Bible verse FAIL!

Tim Hawkins tells this tale against himself.

Who says Christians can't laugh at themselves? I do it all the time . . . but then, some would probably accuse me of being particularly laughable!



Peter

Holiday tours for WHAT???

I find it hard to credit this report from Germany. I can hardly believe it's not a belated April Fool's joke!

Even stuffed animals need a holiday every now and then, according to a Cologne woman who runs a travel agency catering exclusively to teddy bears and other plush toy friends.

“It sounds crazy to many,” said trained retail saleswoman Ulrike Böhmler, admitting that she has always had a certain affection for stuffed animals.

She still has her first stuffed bear, a gift from her grandmother worn ragged by 35 years of cuddling. For some people, such plush toys remain a sentimental object for an entire lifetime, she says.

. . .

... she founded “Teddy-In,” which now offers trips for toys to Hamburg, Munich, Barcelona, Rome and even Romania where the animals can follow Dracula’s fictional footsteps.

Customers book via email or letter, then ship their stuffed animal to Böhmler, who says it can be “comical” when some boxes arrive with air holes punched into cartons for the inanimate toys. She then guides the toy on its holiday tour, taking photographs along the way.

When they return the animals are sent back to their owners refreshed and with a set of vacation photos to share.

Böhmler’s toy travel agency is just one of several such businesses that have cropped up in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Venice and Prague.

“For many it’s a very original gift idea,” said Karsten Morschett from Teddy Tour Berlin. “Lots of people can no longer take trips on their own due to health problems and send their teddy on holiday instead.”

There's more at the link.

Do my eyes deceive me? Are otherwise sane people actually willing to spend their hard-earned money to send their stuffed toys on a vacation?

I just don't get it. Clearly, I'm out of step with something in today's world . . .





Peter

Doofus Of The Day #381

Today's award goes to the Oldham City Council in England.

Council workers were given flame guns to rid a town's pavements of weeds - then accidentally set a shop on fire.

Oldham council chiefs kitted out their staff with the equipment as part of a bid to win Britain In Bloom.

But businessman Jon Riley was left blazing mad after they unwittingly set fire to the front of his father's Roll End Carpets shop.

. . .

Jon, 31, who was in the shop at the time, said: 'They sprayed [weedkiller] first and then these two blokes came with these blowtorches.

'I didn't pay too much attention but about five minutes later I could smell burning. I went outside and flames were going up the shop front.

'The blokes were down the road doing somewhere else. I shouted to them and they came running back. We got the fire extinguisher out and then the fire service came.

'The flames had spread up the door and to the sign. They had to use thermal imaging cameras to make sure it hadn't spread.

'I've been left with half a sign and a tatty shop-front. Business is hard enough as it is without this.

'You'd have thought they may have used a bit of common sense - dry wood and flames don't mix. It's not rocket science.'

There's more at the link.

It may not be rocket science, but it almost led to a burn-off, if not a lift-off!





Peter

A new approach to artificial intelligence

I'm intrigued by a 'bottom-up' approach to creating computer-based artificial intelligence. The Telegraph reports:

Computer-simulated life forms which reproduce themselves inside their electronic world have evolved to produce basic intelligence.

It is hoped that the discovery may in future lead to artificially intelligent brains "bred" within a computer.

The "Avidians", a race of digital beings in a computer world called Avida run by scientists at Michigan State University, with computer code instead of DNA that is copied - not quite perfectly - every time they breed. The random copying errors create differences in their code which dictate how well, or badly, they will perform in their simulated world.

Early experiments put the Avidians on a grid of cells, and let them live and die there. The grid had a gradient of food - cells at one end have more than the ones at the other, where the Avidians begin. After 100 generations of breeding, a mutation led to one of them evolving a "gene" instructing it to move forward. When it landed in a more food-rich cell, it reproduced more quickly, and had more offspring than its rivals.

After thousands more generations, the Avidians had evolved something more impressive: a rudimentary memory. They had started moving towards the food source in a zig-zag motion, changing direction when they were going in the wrong direction. To do that, they had to be able to compare their current cell to the previous one. Robert Pennock, one of the scientists behind the experiments, told New Scientist: "Doing this requires some rudimentary intelligence. You have to be able to assess your situation, realise you're not going in the right direction, reorient, and then reassess."

A later experiment added a new twist: cells that contained instructions on where to go to find food. Some of those instructions were simply "do what you did in the last cell". In order to make sense of those instructions, Avidians had to evolve a more complex memory - and duly did so. Laura Grabowski, another of the researchers, said: "The environment sets up selective pressures so organisms are forced to come up with some kind of memory use - which is in fact what they do."

