Circadiana: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)

This is an awesome blog about sleep, from someone who appears to be a sleep researcher. Good writing, excellent scientific detail in places. Facinating!

How to Become an Early Riser

A simple approach, well reasoned. Jodie and I are going to try it.

Radio Candela

This is my big new project! Jodie & I are performing in 14 days (13 days?) at Scala, as our new band Candela. I've decided to start a Podcast of the process of preparation, as we get our original songs together and polished, ready for our first real performance.

I've divided the blogs and podcasts into two. Firstly, Radio Candela is the podcastumentary of our band as we rehearse and negotiate and basically get ourselves together. Second, Radio Candela Music is just finished (usually demo quality) recordings, new stuff and old stuff as we feel like releasing it.

Radio Candela

• Radio Candela Music - The blog
  http://RadioCandela.blogspot.com
• Radio Candela - The podcast (paste this url into ipodder)
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadioCandela
• Radio Candela - The newsfeed
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadioCandela_blog

Radio Candela Music

• Radio Candela Music - The blog
  http://RadioCandelaMusic.blogspot.com
• Radio Candela Music - The podcast (paste this url into ipodder)
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadioCandelaMusic
• Radio Candela Music - The newsfeed
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadioCandelaMusic_blog

I'm finding this really exciting, because it's either really bold and interesting, or really ridiculous. Probably a bit of both.

Anyway, check it out!

US poised to rule on cloned livestock

Meat and milk from cloned farm animals is about to be declared safe for human consumption by the US Food and Drug Administration, one of the world's most powerful regulatory bodies.
(etc, see link)

Man, we live in funky times! Good one.

Researchers grow stem cells from human skin

Researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine have successfully isolated stem cells from human skin, expanded them in the laboratory and coaxed them into becoming fat, muscle and bone cells. The study, one of the first studies to show the ability of a single adult stem cell to become multiple tissue types, is reported today in Stem Cells and Development.

"These cells should provide a valuable resource for tissue repair and for organs as well," said Anthony Atala, M.D., director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine and senior researcher on the project. "Because these cells are taken from a patient's own skin, there would not be problems with organ or tissue rejection."

(etc, click the title for the full story. This is a research direction that should be pursued further; it has the potential to circumvent the whole ethical issue with embryonic stem cells, and to make it much simpler to get around rejection problems without resorting to nucleonic transfer techniques. Excellent!)

Accelerando!

Read it at the site above. It's available for free.

Accelerando is a novel by Charlie Stross, a story which rips through you like a freight train, set in the world of pre- and post-technological singularity. Even though the novel is available for free, it is definitely not obscure or second rate; Charlie has been nominated for a Hugo for this work, a fact that was documented in a recent New York Times article on him (and he's not even American).

This book is *incredible*, it definitely goes in the list of my favorite Sci Fi, along with Greg Egan's Diaspora, and I am not sure what else (possibly Ringworld by Larry Niven, although that is partially for sentimental reasons).

Unlike Diaspora (an utterly mindblowing work, btw), Accelerando is packed with excellent, likable characters, and doesn't require a higher degree in physics and mathematics on the part of the reader. The story is *dense* with unexplained references to advanced modern concepts, so future shock is hard to avoid, but it's comprehensible enough, and the characters in the story are struggling as much as the reader, so at least you don't feel alone in your bewilderment :-)

Read it. It'll turn your optimism dial to 11.

Dangerrrr: cats could alter your personality

This is an article about the parasite toxoplasma gondii, carried in a cycle by cats and rats, which infects half of the human population of Britain and up to 90% of the human population of France. It makes all kinds of modifications to your personality, detailed in the article. The parasite has been known of for decades, but the fact that it has actual effects on behaviour is a recent finding.

I had a lot of contact with cats as a child, and would assume I'm infected with it, especially given this:

"By contrast, the infected men appeared to suffer from the “alley cat” effect: becoming less well groomed undesirable loners who were more willing to fight. They were more likely to be suspicious and jealous. “They tended to dislike following rules,” Flegr said. "

I'm not super aggressive by any means, but I am a scruffy loner who dislikes following rules. It'd be amazing if that came down to a parasite!!!

