and how it realtes to Artifical Intelligence...#

``Secondly, nothingness is impossible. There are two problems with saying that "x is nothingness" -- first of all, if x is nothingness how can you even posit x to "be" nothingness -- that is a contradiction in that it posits that x is both something and nothing. Second, since "nothing" has no qualities whatsoever how could this "nothing" be known -- what is there in it to know? And if it is unknowable, then how could you know that x is equivalent to it -- what is there to compare x to? Furthermore, to posit that there exists a phenomenon of "nothingness" is ludicrous because by definition "nothingness" contains nothing at all to posit, not even the quality of having existence, not even the quality of being nothingness. The very idea of "nothing" is an illusion for there is nothing for it to refer to at all, it doesn't represent what it symbolizes, it doesn't symbolize anything. If something called nothing actually existed, it wouldn't therefore be nothing.''

Via Just a Gwai Lo is a quote from a review of Against Love -#

``In describing modern marriage, Kipnis, a professor of television, radio and film at Northwestern University, echoes the menacing deadness of the factory worker as described by Marx: "When monogamy becomes labour, when desire is organized contractually, with accounts kept and fidelity extracted like labour from employees. Is this really what we mean by a Good Relationship?" ''

Dienekes writes about Mate Choice and Attractiveness...#

``There are two important factors to be considered when using mate choice as a proxy for attractiveness:

1. Mate choice is bi-directional. If A chooses to marry B, that does not mean that A necessarily likes B best, since it's possible that A would choose C, who however does not like A. In other words, the object of choice is not passive.

2. Mate choice is dependent on availability of potential mates. It's well-known, for example, that the number of "marriageable" people is zero up to some age, then increases to a peak, then decreases again as people get married or die. Or for example, a group of immigrants has a very high male/female ratio; this would create an incentive for males to outmarry, regardless of whether or not they find the females of their own group more attractive or not. ''

Jarno Virtanen writes that "In weblogging, personality counts"...#

``I conclude that for me the content is not, by far, all I am after when I am reading weblogs. You see, personality counts. I want to relate the text to the author's personality. I don't know most of these people whose weblogs I read, but I still have created an image of them and their personality in my mind, and it is an important factor when I am reading their texts. ''

Chrystal got a babe-bocious new outfit and moved into the new apartment...#

``Scene: About 5 minutes after I introduce myself to my roommate's mom, she comes over to look at the laundry room and peeks into my room to discover me under the covers watching tv with a pint of Ben & Jerry's.
Thoughts: Wow, Sara has THE laziest roommate in the entire world!!!!!!
Action: Waves''