This sheds some light on how intelligence originally evolved: MSU zoologist Fred Dyer says: "Laura's work suggests that the evolution of an ability to solve simple navigational problems depends on first evolving a simple short-term memory - and this in digital organisms that still don't exhibit something you would call learning." But the findings may, in the future, allow researchers to create true artificial intelligence.

Dr Grabowski says: "In the past, the approach has been to start with high-level intelligence and reproduce that in a computer.

"This is the opposite. We're showing how complex traits like memory can be built from the bottom up, from things that are really very simple."

There's more at the link.

This is fascinating! I worked with early artificial intelligence (AI) systems in the 1980's, using them to help with the design of commercial computer systems. The whole emphasis in those days was on 'top-down' development, taking the best approaches to a problem that human intelligence could produce and trying to synthesize their main features into a computer-based hierarchical decision-tree-based AI system. This approach turns the earlier procedure on its head. Instead of trying to synthesize human intelligence into a machine form, the system tries to have machine intelligence develop along the same lines that human intelligence must have used at the dawn of our species.

Of course, one of the problems with such a 'bottom-up' approach is that we don't know what sort of 'intelligence' will be produced. Sure, the scientists will probably attempt to 'steer' it in what they consider 'appropriate' directions . . . but what are the chances the Avidians (or their successors) might head off in a radically different direction, producing an 'intelligence' which is competent and effective by its own standards, but also completely alien to our way of thinking?

Or do we already have such an intelligence in our midst?




Hmm . . .



Peter

Mozart's piano?

A report from Germany suggests that an early piano once played by Mozart may have been identified.

The instrument dates back to Mozart’s time in 1775, and is at the workshop of a piano master builder in the Baden-Württemberg city, broadcaster SWR reported from Karlsruhe.

The piano maker, Martin Becker, had bought the fortepiano from a Strasbourg antiques dealer in the mid-1980s, but recently decided to auction it online ... after it had sat some 25 years in storage.

But shortly after the object was put up for bids at an online auction house, well-known musical historian Andreas Beuermann got in touch to say he’d believed it had been played by Mozart during performances in Strasbourg.




He had recognised it from a historic oil painting in Vienna, which had also shown Austrian composer Joseph Haydn at its keys, SWR reported.

The fortepiano, built by Christian Baumann in Zweibrücken, is one of eight known copies.

According to SWR, Christie’s auction house has confirmed the origin of the instrument, and experts are now researching its history.

Should they determine that the influential composer did play the instrument, then it would be worth several million euros, SWR said.

There's more at the link.

I particularly liked a comment posted at the article: "If the story turns out to be true, this mans ship has sailed into the Harbour." You can say that again! If it can be proved that Mozart and Haydn actually played this instrument, I honestly don't know how its value will be established. It'll be almost priceless!

Peter

Cats and catnip - size is irrelevant!

I'm chuckling at this video showing what happens when large predatory cats are introduced to catnip.

It seems that the size of the cat is irrelevant. I wonder if they'll start issuing catnip to photo-safari tourists in Africa?

"No, Ma'am, we won't shoot the lion if it attacks you, but if you sprinkle it with this, you might get lucky!"





Peter

A very interesting approach

I'm intrigued by a report that Israel is tapping the best brains among its teenagers and inviting them to explore novel ways to deal with problems.

The Israeli government, in its search for innovation, has started plucking top 18 year olds out of standard military service and put them to work solving key problems in the government, military and industry.

The idea is to introduce radically new ideas and concepts of operations that can be applied to rapidly changing threats and technological innovation.

The program, called Talpiot, finds these brilliant youngsters with the same screening process that the nation uses to identify it elite corps of fighter pilots. In this case, it is designed by the government to institutionalize creativity across the spectrum of military, political, industrial and intelligence organizations.

. . .

The basis of the concept is to avoid the danger of inertia in successful organizations even though Israel is already renowned for producing young, able leaders.

. . .

Every year, from 30 to 100 of the nation’s best 18-19 year old students with top academic scores and networking skills are offered training as front line analysts of Israel’s most pressing military problems. Instead of three years of conventional military service they are given a free hand to research and investigate issues that are critical to the state of Israel.

“Talpiot” roughly translates as a small group of mountains. It is designed to find and challenge the creativity of brilliant kids during their time of national service. The program originated with the Air Force and is now several years old.

The Air Force, the Navy, the industrial community, Mossad and the other intelligence agencies, wants to take them. They compete for them, even though the agencies know they don’t come with a quick fix in their pocket. But they know that the people selected for Talpiot are Ivy League-quality. This is a resource that can be used to solve new problems, and that way the solutions aren’t confined to experience.

The youngsters are instructed to operate on the edges of anarchy or at least insubordination.

