Brazil says 'no' to Office Open XML

"I was a member of the technical group that have studied OOXML specification extensively. I learned that it is unbelievable how ECMA (same guys that put together the JavaScript standard!) can think that a wannabe spec like OOXML is ready for submission. It is incomplete (does not provide mappings with legacy standards, since compatibility is OOXML goal), too long (6000+ pages), fully tied to a single product, uses deprecated substandards, promotes bad practices (embedded binary objects), has clear proprietary hooks (like “formatAsWord95″ XML tags), reinvents the wheel all around (date and color formats etc), and most of all does not have a standards-grade look and feel required for a universal and (virtually) eternal document format (doesn’t have to be perfect, but can’t be that imperfect)."

http://avi.alkalay.net/2007/08/ooxml-brazil-says-no.html

India throws MS open format out of the window

“We unanimously agree on the disapproval of OOXML with comments. The same will be submitted to ISO,” National Informatics Centre head and BIS technical committee chairperson Nita Verma said after a marathon meeting that lasted over six hours. There was no need for a voting as only Infosys Technologies and CSI supported Microsoft.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Infotech/Software/India_throws_Microsoft_open_format_out_of_the_window/articleshow/2305780.cms

Huge Hole Found in the Universe

The hole is nearly a billion light-years across. It is not a black hole, which is a small sphere of densely packed matter. Rather, this one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it's also strangely empty of the mysterious "dark matter" that permeates the cosmos. Other space voids have been found before, but nothing on this scale.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/hugeholefoundintheuniverse;_ylt=AqYC63AOdBKYvY09.EbqS1Nhr7sF

OOXML - Is it safe?

[Microsoft] are mounting an enormous offensive and expending great sums of money to convince ISO members that this rubbish heap of a format is acceptable as an ISO standard. Someone needs to ask, "Dear boy, next time why not try engineering?"

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/08/is-it-safe.html

Celestia

The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/

Ghengis Khan

"One in every 200 men alive today is a relative of Genghis Khan. An international team of geneticists has made the astonishing discovery that more than 16 million men in central Asia have the same male Y chromosome as the great Mongol leader. It is a striking finding: a huge chunk of modern humanity can trace its origins to Khan's vigorous policy of claiming the most beautiful women captured during his merciless conquest.

" 'One thirteenth century Persian historian claimed that within a century of Khan's birth, his enthusiastic mating habits had created a lineage of more than 20,000 individuals,' said team leader Dr Chris Tyler-Smith. 'That now appears to account for around 8% of the men in central Asia.'

"The team, from Britain, Italy, China and Uzbekistan, took tissue samples from 2,000 men from central Asia, and studied each one's Y chromosome, the genetic package that confers maleness and is passed only from father to son. 'Y chromosomes belonging to different men vary slightly. One in every 5,000 DNA units is not the same,' said Tyler- Smith. 'But when we looked at our results, we found a huge group that did not show any differences. We were absolutely amazed.' ...

"First the team, whose results are published in the latest edition of the American Journal of Human Genetics, found the geographical spread of possessors of the chromosomes almost exactly matched that of Genghis's empire, which stretched from China to the Middle East. Then they discovered that all of these men shared a common ancestor. Again the answer was consistent with the march of Khan, who lived between 1162 and 1227.

" 'There are only two ways a single Y chromosome can make such a mark on a population,' Tyler-Smith said. 'The chromosome could in some way confer its owners with some biological advantage. But given that a Y chromosome is little more than a biochemical switch that turns an embryo into a male child, it is hard to see how it could have such an effect. The other explanation is that its original possessor had some incredible social advantage over other Y chromosome possessors, allowing its owner to pass it on, over and over again. Khan fits that bill perfectly. He had many wives, and was enthusiastic in his attentions to other women.'

When Mongol armies attacked, their spoils were shared among the troops and officers, with one exception. The most beautiful women were reserved for Khan. The study also sided with the Hazara people of northern Pakistan, whose claim to be direct descendants of Khan is derided by historians. It found the Hazaras' Y chromosomes were identical to those they had already linked to Khan. 'It is not the first time the oral tradition has been proved more reliable than academic treatise,' he added. 'It takes the power of genetics to prove it, however.'

Robin McKie, "We Owe It All To Superstud Genghis," The Guardian, Observer Section, March 2, 2003, Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited.

How to write a story - Write short stories

"Before I learned how to write a story and set about writing a novel, I wrote short stories to cut my teeth as a prose writer. I recommend all would be novelists write as many short stories as possible."

http://howtowriteastory.wordpress.com/2007/08/20/how-to-write-a-story-write-short-stories/

Student Finds 5000-Year-Old Chewing Gum

Miss Sarah Pickin from Derby has been the favourite of fortune. She has found a piece of "Neolithic chewing gum", chewed cob of birch-bark, part of an amber ring and found on Thursday July 12th with help of two diggers from Oulu, Ms. Rumana Hossein and Ms. Maisoun Alsanat

http://www.kierikki.fi/sivu/en/ajankohtaista/

Voyager Spacecraft Celebrate 30th Anniversary

NASA's two Voyager spacecraft are celebrating three decades of flight as they careen toward interstellar space billions of miles from the solar system's edge.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070820_voyager_30th.html

Velcro

94x magnification, taken with a Nikon SMZ1500 Stereomicroscope coupled with a Spot Insight Digital Color Camera. Placed in the top 30, Nikon Small World 2005.

http://swissmiss.typepad.com/weblog/2007/08/macro-velcro.html

Also, Swissmiss blog. http://swissmiss.typepad.com/weblog/

University Taps Sewers for Internet Access

A web connection via the toilet bowl may sound like Google's most recent April Fool, but the University of Aberdeen plans to welcome students back with a high bandwidth internet network connected via the sewers.

http://itnews.com.au/News/59429,university-taps-sewers-for-web-access.aspx

Wikinews interviews World Wide Web co-inventor Robert Cailliau

"Tim, who had a longer experience with the internet world, convinced me that the web could only survive if all the code was freely available for everyone who wanted to tinker with it. In 1992-1993 I then worked patiently for some 6 months with CERN's Legal Service to draft a document that put the source code into the public domain. This also implied working to convince the managment, up to the Directors, of the need to do so. The result was the document signed on 30 April 1993 that gave the WWW technology to the world."

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews_interviews_World_Wide_Web_co-inventor_Robert_Cailliau

Haiku

Words lie still, silent
on the page. Eyes move: voices
sound inside my head.

http://www.ithaca.edu/flanagan/Poems/haiku.html