Are you looking for the post I made about the Taiji dolphin slaughter?

If you haven’t seen it before it shows a Slow Loris holding a small parasol umbrella. Here is the Slow Loris’ video:

Slow Loris mother and cub

While Slow Loris might be cute they are most definitely not pets, but that doesn’t stop people from taking these strepsirrhine primates into their homes, in Indonesia they are sold as living “toys” to children. While they might be cute they are wild animals. That said certain problems need to be “fixed” prior to them being sold. Since their bite is potenially deadly there teeth need to be removed.

Here are some excerpts from the Wikipedia article.

Slow lorises are sold locally at street markets, but are also sold internationally over the Internet and in pet stores. They are especially popular or trendy in Japan, particularly among women. The reasons for their popularity, according to the Japan Wildlife Conservation Society (JWCS), are that “they’re easy to keep, they don’t cry, they’re small, and just very cute.” Because of their “cuteness”, videos of pet slow lorises are some of the mostly frequently watched animal-related viral videos on YouTube

Cruel Tooth Removal With Nail Clippers

Even within their countries of origin, slow lorises are very popular pets, particularly in Indonesia. They are seen as a “living toy” for children by local people or are bought out of pity by Western tourists or expatriates. Neither local nor foreign buyers usually know anything about these primates, their endangered status, or that the trade is illegal. Furthermore, few know about their strong odor or their potentially lethal bite.

That is the other side of cuteness, the one that most people often do not consider when they bring an animal into there home.

As part of the trade, infants are pulled prematurely from their parents, leaving them unable to remove their own urine, feces, and oily skin secretions from their fur. Slow lorises have a special network of blood vessels in their hands and feet, which makes them vulnerable to cuts when pulled from the wire cages they are kept in. Slow lorises are also very stress-sensitive and do not do well in captivity. Infection, stress, pneumonia, and poor nutrition lead to high death rates among pet lorises. Common health problems seen in pet slow lorises include undernourishment, tooth decay, diabetes, obesity, and kidney failure. Pet owners also fail to provide proper care because they are usually sleeping when the nocturnal pet is awake.

You can read the full controversy about keeping slow lorises as pets.

3d printing

Well if you follow the current trends in the 3d printing market you know that the technology has come a long way in the last years. Does that mean that you will be able to print replicas of your favorite products? Simply put, no.

But then that isn’t their intended use either. Still 3d printer manufactures may be putting themselves in the firing line.

For all they know, people might start producing cheap replicas of all of the latest and greatest gadgets, wait they already do.

“A coming revolution in 3D printing, with average consumers able to copy and create new three-dimensional objects at home, may lead to attempts by patent holders to expand their legal protections, a paper from Public Knowledge says. Patent holders may see 3D printers as threats, and they may try to sue makers of the printers or the distributors of CAD (computer-aided design) blueprints, according to digital rights group Public Knowledge.”

You can read more in the original post.

Would a pre-emptive assault from patent holders cripple this fledgling market? Probably not. 3d printing is still in its infancy, it still has a long way to go before you’ll be able to print objects like this at home.

I am not sure if the traditional printing industry was against the desktop printer, though they probably had more to lose than other manufactures.

In closing I will leave you with this image.

Current state of 3d printing

Comet Hartley 2

Sometimes accidents turnout to have wonderful results. That is what happened with the Hartly 2 comet fly-by. You see in all rights we shouldn’t see Hartley 2, NASA’s EPOXI spacecraft wasn’t even supposed to film it.

The reason NASA took pictures of comet Hartley 2 was because they couldn’t find their original target. I guess that is understandable, after all there is plenty of space to loose something in.

Here is a little more information about comet Hartley 2:

NASA’s EPOXI mission spacecraft successfully flew past comet Hartley 2 at 7 a.m. PDT (10 a.m. EDT) Thursday, Nov. 4. Scientists say initial images from the flyby provide new information about the comet’s volume and material spewing from its surface.