There's more at the link.

Whoever thought up this program is to be commended, I think. Really bright minds - and if they're taking only the top fraction of one per cent of the annual military intake, that's really bright by anyone's standards! - might well find novel approaches and solutions that defy more rigid thinking by those who've become set in their ways.

I wonder if a similar program could be developed here in the USA? The problem would be, of course, that special interest groups would clamor for their members to be included, irrespective of the level of their intelligence. Race, ethnic origin, religion, politics and a bunch of other factors would rear their ugly heads. Still, if a way could be found to get around such issues, such a program might prove very useful here too.

(Of course, given what I've seen of a great many American teens, their breakthrough 'contribution' might be to hack Grand Theft Auto to play it on the supercomputers at Lawrence Livermore . . . )



Peter

Marriage, law, and complications

A Federal judge ruled today that California's Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage, is un-Constitutional, and is therefore nullified.

Great. Now everyone opposed to gay marriage is going to get their panties in a wad about the ruling, and pontificate about how the courts are not respecting the will of the people, or demanding that legislators overrule the courts and preserve marriage in its historical context of a union between a man and a woman (leaving out, for the moment, those societies where polygyny and/or polyandry are accepted). On the other hand, those in favor of gay marriage are going to be celebrating (many of them in a flagrantly "in-your-face" manner, deliberately designed to irritate, if not outrage, those opposed to it). Here come more months of wrangling, dissent and division.

I'd much prefer it if the Government - Federal, State and local - would simply butt out of the marriage debate altogether. Let those who are guided by religious faith choose for themselves how they want to marry, and how they want to regard marriage. Let those of different beliefs make the same choice for themselves. That way, churches can recognize marriages that are in accordance with their doctrines, and those who don't share those doctrines can do their own thing. Why should the law have to play favorites, or take sides? Why should government have to recognize a relationship at all? Surely individual contracts could take care of the legal issues for each specific case, without needing a bureaucracy to control them?

I've got pretty strong opinions on what makes a marriage, but I don't see that my opinions and beliefs should be binding on those with different perspectives. I think life would be an awful lot simpler if we could all agree on that approach.

Peter

Doofus Of The Day #380

Today's award goes to the Eurotunnel employee or employees responsible for offloading passengers and their vehicles from the rail shuttle service between England and France. The Daily Mail reports:

Passengers looking forward to a day out in France as their train pulled into Calais found themselves on their way home again rather sooner than they expected - after train bosses forgot to let them off.

Around 20 Eurotunnel passengers had travelled on the Shuttle from Folkestone to Calais in seven vehicles loaded behind a wagon that had been left empty after an earlier fuel spill.

Eurotunnel staff at Calais unloaded the front vehicles from the train but were completely unaware that there were another seven cars behind the empty wagon.

The unfortunate occupants ended up making their premature 40-minute return journey to Folkestone where red-faced Eurotunnel managers greeted them, apologised and sent them on their way to Calais again on the next available train.

The passengers, who had originally left Folkestone at 8.50am last Saturday, were given a refund and also a free crossing in the future.

A Eurotunnel spokesman said today: 'We have apologised profusely. Something like this has never happened before in our 16- year history and it's very embarrassing for us.'

There's more at the link.

I'm still trying to figure out how Eurotunnel staff could possibly have been "completely unaware that there were another seven cars behind the empty wagon". I mean . . . they're railroad cars! Great honking big things! Just how do you miss 'em, unless you're blind as a bat?





Peter

Untrustworthy!

Along with many others, I was seriously concerned when the Transportation Safety Administration announced some time ago that they planned to introduce full-body scanners at airports. I didn't believe their assurances that the images would never be retained, stored, or disseminated. Throughout the history of governments all over the world, once they have something, they hang on to it - they don't let go. It's a disease that goes with the bureaucracy.

Well, today came a news report telling us that our concerns were fully justified.

Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.

This follows an earlier disclosure (PDF) by the TSA that it requires all airport body scanners it purchases to be able to store and transmit images for "testing, training, and evaluation purposes."

Image from millimeter-wave scanner (picture courtesy of Wikipedia)

. . .

This privacy debate, which has been simmering since the days of the Bush administration, came to a boil two weeks ago when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that scanners would soon appear at virtually every major airport. The updated list includes airports in New York City, Dallas, Washington, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, and Philadelphia.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, has filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to grant an immediate injunction pulling the plug on TSA's body scanning program. In a separate lawsuit, EPIC obtained a letter (PDF) from the Marshals Service, part of the Justice Department, and released it on Tuesday afternoon.

These "devices are designed and deployed in a way that allows the images to be routinely stored and recorded, which is exactly what the Marshals Service is doing," EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg told CNET. "We think it's significant."

