November 24th, 2004
Here's an interesting little revelation.... it seems that when Microsoft settled its antitrust battle with the Computer & Communications Industry Association earlier this month, half of the $19.75 million settlement went directly to Ed Black, CEO of the CCIA and a vocal Microsoft critic. In return, CCIA dropped its antitrust suit against Microsoft alleging that Windows XP is anticompetitive, and also agreed to stop acting as an agent for the EU in its own antitrust suit.
Hey, if you can't beat'em on merit, buy'em off...?
Another justification for chocolate: A new study indicates theobromine, a key ingredient of chocolate, is a more effective cough suppressant than codeine, and has none of the side effects associated with conventional pharmaceutical treatments for persistent coughing. Testing using a capsaicin inhaler, a standard test for determining the efficacy of cough suppressants, showed a dose of theobromine equivalent to about two cups of cocoa to be about 30% more effective than codeine. Codeine, by contrast, was only marginally more effective than a placebo.
I try ta think, an' nuttin' happens: Northwestern University researchers previously found that chronic pain sufferers have decreased brain activity in the thalamus, known to be important in decision-making and social behavior. Now, new results indicate that chronic pain causes physical loss of brain matter in the thalamus and prefrontal cortex, which may be irreversible and may render pain treatment ineffective.
More things in heaven and earth, and ocean: The International Census of Marine Life, the first systematic attempt to map the Earth's oceans, has logged almost a quarter of a million species, with new species turning up at close to 50 per week. Scientists estimate as many as ten times more may remain to be discovered. Analysis of the dabatase of known species created for the project reveals that 95% of current marine biology knowledge comes from surface waters, and less than 0.1% from the bottom half of the water column.
The early black hole gets the worm: Two separate new studies have shown that supermassive black holes were present early in the history of the universe. NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory has made measurements on the black hole SDSSp J1306 [12.7 billion light years distant, so we're seeing it as it was when the Universe was only a billion years old) showing that at that time, it was approximately a billion solar masses and emitting twenty trillion times the energy output of the Sun. The ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory has made similar observations on black hole SDSSp J1030, 12.8 billion light years away and of similar mass. Who knows how massive they are now .... those monsters are -- were, almost 13 billion years ago -- big enough to gobble up entire galaxies.
If you use your color laser printer for your ransom note, use a yellow background: A number of color laser printer and color manufacturers, including Xerox, are using what amounts to a sparse glyph to covertly print the manufacturer code and serial number of the printer/copier on every page printed, coded in scattered yellow pixels. Governments, including that of the US, are using the encoded numbers to track down counterfeiters and forgers, and could in principle be used to track any document printed or copied on such a device back to the machine it was printed on. Xerox says don't bother trying to disable the encoding mechanism, but it seems a simple workaround is to just use a yellow page background....
And finally, Living the Half Life: On a less serious note, it is reported that Valve has shut down 20,000 Steam accounts, citing reasons including credit card fraud, account theft, and piracy of HalfLife 2 and other Valve games. Valve denies accusations that it deliberately leaked cracked copies of HalfLife 2 to entrap users.