Last paragraph:
Dr Dominique Soldati, a researcher at Imperial College in London, is studying ways of blocking toxoplasma from getting into cells. “Once you are infected you cannot get rid of this parasite and the numbers of them slowly grow over the years,” she said. “It’s not a nice thought.”

I don't agree that this is a particular problem. I imagine humans have had this parasite for millenia; it's probably shaped the human condition to some extent. So it's not like this is a new and scary threat, just an unexpected quirk in how we come to be who we are. Cool!

Free Online Calendar with SMS Reminders

I was thinking that I need to be a bit better organised. I've got a calendar at a free calendar place, but my lovely wife showed me the Yahoo calendar, and guess what? It kicks butt!

It's an exraordinarily flexible calendar, allowing you heaps of options for sharing your calendar out (including letting others add items to your calendar), and to send email reminders when you have an "event" (scheduled item in your calendar). The reminder feature is what interests me.

It interests me because, meanwhile, I have my hotmail account set up to send me sms messages when emails arrive (it includes a pretty decent ability to select which messages you want forwarded via sms, so you don't pay for crap to be forwarded to you!). I also use MSN Messenger for instant messaging, and as my hotmail address is my MSN Passport address, I am notified of emails by Messenger instead of by sms when I'm logged in, which saves a few dollars and is more useful when I'm at a PC.

So putting them together, by telling yahoo to use my hotmail email to send me reminders, I now have an online calendar which sends me sms messages to remind me of upcoming appointments!

Now, my lovely wife Jodie is the organiser in the family (otherwise we would be doomed). She was extremely interested in this facility, so I'm setting it up for her too. But further to this, we've now set up a private yahoo group for our family, which has its own calendar. Not only can the two of us can get to it, the kids can too (all of us are computer freaks with our own machines). This will be used to schedule in family-wide events, of which there are quite a few, because we are a one car family. Six computers, one car. We may possibly be geeks :-)

In a personal yahoo calendar, you can set it up to show group calendars and other people's shared personal calendars alongside or inline with yours. I've done this with the family calendar and Jodie's calendar, so now I see the combined view of what is going on, family wide (I can also add in the kids personal calendars if they want to make them, and if they want to give me access!). Also, the family yahoogroup can send reminders for events, which go to my hotmail account too, so I get sms alerts for not only my calendar, but for the family calendar.

Now this all sounds like we are crazy anal organisation freaks; we are anything but. The point of all this automation is that I am completely hopeless with anything that has a date attached. Jodie is better, but she has the load of the whole family to deal with. So this kind of facility is priceless to us. And it's completely free! Except for the price of the SMSs, I guess, but that's not so bad.

Anyway, I'll keep the blog posted on how this goes. It's pretty damned cool stuff. Wow, the new millenium ey?

---

If you want to set this stuff up for yourself:
MyYahoo (get your calendar here)
- I advise you to steer clear of their email and toolbar.
Yahoo Groups (set up a group calendar that can send reminders to all group subscribers here)
Hotmail (set up email to sms forwarding here)
- again, steer clear of these guys for email, except for email to sms forwarding
GMail (get online email here, it's the best)
- to get an account you need an invite from an existing user. Email me and I'll send you one. It leaves the rest for dead.

More on the cyborg suit

More on the cyborg suit, a yahoo news article with a very cool photo:

Breathe water like a fish!

Click above for the full story. The interesting bit is here:



The system developed by Bodner uses a well known physical law called the "Henry Law" which describes gas absorption in liquids. This law states that the amount of gas that can be dissolved in a liquid body is proportional to the pressure on the liquid body. The law works in both directions – lowering the pressure will release more gas out of the liquid. This is done by a centrifuge which rotates rapidly thus creating under pressure inside a small sealed chamber containing sea water. The system will be powered by rechargeable batteries. Calculations showed that a one kilo Lithium battery can provide a diver with about one hour of diving time.

New Scientist Breaking News - Mission to build a simulated brain begins

Fasten your seatbelts, here comes the singularity. I didn't expect to see an effort like this one for some time, and it looks like some serious muscle is behind it, namely IBM using the Blue Gene design a new machine called Blue Brain. Holy crap!