William Bordley, an associate general counsel with the Marshals Service, acknowledged in the letter that "approximately 35,314 images...have been stored on the Brijot Gen2 machine" used in the Orlando, Fla. federal courthouse. In addition, Bordley wrote, a Millivision machine was tested in the Washington, D.C. federal courthouse but it was sent back to the manufacturer, which now apparently possesses the image database.

. . .

This trickle of disclosures about the true capabilities of body scanners--and how they're being used in practice--is probably what alarms privacy advocates more than anything else.

There's more at the link.

The late President Reagan put it very well: "Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other." If we allow them to get their hands on something - anything! - they'll hang on to it, and use it in ways we cannot possibly foresee or imagine. Laws passed for one purpose are applied in ways and to cases never intended by their authors. Personal information collected for a particular purpose winds up being spread all over many other departments and 'mined' in ways never intended by its original collectors. And now, pictures of travelers may end up being stored for undisclosed purposes - even sent back to the machine's manufacturers! Heaven only knows what some technician there will do with a data dump of thousands of pictures of virtually-naked people!

One can only hope that EPIC succeeds in their lawsuit . . . otherwise, where will this nonsense stop?

Peter

Is it swimming, or flying?

Back in 2008 I wrote about a fish-shaped airship that 'swam' through the air. A few days later, I added a report about a German group, Festo, that was producing various odd-shaped flying vehicles also resembling fish of various sorts.

It seems Festo hasn't been resting on its laurels. Here's a video from last year about its 'AirPenguin'.

Amazing to see how hydrodynamics (also known as fluid dynamics) and aerodynamics are related, isn't it? 'Creatures' like the AirPenguin make the relationship very clear.

Peter

Fanatics of any kind are all equally dangerous

I'm saddened - not to mention very angry! - to read of the plans of a Florida church to hold a Koran-burning on the ninth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. CNN reports:

The Dove World Outreach Center says it is hosting the event to remember 9/11 victims and take a stand against Islam. With promotions on its website and Facebook page, it invites Christians to burn the Muslim holy book at the church from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

"We believe that Islam is of the devil, that it's causing billions of people to go to hell, it is a deceptive religion, it is a violent religion and that is proven many, many times," Pastor Terry Jones told CNN's Rick Sanchez earlier this week.

Jones wrote a book titled "Islam is of the Devil," and the church sells coffee mugs and shirts featuring the phrase.

Muslims and many other Christians -- including some evangelicals -- are fighting the initiative.

The church launched a YouTube channel to disseminate its messages.

"I mean ask yourself, have you ever really seen a really happy Muslim? As they're on the way to Mecca? As they gather together in the mosque on the floor? Does it look like a real religion of joy?" Jones asks in one of his YouTube posts.

"No, to me it looks like a religion of the devil."

. . .

The National Association of Evangelicals, the nation's largest umbrella evangelical group, issued a statement urging the church to cancel the event, warning it could cause worldwide tension between the two religions.

"The NAE calls on its members to cultivate relationships of trust and respect with our neighbors of other faiths. God created human beings in his image, and therefore all should be treated with dignity and respect," it said in the statement.

Dove's Facebook page, set up for the September event, has more than 1,600 fans.

"Eternal fire is the only destination the Quran can lead people to, so we want to put the Quran in it's [sic] place -- the fire!" the page says.

But another Facebook group with more than 3,100 fans says it stands "against the disrespect and intolerance that these people have for the Muslim people" and encourages people to report Dove's page to Facebook.

Targeting another group it calls "godless," the Dove center is also hosting a protest against Gainesville Mayor Craig Lowe, who is openly gay, on Monday at Gainesville's City Hall. The group previously fought -- unsuccessfully -- to derail Lowe's election campaign.

"We protest sexual perversion because the Bible protests it. ... What is acceptable to today's leadership becomes acceptable to tomorrow's society," the church says in its blog entry about the event.

There's more at the link.

The saddest thing about this is the sheer blindness of this church and its pastor. It's a blindness shared by fundamentalists and fanatics of every description, whether religious, political, social, economic or anything else. They absolutely cannot admit that any point of view or perspective other than their own might be valid. It's almost as if doing so would somehow weaken their own faith, or purity, or whatever.

Unfortunately, they utterly fail to see the corollary to their bigotry and insularity. If they deny to others any freedom, any right, any respect, on the basis of their beliefs, then others are free to do the same to them. It's a two-way street. If I expect to be allowed to exercise my religion in peace, without interruption, coercion or intimidation, then I have to extend the same right to members of any and every other religion.

