This is a counter rant, so please excuse me. It regards a YouTube video parody turning a David Lynch comment on tiny cellphone screens being used to watch movies, into an iPhone commercial. A sensible debate in the ghettos of the YouTube comment system is beyond fanciful, so this gets a blog post instead. Take a look;

Ya think? Look here, cranky (all of Lynch, the person who made this parody and the person who posted it), no one is going to exclusively watch a worthwhile movie on the iPhone. If they do, they are indeed missing out. No one in their right mind does that. When I get an iPhone or an iPod touch, I’m going to have videos, cartoons and maybe even movies on it. Not because I think I’m experiencing the media in the manner the creator intended, but because I’ll be experiencing entertainment on a portable device in a manner I see fit. Quite frankly, with the horrendous drivel coming out of Hollywood these days, I don’t think I’d be missing much watching most movies on a 4″ screen. Either that or there’s some kind of special magic I’ll rob myself of, if I don’t watch Napoleon Dynamite or Borat in a theatre.

Get off your pretentious high horse you arrogant fucks, no one cares what you think. All we care about is having a sexy phones (this goes for any of the new generation phones with those nice, big, bright, gorgeous screens) with the ABILITY to play video. End of story.

Sorry about all that, here’s something to lighten the mood (since it’s so freakin’ awesome). God is a DJ;

I just accidentally broke the screen on my 4 GB iPod Nano. I fucking loved that thing. It’s now a worthless 4 GB iPod shuffle. What a waste.

Apple are supposed to be unveiling some new iPod today, though, as luck would have it, so maybe I can save up some extra cash and buy one of those when they come out. Stupid breakable electronics….

via Astronomy Buzz;

COROT has provided its first image of a giant planet orbiting another star and the first bit of ‘seismic’ information on a far away, Sun-like star, with unexpected accuracy.

The ESA (European Space Agency) satellite COROT (COnvection ROtation and planetary Transits) is designed in part to measure the variations in light waves from stars when an exoplanet transits its stellar parent. This can be summed up simply with the following image from the ESA;

The first planet imaged is a gas giant with a radius 1.78 times that of Jupiter (or 127,255 km), which completes an orbit of its star every 36 hours.

The exceptionally cool thing about these results is the accuracy to which this luminescent variance has been measured. So accurate that imaging a planet the size of the Earth is possible. From the ESA Portal;

The unanticipated level of accuracy of this raw data shows that COROT will be able to see rocky planets – perhaps even as small as Earth – and possibly provide an indication of their chemical composition.

Measuring the variance in the light frequencies is a good way of determining the composition of something as light passes through. This means that determining the make-up of a rocky exoplanet’s atmosphere is perhaps possible with COROT.

COROT could herald a new age of exoplanet discovery, which is awesome. We need a new home.

Ever wondered how the solar system formed and why the planets and asteroids are the way they are? I do all the time. That’s why I’m in the second year of my MSc in Geology; the research year. I thought I’d share a few shots of the meteorite samples I’m doing my research on, and a brief run-down on what I’m doing, what I’m aiming to achieve and why any of this counts as geology.

At the risk of you, my beloved reader, experiencing a fit of explosive eye-glazing, I will first present a picture of my very first mounted meteorite sample (not as dirty as it sounds);

The white bit in this picture is 4.5672 billion years old. It’s one of the oldest solids in the Solar System and dates back to a time when the Sun was just kicking off its fire-juggling party. The minute concentrations of iron in this rock and the iron in your blood are from the same star-derived reservoir. But I digress.

This is a sample of a Calcium-Aluminium rich Inclusion (or CAI) from a carbonaceous chondrite (stoney-iron meteorites). These things formed in a very hot environment, and the minerals within have gone through between one and three stages of melting. The heat inherent in the environment was not due to the sun, but radioactive decay of unstable isotopes such as 26 Aluminium (Half life of ~703 Ka).

What I’m doing with these tiny inclusions (which are all less than 10mm in diameter), is determining the major mineral constituents, of each of those I’m looking at the minor or trace element concentrations and finally dating them by determining comparative ²⁶Mg deficits (if any). So what involved in each step?

Step 1: Mineralogy: Using an Electron Micro Probe, I am able to determine the major elemental weight percentages of each mineral “phase” of the targeted CAI;

Each shade of grey in the above image is a different mineral. In this case, the lightest phase (Phase 1, points of sampling are orange) is melilite, the second lightest (Phase 2, coloured blue) is pyroxene, phase 3 (in green) is anorthite, and the nearly black phase 4 (in red) is spinel. The above image is an electron back-scatter image of a Type B1 CAI from the carboneceous chondrite NWA 2364.

