And Slaters Go Plop

As most of us know, Jesus was bodily resurrected about 2000 years ago. After he was resurrected he ascended up into heaven. But where did he go? Did he wait until everyone had gone home and then came back down again? Did he continue on out into space to an undisclosed location? We just don’t know.

What we can know however, is the vicinity in which he must be. Even travelling at the speed of light (~300,000km per second) he’s still somewhere in our galaxy:

(Obviously, these images are of galaxies other than our own but they’re of a similar size and type. Our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across and we’re located out on one of the spiral arms.)

I live and work from home which means I don’t get out as often as is probably healthy. A lot of my view of the world is formed by the news I read and sometimes I find myself getting a little pessimistic.

I came across the following statistics last week while reading Freakonomics (thoroughly recommended) which helped put things into perspective. If you think humanity is going to hell in a handbasket I hope these figures help you as much as they did me:

*En = England, N+B = Netherlands and Belgium, Sc = Scandinavia, G+S = Germany and Swizerland, It = Italy

(Source: Manuel Eisner, “Violence and the Rise of Modern Society” Criminology in Cambridge, October 2003, pp 3-7)

If you’re running Linux you’ll be aware that it’s crazyfast™ already. Want even more speed? Get Preload. If you’re running Ubuntu you can get it by opening your console and typing sudo apt-get install preload.

I’ve just received the following email announcing that the Encyclopedia Of Life has finally gone live with the first 30,000 pages:

The new Encyclopedia of Life portal has gone live with more than one million species pages!
In celebration of this big event, our first EOL newsletter is available at:

http://www.eol.org/content/page/newsletter.

You can see the new pages at http://www.eol.org. We also invite you to take the survey at the site so you can help us improve.

Unfortunately I’ve been unable to get on it due to the sheer volume of people who must be hitting it right now.

The EOL aims to catalogue the 1.8 million known species and is an open collaboration that’s expected to take 10 years or so. Take a look at EO Wilson’s talk that started it all off:

Last night we saw Ween play at the Powerstation in Auckland. Wow. Just wow. Dean is by far the best guitarist I’ve ever seen live and live is definitely what they do best.

They played songs from all of their albums. Chocolate and Cheese got a lot of coverage and their second song was an excellent rock reinterpretation of Spinal Meningitis which normally has the feel of creeping through a hospital ward.

Dean got plenty of solos in (unlike their latest album) and there were mammoth solos pulled off by the keyboardist (Glenn McClelland?) and the drummer, Claude Coleman. Toward the end of Claude’s solo he dropped the sticks (hardly surprising – he must have been knackered) and continued on with his hands which must have hurt.

Toward the end (almost three hours!) half of the crowd had this we’re-sore-and-we-want-to-go-home worried look in their eyes while the other half were bawling for more. Ween, in my opinion, are the essence of what rock is all about.

Was anyone else there? What did you think?

After an incredibly busy stretch Sal and I took a week off at the Botaira Resort in the Yasawa Islands in Fiji. No cell phone coverage, warm breezes, amazing snorkelling, plenty of bugs to hunt for and nothing else to do but lay around in a hammock reading books. The perfect holiday.

Just over three years ago we honeymooned in Tonga and I have to say that our Fijian experience was a better one. It may have been the fact that the Tongans were having issues with their royalty at the time but the Fijians just seem more friendly (despite what Frank Bainimarama is doing to the country at the moment) and their civil infrastructure is slightly better.

Botaira is run by the people of the local village which is on the other side of the island and suited us perfectly. No air conditioning or swimming pools but no hoards of backpackers either.

If you’re like us and are happy to live in a bure with geckos in low-tech surroundings and need to get away for a while check out Botaira.

On this day 199 years ago Charles Darwin was born. Famous for his contributions to the discovery of the mechanisms of evolution by way of natural selection he is considered to be one of the most important figures in the history of scientific enquiry.

The implications of his discoveries have caused turmoil among the egocentric of the world and the fallout continues to this day. Charles Darwin himself was extremely reluctant to publish his discovery because of the contention it would cause in a world dominated by young earth creationism – a view he held for many years against all evidence.

In my opinion, evolution is the most mind-blowing natural process ever discovered. It’s life changing in more ways than one and if you don’t have a full understanding of it I encourage you to take some time out today to learn more – you’ll never look at a blade of grass or a drop of water the same again.

If you listen to podcasts check out the excellent introductory series by Dr Zachary Moore called Evolution 101, otherwise take a look through the introduction to evolution resource at Berkeley.

At least something
/.+/

A positive integer
/^\d*$/

A decimal number
/^\d*\.?\d/

A valid email address
/^\w+((-\w+)|(\.\w+))*\@[A-Za-z0-9]+((\.|-)[A-Za-z0-9]+)*\.[A-Za-z0-9]+$/

A valid web address
/^(http:\/\/)?\w+([\.-]?\w+)*\w+([\.-]?\w+)*(\.\w+)+(\/)?(\w+)?$/

A hexadecimal colour (6 chars)
/^#?[0-9A-Fa-f]{6}$/

How to use in Javascript:
var testString = "ff0000";
var pattern = /^#?[0-9A-Fa-f]{6}$/;
if (testString.match(pattern)) DoSomething();

How to use in PHP:
$testString = 'ff0000';
$pattern = '/^#?[0-9A-Fa-f]{6}$/';
if (preg_match($pattern, $testString) DoSomething();

How to use in C#:
string testString = "ff0000";
string pattern = @"^#?[0-9A-Fa-f]{6}$";
Match m = Regex.Match(testString, pattern);
if (m.Success) DoSomething();

I stumbled across the most bizarre-looking spider today up at our bit of land on the Kaipara Harbour. It’s a Poecilopachys Australasiae and, as the name suggests, it’s a visitor from Australia. It was guarding an enclosed web that had a spindle-shaped egg sac suspended in the middle of it. I wonder what natural selection process caused it to develop these strange features?