The 'Golden Rule' (contained in some form or other within the sacred writings of every single major religion on earth) bears this out. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." I wonder if the congregation of the Dove World Outreach Center remember Jesus preaching that (Matthew 7:12, Luke 6:31)? It seems they've forgotten it . . . and in their blindness, they're going to stir up dissent, bitterness, anger and enmity between the followers of two of the great faiths of the world. I can't imagine our Lord approving that.

Peter

Can you tell a larp from a vire-spannel?

You can't? Well, I couldn't, either, until I read a very interesting article in the Daily Mail about some of England's more obscure regional words. The words in question mean:

LARP: (from Cheshire) a wasp.

VIRE-SPANNEL: (from the Isle of Wight) A dog given to lying before the fire.

The article lists many more words for your linguistic enjoyment. Fun reading - and even more fun to use some of them in conversation, and watch the expressions of incomprehension on the faces of your friends!



Peter

A family adventure

I was very happy to read of the adventures of the Crafton family, who over the past seven years have sailed around the world. The Washington Post has an excellent article about the experiences of the two adults and three children. Here's an extract to whet your appetite.

After achieving two-career success in Anchorage (Kathy as an ICU nurse, Tom as a family psychologist), the couple found that big-house status and plenty of everything left them feeling not much of anything, save frustration and want. With both Jena and Ben having significant developmental and speech delays, what the parents really craved was less stuff and more time together.

"We looked at each other and said, 'What the hell are we doing?' " Tom says.

It took six months to liquidate everything. By 2001, they had sold two houses in Alaska and their share of a family property in Severna Park, where Tom grew up. With the proceeds, they bought the sturdiest ocean crosser they could find, a Taiwanese-built Hans Christian with twin yellow masts, and set forth.




It was an adjustment, of course. There were head bumps in the tiny sleeping berths and five hurricanes during the year and a half they spent prepping in Florida. But almost at once, an instinctive choreography emerged, allowing five people to colonize a space not much larger than a minivan.

The close quarters stayed remarkably clear of clutter. They even got rid of the small refrigerator, not wanting to run the smelly engine just to keep beer cool. At sea, they lived on fish and canned goods. Ashore, they delighted in taking jitney buses to the market each day, living a local's life.

They wandered the Americas for a couple of years, finally crossing the Panama Canal in 2006. This was pure blue-water cruising, sailing for miles and for months between Pacific Islands. Vanuatu, where the people owned the least and smiled the most, was one of their favorites. They stayed three months.

"They are the happiest people in the world," Tom says. "It reinforced everything we believed about putting time with the family over this blind pursuit of material things."

There was a break, 18 months in a New Zealand harbor. They would have settled there permanently but for bureaucratic hassles and the cost of living. To buy a house would have meant selling the boat, and that wasn't an option. "She's like a member of our family now," Kathy says.

And so they sailed, ever westward. Even now, they make a point of gathering to watch the sunset together, and of getting up early to see it rise.

In many places, they traded for fresh food from the canoes that surrounded them when they dropped the hook in an island harbor. Bunches of bananas and mountains of fish could be had for an empty plastic bottle, coveted for storage in places where everything is biodegradable.

But it wasn't all mangoes and papayas. Their Pacific diet also included betel nuts, kava (a ceremonial hallucinogen), fish intestines and, at separate events, dog and bat. Last spring, during the final 43-day crossing from Ascension Island to Charleston, S.C., they lived almost entirely on canned tuna. "Ascension is the worst place to provision," says Tom. "It's like a desert with volcanoes."

They spent hours in that first grocery store in Charleston. "Oh my God, Pop-Tarts!" Kalena, who goes by Kali, remembers exclaiming.

There's more at the link, along with more photographs from their voyage. Highly recommended reading.

It's great to read of a family willing to abandon the rat race and set out together in search of adventure. I bet their kids will never forget growing up in that almost unique environment! I think they're going to turn into rather special adults, strong, independent and standing tall on their own two feet. An adventurous life tends to do that to a person.

Peter

Of interest to bloggers

This post probably won't be very interesting to general readers, but for my fellow bloggers, it may be useful.

I've been wondering for some time about the accuracy of my visitor count, as shown by Sitemeter (their visitor count is in the sidebar). There seems to be a general consensus among bloggers that Sitemeter undercounts visitors; but no-one seems to be able to state why, or by how much, or to scientifically verify that belief. Google Analytics is very good at identifying unique visitors, but not so good at counting repeat visits, which is, after all, an important part of blog traffic (many readers check in more than once daily).