Step 2: Trace Elements: Using Laser Ablation Inductively-Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS), I am determining the concentrations of 34 chemical elements that are present to an accuracy of a few parts per million (ppm) or less. The elements I’m looking for range through Uranium, Thorium, Lead, Titanium, the Rare Earth Elements (REE) and more. By comparing the concentrations of these elements in different CAIs, whole meteorites and planets, you can get an idea of what was around when each formed and how the areas of formation differed in their respective elemental composition. Did the Earth and these CAIs form in the same place in the solar nebula? The answer at the moment is no, so why did the solar nebula cloud have differing concentrations of elements from one point to another? That’s the big questions relating to how these various bodies formed.

I like to think of this step as a real life game of Asteroids, with a scientific slant.

Step 3: Magnesium Deficits and Dating: Using another kind of ICPMS, namely a Multi-Collector, I will be determining the concentrations of the isotopes of magnesium (Mg) in each of my collected samples. As I mentioned previously, these samples were heated by the decay of ²⁶Al. This particular isotope decays to ²⁶Mg. So the more ²⁶Mg in a sample, the older it is. Any deficit in ²⁶Mg compared to that of the maximum found in CAIs can be correlated to the time between CAI formation and the formation of whatever you’re looking at. So by getting the ²⁶Mg/²⁴Mg ratio from these samples, I can determine their relative ages from oldest to youngest. This is of interest because knowing over what time span CAIs were forming can help you determine whether it all happened at once in a very short time span (and was thus stopped by some process of the sun’s formation), whether there were several exclusive periods of CAI formation (perhaps by injection of ²⁶Al from nearby supernovae), or whether it happened slowly and steadily over 6 half lives of ²⁶Al (most likely).

Why does this count as geology? By knowing what was around when the Earth formed and thus what it is made of (i.e, how the chemical composition of the solar nebula changed over time) and how old it is in comparison to other bodies in the solar system, you can build more accurate models of the chemical composition of the materials that make up the crust, mantle and the core of the Earth. This helps in the understanding of how and why things are the way they are. It also makes up the underpinning of mantle geochemistry, volcanic petrology and chemistry, and environmental and atmospheric evolution (which links to the formation of life (abiogenesis) and the like.

So that’s what I’m spending most of my time doing. Any questions, just post a comment and I’ll endeavour to answer.

The Nintendo Wii launches here in a mere 4 hours. In one hour I’m going to my local game shop for a launch party. I don’t think I could be more hyped, partly because it’s a new Nintendo console, party because of Zelda: Twilight Princess and partly because I’ve been anticipating this launch for 2 years. To quote Eric Cartman; “It’s like waiting for christmas, times a thousand“.

Though I’m quite the Nintendo fan, I’ve never actually been to a new console launch. I flew thousands of kilometres in 2001 to go to E3 and play the GameCube at its first public showing, which I suppose is pretty hardcore, but when launch came around, I simply ordered a cube from the USA and got it months before it came out here (NZ). It’s a first for me and I’m giddy with excitement.

Over the past few months of using OS X, I’ve been in my old swing of using Firefox as my browser. Over the past few weeks, however, I’ve been getting anoyed with Firefox crawling along, taking ages to load pages, and generally preforming poorly.

So, since Opera make a free, ad-free version of their browser for OS X, and since I’ve had it insalled for the past few months owing to various web development, I’m going to give Opera a full “go” as it were.

I found a neat page of Firefox extension equivalents in Opera, and it turns out most of my needs are filled in Opera by default. There’s even a user stylesheet for hiding and selectively playing flash, which is a biggy for me, what with all the Youtubing I do. The only thing lacking is a true equivalent of the web developer extension, which is essential for my various tom-dickery in the web design and layout sphere. But to be honest, I don’t hate Firefox, so a flick back to it for any web development is no problem with me (especially with QuickSilver making launching so quick).

As for daily browsing, i welcome my faster, less bloated web browser to the forefront of my web experience, and I’ll let you know how it goes.

Next week I’ll come into owning my first Mac; a 12″ Powerbook, and with it will come the “switch”, although in my case it’ll be from Linux to Mac, as opposed to the intended market.

I started writing this article from the perspective that I’d lose a few of the cool features I’ve become accustomed to over my years of using Linux, however as my research expanded I found that someone has solved, or at least claimed to have solved, every one of my needs, so without further delay, this is what I found will make my switching all the more easier;

Amarok: Since I started using Kubuntu – the KDE version of Ubuntu, I’ve been using Amarok as my music player. Amarok leaves iTunes for dead as a music player, as you can sync to your iPod, bring up artist information and song lyrics, compile playlists (and then sync them plus their songs to you ‘pod) and interface to last.fm and Musicbrainz from the default install – no plugins required. There’s ways to install Amarok on OSX, but it requires compiling and tweaking, which is something I gave up on when I dumped Gentoo Linux in favour of Kubuntu. We’ll see how desparate I get for a decent music player.