Hartley 2 Gallery

More NASA related posts:
Astronauts’ Skin-Tight Bodysuits Could Protect From Bone Loss
New NASA MMO

Netflix bandwidth usuage?

So you’re sitting at your computer and you’ve waited forever for this page to load. Well, it’s Netflix fault.

Okay, that is a little bit of a stretch, however, I read an interesting article on slashdot about Netflix bandwidth usage.

While this isn’t something that I would normally post about, I thought that it brought up an interesting point and thought it was worth sharing.

Here is an excerpt from the article.

Netflix is swallowing America’s bandwidth and it probably won’t be long before it comes for the rest of the world. That’s one of the headlines from Sandvine’s Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena Report, an exhaustive look at what people around the world are doing with their Internet lines. According to Sandvine, Netflix accounts for 20 percent of downstream Internet traffic during peak home Internet usage hours in North America. That’s an amazing share — it beats that of YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, and, perhaps most tellingly, the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent.

20% is an impressive amount of bandwidth usage for one company. What is even more impressive is that they are using it to watch Sean Connery classics like Zardoz.

NASA Skin-tight Bodysuits

Have you ever wondered why everyone needs to run around in skin-tight body suits in space? No, it’s not what you’re thinking, there is actually a science to the sexiness. Well, at least there is now.

Bone loss is a major problem for today’s astronauts. In fact, for every month in space they loose up to 2% bone density.

For a stay on the ISS this number might be acceptable, but think about effects this would have on the human body over a prolonged stay in space.

With current level of technology it would take NASA astronauts a minimum of 6 months to reach Mars. ESA is also planning a trip to Mars that would last 440 days. The Russian space program is planning the longest mission to the Red Planet, a staggering 2 year mission. As you can see, the math doesn’t add up, and certain areas need to be addressed before we can take a road trip through space.

That is where the skin-tight body suits come in.

MIT’s Man-Vehicle Laboratory into using “superhero-style” skinsuits to combat the effects of extended stays in microgravity on bone density in astronauts. (Abstract.) Quoting: “Astronauts lose 1 to 2 percent of their bone mass for each month they spend in space. As far back as the Gemini missions, conditioning exercise regimes have been used to slow the rate of bone loss, but a 2001-2004 NASA-sponsored study showed that crew members aboard the International Space Station were still losing up to 2.7 percent of their interior bone material and 1.7 percent of outer hipbone material for each month they spent in space. … With stirrups that loop around the feet, the elastic gravity skinsuit is purposely cut too short for the astronaut so that it stretches when put on — pulling the wearer’s shoulders towards the feet. In normal gravity conditions on Earth, a human’s legs bear more weight than the torso. Because the suit’s legs stretch more than the torso section, the wearer’s legs are subjected to a greater force — replicating gravity effects on Earth.

I don’t know about you but it doesn’t sound very comfortable.

How much clean water do you think there is on earth? Let’s say that all of the water on earth fits into one bathtub. Okay, I relaize that this is a stretch for some people’s imaginations. But wait just a second. If all of the water fit into that one bath tub the drinkable portion would fill a single glass.

That isn’t very much… And it brings up the question, what are we going to do when it isn’t enough? Now, I know you won’t say this but let me play the devil’s advocate for a moment and say “so what?”

Raw sewage and industrial waste

Currently, 38,000 children die due to unsafe drinking water, and that is in a single week. That means 1,976,000 children die each and every year due to unsafe drinking water and unhygienic living conditions it creates.

Here are some reasons why you may want to pay attention to the topic “clean water.”