There are alternatives, other software that counts visitors, but many of the competitors in the field suffer from their own problems. One that I used to like is The Truth Laid Bare (TTLB); but it seems to have all sorts of problems in translating traffic count to ratings. For example, this blog is rated as a 'Large Mammal' in its classification system, as borne out by this listing (taken from a screenshot when I checked TTLB's home page yesterday):




That shows this blog as the 3,968th from the top in terms of links, or well within the top 5,000 blogs tracked by TTLB. However, the display in the sidebar of my blog, which is supposed to reflect that 'Large Mammal' ranking, shows instead that the blog is classified as a 'Lowly Insect' - a category that starts at 100,739 and goes lower from there! E-mails and inquiries to TTLB as to why they can't match their internal rankings with their external displays go unanswered. I think I'll be discontinuing my TTLB ranking as a result.

I'd noticed that according to Sitemeter, from a high point in January this year (almost 90,000 visitors), my blog visit count had been steadily declining. Part of this was due to a lesser number of search engine queries pointing to articles here; that's been a trend across the Web, as the economic recession has reduced the number of people who can use an Internet connection at work or at home. However, I've not seen any reduction in comments or other feedback; in fact, there's been an increase. Also, I knew many readers were getting here via Facebook or another outlet, or using an RSS feed, and they weren't reflected in Sitemeter's figures.

I decided to check up on the number of readers I was getting via the latter sources, and signed up for Google Feedburner to get the statistics. They've been quite eye-opening. Not only have I not been losing readers, I've been gaining them! Let's look at the last week of July as an indication. Sitemeter (measuring visitors who come to my Blogspot page directly) recorded 13,208 visits from July 25-31 inclusive, for an average of 1,887 per day. Google Feedburner (measuring visitors who read this blog via an RSS feed or through another portal, but don't come here directly) showed 7,940 views during the same period, for a daily average of 1,134. Putting them together, that means a combined total of 21,148 visits, or an average of 3,021 per day. Extrapolating that over a full month of 31 days, that gives 93,651 visits for July 2010.

There's another interesting wrinkle to the Google Feedburner figures (or so I was told after e-mailing them to inquire about the distinction). They show both overall visits per day and 'subscribers' per day (i.e. unique users who visit the blog through a feed). For example, on July 31st there were 1,295 'views' of this blog from 525 'subscribers'. The two categories are not the same. The Facebook feed for this blog counts as one unique visitor, or subscriber: but there are many people reading that feed on Facebook, each of whom shows up as a 'visit' but not as a 'subscriber'. The same goes for the Livejournal RSS feed for this blog - there are multiple readers, but only one subscribed feed.

So, it looks like Sitemeter is under-counting my daily readership by a little more than a third of the combined total readership from that source and Google Feedburner. Based on that difference, my total readership counter should now be over two million, rather than the 1.4 million-odd it displays at the time of writing.

Fellow bloggers, you might want to check out your RSS feed statistics. They show an interesting picture of your readership - which might be rather larger than you think!

Peter

The whales of San Ignacio

A report in the Daily Mail alerted me to the existence of the friendly gray whales of San Ignacio in Mexico, of which I'd never heard before. Intrigued, I looked for more information, and found this article.

It was early one morning in February, 1972, when Mayoral and his partner Santo Luis Perez set out to fish in Laguna San Ignacio. Hundreds of gray whales were swimming in the three-mile-long, one-mile-wide inlet. This was usual between December and April, for the whales breed and calve in the protected inlets of Baja, the final destination of their annual 6,000-mile migration from the Arctic. Mayoral and Perez stayed as far as possible from the spouting creatures because the whales were said to smash boats with their powerful flukes. Mayoral, who had 16 years' experience at sea, knew of no one who had been close to a health gray whale and lived.

As Mayoral rowed to catch the outgoing tide, he saw, straight ahead, a whale approaching. Heart pounding, the wiry 31-year-old turned the little wooden boat and pulled hard for shore. Try as he might, however, he could not outrow the huge beast. In moments, it overtook them. Expecting the worst, the fishermen dropped to their knees and made the sign of the cross. The whale raised its nine-foot head out of the water and looked at them. Then, remarkably, it began to rub gently against the boat.

Sinking and resurfacing on opposite sides of the boat, the whale continued its gentle nuzzling for almost an hour. At first the men prayed, frozen in fear. But gradually, Mayoral's terror gave way to curiosity. He was tempted to reach out and touch this oddly unthreatening monster, but a lifetime of caution kept him still.

At last, finished with whatever its purpose had been, the whale disappeared below the surface. Some time passed before either man spoke. Then they headed home. To his wife, Mayoral said only, "No fish today."

But word spread through the cluster of small wooden shacks edging the lagoon. A miracle of sorts had happended; one of the whales had tried to touch the men, and the men had returned unharmed. Why?

In nights to come, by flickering kerosene lamps, Mayoral and Perez told the story. They and other fishermen struggled to understand. What did the whale want?

