Keys Corner

The largest ever study of the links between lifestyle and cancer has made 10 stark recommendations to reduce the risk of developing the disease…

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The environmental lobby often laments mankind’s unfortunate obsession with the short term. People, by and large, don’t tend to think ahead (two-thirds of Britons lack wills, for example, leaving them unprepared for one of life’s few real certainties). Politicians, with one eye always fixed on surviving the next election, are particularly guilty of short-termism. That is a problem, since human time-scales don’t always match environmental ones. A razed rainforest may take decades to regrow. Climate change will remain a problem for centuries, even if carbon emissions were to cease tomorrow.

One of the thorniest long-term problems is what to do with nuclear waste. Many western countries may build new nuclear plants; they see the energy as clean and secure. But their publics remain dubious, and nuclear waste tops their list of worries…

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Elephants are in the news at the moment:

• Elephants can differentiate between different tribes and different types of humans
• Bees repel elephants
• Elephants seem to like revenge

The run up to Christmas seems to start earlier each year. One way to tell it’s Christmas in Germany is when everyone starts eating Lebkuchen (gingerbread), which comes in many different forms, but the most common is as round pieces of gingerbread baked on a thin wafer of white oblate, like in the picture above. It’s yummy and you can usually only buy it over the Christmas period.

Yesterday, Ruth and I took our cars to the local tyre dealer to get our winter wheels mounted – when we paid, we got given our first Lebkuchen of the year.

Would you attempt this in a Lada 4×4?
(Via DarkRoastedBlend)

PDP-8 front panel
No, I didn’t own a DEC PDP-8, but when I studied Engineering at university, this was the first computer I ever wrote a program for. The PDP-8 was one of the first mini-computers produced (from 1965 onwards); it had 4096 12-bit words of main memory. And with a list price of $18000 in the basic configuraton it was affordable enough that the university felt happy to allow students hands-on experience. The picture shows part of the front panel with the toggle switches used to program the computer – or if you had a high speed paper tape reader or a teletype console (which also had a paper tape reader), they were used to boot the machine from the tape reader. You can see a short video of a small program to increment a counter in memory being run by toggling the front panel keys here.

I was reminded about the PDP-8 when I found this photo series of vintage computer hardware on Time’s website – there are some fascinating pictures to browse through.

Russia and the USA have the world’s highest populations of prisoners [PDF from the British Government, 116 KB size]. Russia has 685 per 100,000 people of the national population locked away, followed by the USA, which has 645 prisoners per 100,000. Those figures are around 6 times the rates for most countries in Europe, by the way (Germany, France, Switzerland: 90, UK 125, Italy 85 for example. Even Zimbabwe only has 155 per 100,000 in prison).

The USA under George W Bush has moved much closer to a soviet-style regime in another way: the Transport Security Administration (TSA) has just published a proposal that all air passengers will have to apply for permission to fly to/from or over the USA 72 hours in advance of their flight for “security screening”. Only if you get a clean bill of health will you be issued with a boarding card. Non-travellers entering secure areas, such as parents escorting children, will also need clearance. (If you don’t fancy ploughing though a 1MB PDF, the Register has summarized the main points here).

Apart from sounding very like the thin edge of requirements similar to those in Russia to have internal passports for movements within Russia – a requirement which is about to be lifted, by the way, I can’t imagine that it will help tourism, which despite the cheap dollar has been suffering from the increasing bureaucracy associated with trying to arrange travel to the USA.

When Palm announced the Centro smart phone recently, I was skeptical about whether it would be any good – the phone has a full keyboard (good) but the keys are even smaller than those of the Treo (bad?) which I use today. I would like to replace my Treo 650 because it is quite bulky and heavy for a shirt pocket, which is where I carry it most of the time. But I want to protect my investment in Palm applications which I have purchased over the years – dictionaries and translation software, password safe and so on.

However, Dave Pogue has just reviewed it for the New York Times, and he is convinced it is a big improvement. His summary:

Still, you’ve rarely seen so much utility in such a small package, and you’ve never been able to buy one for so little money. Palm may have created Centro by shaving down the Treo’s size and price — but in this case, tiny tweaks make all the difference.

The Centro isn’t available in Europe yet, but when it arrives, it looks to me like a very interesting replacement for my Treo. And the Centro is selling for just $99 in the USA (but only if tied to a 2-year contract with Sprint – what the real unbundled price is, will only be known when Palm starts to sell the phone directly).

Did we throw away the best weapon against malaria in the mid-1960’s? The New Scientist has an article on how, having nearly eradicated malaria betweeb 1958 and 1963, funds for the eradication were stopped one year earlier than would have been necessary to finish the job. Malaria today kills nearly as many people each year as Aids – around 2 million. The problem was that small amounts of DDT were used to spray house walls to repel and kill mosquitos. In 1962 Silent Spring was published by Rachel Carson, arguing that DDT should be banned because of the danger to wildlife if it was sprayed in large quantities on fields. As a result, the use of DDT was banned worldwide and malaria has come back in nearly all those areas where it had been eradicated. In 2006 the WHO made a U-turn and approved the use DDT again; incidence of malaria has started falling in those countries which have resumed spraying inside homes:

It seems millions of lives have been lost because health experts threw away their best weapon. Are environmentalists to blame? There is no doubt that DDT was misused as an agricultural pesticide and seriously damaged wildlife. In that sense Carson was right. But regulators did not recognise that spraying indoors was different. And an environmental outcry against DDT helped to ensure that the early fears about its effect on human health became entrenched dogma long after they had been proved unfounded.

We found this recipe a couple of days ago on Simply Recipes and tried it this evening. It’s easy to make and very tasty – so it’s been added to our (non-computerized) recipe collection!