Screws Galore

In trying to look for an obscure screw online (I think a stainless #6, 1/4", beveled Phillips head; I need it to replace the one I stripped at the bottom of my shower door), I came across a page detailing all of the different types of screw heads.  I though Phillips was Phillips.  Wrong, apparently.  There are a ton of variations, along with some exotic ones that I've never seen or heard of.  

When A Phillips Is Not A Phillips

I would have guessed pretty different precentages..

I came across this Microsoft-supplied graphic in a Lifehacker story yesterday:

Microsoft says that the above is the relative proportion of power sucked up on the typical Windows laptop.  I think I would have guessed that the panel uses the most (I wonder how much LED backlighting changes this?), but I wouldn't have guessed the chipset would use more than twice what the CPU uses.  Perhaps this is due to the SpeedStep (Intel)/PowerNow (AMD) CPU throttling?  I also would definitely not guessed that the chipset sucks up 4x the power of the hard drive (I might have put that 2nd or 3rd when guessing)..

Year In Review

This longish Dave Barry piece at the WaPo today is hilarious (and probably more true than satirical): The Year In Review

Prop 8: The Musical

This is awesome.  Jack Black as Jesus...and it even has Doogie. It has a lot of people, actually!

Python 3.0 Has Arrived!

I hadn't noticed this myself; it was from a post shared (via Google Reader) from Brandon that I learned of it.  Python 3.0 ('Python 3000') was first talked about (2000) not long after I was still using Python a lot (1999)...and it's finally here.  This is the long awaited release that is intentionally not backward compatible with previous releases, meant to clean up some language cruft.  Guido's summary of the changes: What's New In Python 3.0

Human Evolution: Slowing Down?

I saw this a day or two late, but the geneticist Steve Jones asserts that human evolution has pretty much ground to a halt. The Times (UK) has the story .  The summary of why he thinks this is the case: a big drop in the 'old guy with much younger girl' case.  Fathers in their 20s have accumulated far fewer genetic mutations than fathers in their 50s..and so fewer mutations are conferred to the child.  The lower mutation rate (on average) would ostensibly lead to a slower pace of evolution.

Steve Jones is the author of a pretty good evolution-focused book that I read several years ago and would recommend: Almost Like A Whale.  That is the title of the UK version of the book (the version I have), but the US version is instead called Darwin's Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated .

Large Hadron Rap

I just came across this rap about the Large Hadron Collider.  I've seen 'nerdcore' rap before (see MC Plus Plus), but this is the first such rap I've seen by a woman.  It is awesome.  You can bask in lyrics like (from about 2:40)

The Higgs boson, that's the one
that everybody talks about,
and it's the one sure thing
that this machine will sort out.

If the Higgs exists
they ought to see it right away.
And if it doesn't,
the scientists will finally say,

"There is no Higgs!
We need new physics
to account for why
things have mass.
Something in our Standard
Model went awry!"