For Millennia, California gray whales had wintered in Baja's isolated lagoons, unbothered by natural enemies. Then, in 1845, two whalers sailed into Baja's Magdalena Bay and discovered that it was a breeding sanctuary for the migrating whales.

The grays, however, were not easy prey. Protective females were demonic defenders of their newborns, charging whaling boats and injuring or killing crew members. Whalers had dangerous encounters with other types of whales, but the grays were the only ones they called Devil Fish.

One Yankee whaler, Captain Charles Scammon, recounted in his 1856 Magdalena Bay journal another captain's experience, "We were chasing a cow and calf when the boat-steerer sung out: 'Cap'n, I've killed the calf, and the old cow is after us!" I sung out to the men to pull for the shore if they loved their lives; and when the boats struck the beach, I told all hands to climb trees."

In the end, the grays were no match for their hunters. The whalers blocked Baja's lagoons and turned them into giant traps. What followed was a methodical slaughter that made the once-quiet sanctuaries run red with the blood of dying whales. Their carcasses were floated to the beach, and blubber was boiled on the spot for oil. Whalebone and baleen were hauled aboard ships to be sold for corset stays, brushes and umbrella spokes. As petroleum eventually replaced whale oil as fuel, the gray were killed primarily to be sold as pet food.

By 1946, when international agreements finally protected the California grays against commercial whaling, it was extimated as few as 500 of the magnificent mammals remained.

Over the following decades, Baja's lagoons became refuges once more. The only humans who shared the whales' quiet breeding grounds were fishermen in small boats. The gray whale population rebounded to 24,000 animals - almost as many as there were before the commercial whalers arrived. Subsequently, in June 1994, the California gray whale became the first marine mammal to be removed from the U.S. list of endangered species.

So isolated is Laguna San Ignacio - even today, it is without telephones, electricity or running water - that word of Jose Francisco Mayoral's strange encounter did not reach the outside world. Then in February, 1976, the Salado, a whalewatching excursion boat from San Diego, anchored in Laguna San Ignacio. A 30-foot adolescent whale approached and began playing with the rubber dinghies tethered off its stern. The captain and others climbed into the dinghies for a closer look. Finally they dared to pat the seven-ton youngster. The following day, it returned for more. For the next month it continued making contact.

The fantastic news brought scientists flocking. During the next five years, encounters with friendly whales increased dramatically. Each year more scientists were on the water and more whales would approach. Gradually, the fishermen who initially thought the scientists were crazy, came to be the most frequent acquaintances of the giants they had feared for so long. The special group of gray whales that consistently sought our human contact came to be known as "the friendlies". Many with distinct personalities were even given names - Margie, Scarback, Mancha, Bopper and Amazing Grace.

. . .

Adventure travelers, science museums and wildlife groups have organized trips to visit Laguna San Ignacio. Contact with the whales is governed by strict rules. With few exceptions, local fisherman are the only ones the Mexican government allows to put boats on the lagoon. Many of them serve as guides during the winter whale season. Special areas in the northern half of the lagoon are off-limits to all except the whales and their calves. Rules are enforced by onshore government observers with high-powered telescopes - and by the fishermen.




Why are the whales approaching us? What do they want?

Jim Sumich, a San Diego-based expert on the migratory patterns of gray whales, notes that except for whalers, peoples have avoided these great animals throughout history. Perhaps the notoriously curious creatures might have made contact long ago, had we allowed it.

Scientists agree that all cetaceans - dolphins, toothed whales and baleen whales - are highly sensitive to touch. Perhaps the whales' initial curiosity about people was rewarded by the pleasurable sensation of being stroked, and this sparked repeated contacts.




Is that what the whales are getting out of this? A good scratch, nothing more? When asked, fishermen who spend their days with the whales have another answer: they like us.

"It is more than touch," Mayoral says with quiet conviction. Jose' Angel Sanchez, a marine biologist for Mexico's National Institute of Ecology agrees. He believes the grays are curious and intelligent, with a delightful sense of play. Baby whales will often push their sleeping mothers around the lagoons. So why wouldn't they have the intelligence - and gentleness - to twirl our boats like bathtub toys? That's what Bruce Mate, director of the Endowed Marine Mammal Research programs at Oregon State University, suggests.

Regardless of who is right, we seem to have crossed a frontier with another species, another world. And, remarkably, the contact was initiated not by us, but by the whales.

There's more at the link.

What a remarkable story! I'd never heard about these whales before now . . . but after reading the article, and seeing the pictures there and in the Daily Mail report, I think I have another destination to put on my list of "things I want to see before I die".

Here's a short video clip of the whales of San Ignacio.

