Interesting Links for 08-02-2012

[andrewducker]

• Abu Qatada: out on bail, and rightfully so.
  (tags: terrorism uk law alquaeda AbuQata )
• How to stop Facebook or Google knowing too much about you.
  (tags: disinformation privacy google facebook )
• Breastfeeding women protest outside Facebook offices
  (tags: facebook breastfeeding )
• Fracture Putty can heal a broken bone in days
  (tags: stemcells

Comments

[channelpenguin]

Fracture Putty - f'ing A! Though I don't plan on breaking anything ever again. Muscle wastage is MAJOR nasty thing that is totally underestimated in its effect by almost anyone (bar professionals and those of us who have broken stuff).

It won't help with the direct damage to the surrounding tissues though, which is also its own issue with recovery times and outcomes.

But still - MAJOR, major news. Brilliant advance, If they get it to work in pigs and maybe some kind of ape (and I don't see why it wouldn't), it will work in humans (barring some really weird human-specific immune system reaction - always a possibility).

Brilliant news already for pets/farm animals/race horses

[danieldwilliam]

i bet it itches like an itchy thing.

[philmophlegm]

Mixed views on the Abu Qatada thing. Like Tim says, he possibly / probably hasn't done anything criminal in this country. And he's probably less of a threat to national security than several IRA / Sinn Fein members of the Northern Ireland Assembly (who almost certainly have done something criminal in this country like, for example, murder).

On the other hand, he probably is a "wrong 'un" and he probably has committed crimes in other countries, some of which are important allies. And one day we may want those countries to deport someone to us for trial.

[andrewducker]

Oh, if another country has an extradition request that is perfectly legal then they can have him, no problems there.

[philmophlegm]

I think the debate is about whether he would get a fair trial in Jordan.

[andrewducker]

Which is fair enough - about the legitimacy of allowing information extracted under torture to be used. But there are other countries where he's wanted.

[philmophlegm]

I'm not especially concerned about what facebook and google knows about me (although since google thinks I'm over the age of 65 and interested in Belize*, it's rather more about what they _think_ they know about me than what they actually think about me).

I'm rather reminded of the recent advice from an anti-virus software company to celebrities on how to avoid nude photographs of yourself appearing all over the internet: "Don't take nude photographs of yourself or let anyone else take nude photographs of yourself."

* The company of which I am FD has a client in Belize, but I think about them maybe once a year. Apart from that, I know very little about Belize.

[philmophlegm]

Oh, and was it deliberate to put a post about stopping facebook from knowing too much about you next to a post about people women demanding the right to get their tits out on facebook...?

(It seems to me that a more common problem with facebook is not so much that it knows too much about you, more that you end up knowing too much about your facebook friends...)

[andrewducker]

Nope, I am totally in favour of people choosing to share things online, if they want to.

For instance I am totally in favour of sites allowing pseudonyms, while having an account with my totally real name on it :->

[philmophlegm]

I don't usually use pseudonyms (even twitter is in my own name) but when I started on LJ, people told me that everyone used them, and I've never changed. I don't really mind if people use real names or pseudonyms, although in many ways I'd prefer it on LJ if people were easier to find. It annoys me that there might be people out there whom I know in real life but have no idea are on LJ.

[philmophlegm]

The article on willpower is interesting, particularly the observed correlation between willpower as children and success in later life. This seems bloody obvious to me - kids that revise for exams are exercising their willpower by doing something unpleasant now in return for vague future returns; and kids that revise do better in their exams than kids who don't; and kids who do better in their exams ultimately get better jobs...

...except that is for those high intelligence / low willpower types who may well get good exam grades but who then end up in a succession of crap jobs by following the path of least resistance. And we all know some of those.

[philmophlegm]

I'm somewhere in between. If I had the sort of willpower that made me work on the course I'm supposed to be writing instead of commenting on your livejournal, I'd have made partner by now, or at least director...

[andrewducker]

But would that make you any happier?

[philmophlegm]

No, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't

[bracknellexile]

The Skyrim High-Res Pack isn't bad but in a lot of cases the mod-community's high-res textures are better. Once Bethesda added support for 4GB+ of RAM for 64-bit systems* they pretty much opened up the option for ludicrous texture resolution mods. The DLC is a nice halfway house for those that haven't got new gaming rigs but can support more than the console textures that were ported across. It also retextures a few things that mods don't, like statues. Still, there's better stuff out there and then things like S.T.E.P. which is keeping on top of all the new mods, evaluating, finding conflicts and recommending what to install. Fortunately you can load the hi-res pack and then load mods on top of that. Win-win

[philmophlegm]

You've obviously researched this (and I haven't!), so in your professional opinion, what mods (and mod managers) should I install?

(System specs: i7-2700K, Geforce 580, 8gb RAM, 64-bit Windows 7, Skyrim installed on an SSD)

[bracknellexile]

Firstly make sure Skyrim's up to date. Patch 1.4's out of beta now I think, then add the hi-res texture DLC before starting on the mods.

Nexus Mod Manager (NMM) is my mod manager of choice and SkyrimNexus (as per the link above for STEP) for installing them since pretty much every mod there has a "download with manager" link

[philmophlegm]

Brilliant - thanks a lot for that.