Water Wars: Many scholar, researchers and political analysts attribute the conflict in Darfur at least in part to lack of access to water. In fact, a report commissioned by the UN Development Program found that in the 21st century, water scarcity will become one of the leading causes of conflict in Africa. More Info

Polluted Oceans: Not only is pollution bad for the environment, it’s also expensive! Death and disease caused by polluted coastal waters costs the global economy $12.8 billion a year. More Info

Uninhabitable Rivers: Today, 40% of America’s rivers and 46% of America’s lakes are too polluted for fishing, swimming, or aquatic life. That’s not surprising considering the fact that 1.2 trillion gallons of untreated sewage, storm water, and industrial waste are discharged into US waters annually. More Info

Fashion Footprint: That cotton t-shirt you’re wearing right now took 400 gallons of water to produce, and your jeans required an extra 1800 gallons. Not wearing cotton? The dyes and synthetic fibers used to make your clothes create waste that’s among the many contributors to water pollution. More Info

How can you help? Well, first you could sign the UN’s petition for safe clean drinking water. As of July this year the UN has declared that access to clean water and sanitation a human right. Making that declaration a reality will take all of us. At the time of writing nearly one eight of the population is without either of these necessities.

That is almost a billion people, we can do better than that.

There isn’t any question about the power of linux/unix on the server and desktop level, but a little acknowledgement never hurts.

I recently posted about the release of Ubuntu 10.10. While this isn’t as fresh, it is equally as interesting. Dustin Kirkland, a core developer of Ubuntu Server at Canonical posted in January about how Weta uses Ubuntu at their studio.

In his post Dustin mentioned how he had a chance to sit down and talk to Paul Gunn, the Systems Administrator at Weta Digital.

It was a great talk, about the type of data center needed to render special effects in today’s blockbuster movies. They have a 2 Petabyte disk array, 10gbps networking, and 35,000 cores (4,000+ HP blades) in their data center, and still it takes 48 hours to render some of their graphic sequences.

That is a pretty respectable data center! And Unbuntu is at the heart of it. The OS is currently running on all of the rendering nodes as well as 90% of the studios desktops. That means that all of those breath taking scenes you enjoyed in films like Avatar made their way through the sudio’s Ubuntu render farm.

I first saw this on Christer Edwards blog, Ubuntu Tutorials. He noted a couple of other films that Weta Digital has work on, these include such blockbusters as:

• Avatar
• District 9
• The Day the Earth Stood Still
• King Kong
• Jumper
• Lord of the Rings
• Fantastic Four
• i-Robot
• X-Men
• Eragon

Where they also rendered on Ubuntu? That isn’t confirmed but with the size of their render farm you can be sure it didn’t spring up over night.

The news last week that exoplanet Gliese 581g may be in the “goldilocks zone” and could therefore hold liquid water and alien life got everyone all excited, with good reason. A potentially habitable planet–and only 20 light years away! But to put things in perspective, here are a couple of estimates on what it would take to travel to Gliese 581g. One scientist puts the travel time at 180,000 years based on current space flight technology, while another explains that it could be quite quick if we build a matter-antimatter drive, and can figure out how to bring along 530 times as much mass in fuel as is contained in the ship and cargo itself.

Is the planet home to alien life? If it is I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting to find out, I don’t think that we’ll find out anytime soon. Until then it looks like we’ll just have to explore the “alien” lifeforms on our own planet.

Gliese 581g alien world

The Space Game

Want to try your hand at plotting a course to Jupiter? Well the European Space Agency might just have what you’re looking for. From the 4th of October to the tenth ESA will be celebrating World Space Week and they’ve released the Space Game (creative title isn’t it?) that allows you to do just that.

“The Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency is celebrating World Space Week (4-10 October 2010) with the release of ‘The Space Game,’ an online game for interplanetary trajectory design. The Space Game is an online crowdsourcing experiment where you are given the role of a mission designer to seek the best path to travel through space. The interactive game, coded in HTML5, challenges the players to devise fuel-efficient trajectories to various bodies of the Solar System via a user-friendly interface. The aim of the experiment is get people from all ages and backgrounds to come up with better strategies that can help improve the effectiveness of the current computer algorithms. As part of the events organized worldwide for Space Week, the first problem of the game is to reach Jupiter with the lowest amount of propellant. The best scores by 10 October will be displayed on the Advanced Concepts Team website and the three best designs will also receive some ESA prizes.”

Need some help? Watch the Space Game screencast.

You can visit the official website here.