Mature Terminal Applications: I’ll admit I’m a terminal bunny. When I’m not using Firefox, I’ll likely be in a terminal. My default these days is Konsole, the KDE terminal emulation program – which features, much like Firefox, a tabbed window with the ability to show lots of tabs without having lots of windows. Luckily, there’s geeks out there who wanted the same thing and made iTerm. One less problem for me.

Multiple Desktops: Back in the days of Windows before I discovered Linux, I had everything on the same desktop. Hours of my life have been wasted because I would have to minimise, maximise and other-mise the windows to switch between tasks. Then Linux came along with multiple, virtual desktops, allowing a hot key to arrange all the windows I needed for one element of my task to be displayed. Another hotkey away was another set of windows pertaining to a different task, and then another and another. For example, one desktop contains my graphics programs, while the other contains a web browser showing how the graphics look in the web world. “Alas“, I thought, “Mac uses Exposé, a wicked and beautiful window switching technique, but not quite what I need“. Though I’ve used Exposé extensively, I’ve always found I’m better off with multiple desktops – which is why this application, seems to fit the bill perfectly. Check out the movies of the various desktop switching here.

Mplayer: Granted there’s Mplayer for OS X, I just wanted to make sure everyone knew about it, since it’s the best movie player available – it literally plays everything.

GIMP: The GIMP is a graphics application that’s, in my opinion, good enough as to be a free version of Photoshop. There’s a list of ways to install on OSX on the GIMP homepage (of which Gimp.app seems the most painless), so at least it’s possible.

Inkscape: A free vector drawing program, Inkscape come in an OSX package too. Splendid.

Open Office: The free, and frankly superior office suite forked from Sun’s Star Office. There’s an OS X Version called NeoOffice. Koz reackons it takes ages to load, but it’s free, so I can occupy myself while it loads.

All in all, my trip over to the other side looks to be rather more tempting than I had originally thought, and to be honest, I couldn’t wait to change. Now I’m salivating at the prospect. Bring on next week!

From a rock geek perspective, I found it pretty damn funny that the Birts used a fake rock to spy on the Russians. Why a rock and not, let’s say, a tree? Or perhaps a delicious fake steak?

The BBC has the details, including a picture of the suspected geospy, which looks like lithified, weathered mudstone.

I’m about to crack and admit I want an iPod. For years I’ve sat denying the mp3-only bar of soap so many have surrendered their wills to. The Nano is small and has a good chunk of solid-state memory which is close to perfect.

The only things I’d add would be the ability to play Ogg Vorbis, and 10GB of storage rather than 4. Perhaps a built in short-range radio transmitter would be cool too, but that’s just bat-shit crazy.

Anyway, that aside, were I to actually fall victim to the i-trend, I’d have another item on my list straight away – this wooden case. It may not have a window to use the scroll wheel or anything, but who cares? It’s got pure class. Wood.

I use Linux as my operating system. Partly because I used to be an IT guy, and have a clue about computers (so therefore refuse to use Windows), but mostly because I’m poor and can’t afford a Mac at the moment.

As a person who was more concerned with things working exactly as I wanted them to, I installed Gentoo Linux – a distribution you download and compile specifically for your machine. Gentoo has a lot of packages in it’s online catalouge. Tens of thousands of programs. Basically, if it compiles on Linux, you can install it in Gentoo from the commandline.

Over the past year, I’ve been using Macs at school and work, and Linux at home. I like OS X. It Just works. And it’s because things just work in most computer situations for me, that I’ve become annoyed and irritated with the shear amount of time I have to spend making my Gentoo box run. I’m sick of writing conf files, having old conf files not work with newer version of programs, or caring which driver is in charge of outputting sound to my headphones. Seriously, I have more important things to do these days.

So, today I’ve decided to ditch Gentoo and give Ubuntu Linux a try. I hear it’s good, and they seem to have built the system on a good philosophy;

Ubuntu is a free, open source operating system that starts with the breadth of Debian and adds regular releases (every six months), a clear focus on the user and usability (it should “Just Work”, TM) and a commitment to security updates with 18 months of support for every release.

So it’s built on Debian (which is hardcore), has a good professional backup crew making sure things keep ticking, and it just works. Let’s see how this works out.

Fare thee well Gentoo. You were good while I cared.