There are many more such clips on YouTube, if you're interested.

Peter

Remembering 'Black Tot Day'

Forty years ago, on July 31st, 1970, the Royal Navy abolished the daily issue of rum to its seamen. The date has been remembered as 'Black Tot Day' ever since. Yachting Monthly reports:

The 40th anniversary of what is known as Black Tot Day will be marked [aboard HMS Victory in Portsmouth] with a re-enactment of Up Spirits, the serving of the rum tot to all Royal Navy sailors.

The final Up Spirits took place between 11am and 12 noon on July 31, 1970, when the last measure of Pusser's rum was served to the crews of Royal Navy ships.

It ended an enshrined 300-year tradition of a daily rum tot for each serving mariner.

Over the years, the daily measure shrank from half a pint a day in its introduction in the 17th century, to one eighth of a pint (equivalent to three modern measures) in the last century.

The rum was watered down in the Scuttlebutt and either drunk on the spot or collected in a rum fanny, or can, for the sailors' mess.




The Pusser's rum re-enactment crew, dressed in naval gear of Nelson's period, will be accompanied by the Exmouth Shanty Men singing famous old sea songs such as ‘All for me Grog' and ‘Nelson's Blood'.

The songs recall the creation of grog (a mix of rum, lime juice and sugar) and the death of Nelson whose body was shipped back to England in a rum cask to preserve it after the battle of Trafalgar. Legend says that the barrel was dry when opened - thirsty sailors had bored a hole and drunk Nelson's blood.

There's more at the link.

Fortunately for those with historic tastes, the original Admiralty-recipe 'Pusser's Rum' can still be purchased. (The term 'Pusser' is a corruption of 'Purser', who was the officer aboard ship responsible for the issue of provisions and supplies.) The recipe and all rights to it were purchased by Charles Tobias, who began producing it again in the British Virgin Islands. Today it's as strong as ever (108 proof, or 54% alcohol by volume), and is even produced in the same stills! The Pusser's Rum Web site describes them as follows:

"Navy Rum" is not just a name for dark rum. Originally it was the name of a specific type of rum distilled for the Admiralty in wooden pot stills in lieu of the normal metal ones. The distillation of rum in wood imparts a truly unique flavor that can only be described as "full and rich," making most others bland by comparison. This flavor is unique to the wooden process, and cannot be duplicated from any other type of distillation; interestingly Pusser’s is still distilled in the same original Admiralty stills. Rum that is not distilled in wood cannot achieve the unique flavor of a real Navy Rum. While others may have designated their product to be a navy rum by the mere inclusion of the phrase 'Navy Rum' on their label, they can never be a Navy Rum any more than a Rolls Royce logo placed on a Ford doesn't make a Ford a Rolls Royce. A real navy rum has to be distilled in wood.

. . .

The wooden staves of these two old, stills are impregnated with 200 years of esters and congeners - the organic compounds found naturally in wine and spirits that impart flavor to them. No other stills in the world can reproduce these flavors because all modern stills are made from metal which absorb nothing, and thus have nothing to impart in the way of flavor to a spirit during the distillation process. In contrast, wood soaks up the flavor of whatever it contains. In the case of the wooden stills, continuous usage over hundreds of years has made the wood of these stills extraordinarily flavorful.

Following distillation, all rums are aged for some time in wood because aging in wood imparts smoothness and flavor. But unlike other rums which are bland out of the still, Pusser's begins its aging process with a rich flavor already in place from the distillation process, one that would not be possible without the wooden distillation. Thus when the aging process is completed, the full flavor of Pusser's surpasses by far that of any other rum because the wooden distillation provides an extraordinary head start over anything distilled in metal.

While the rich flavor of Pusser's Rum is natural, most other major rum brands add flavoring agents and sugar to make their products smoother and to give them body. By contrast, Pusser's uses no flavoring agents or sugar. It is all natural.

There's more at the link. If you're interested in rum, and/or in the history of drinking, there's a wealth of information at the site. It's worth a visit. (I apologize if this sounds like a commercial for Pusser's Rum: it's not intended as such. Still, I really like the stuff, both for its taste and for the history behind it. They're not paying me to write this, nor will I receive any free product or other consideration from them. I just regard it as the finest rum in the world.)

This advertisement for Pusser's Rum illustrates the history of the rum issue in the Royal Navy. (There are a few seconds of darkness before the video begins.)

I'm not sure whether the abolition of the rum ration did anything to improve the operational efficiency of the Royal Navy. By now, so many of its ships have been abolished that it's no more than a shadow of the force that allowed Britannia to claim it 'ruled the waves'. Perhaps if they brought back the rum ration, it might help to improve the otherwise battered morale of the shrunken Fleet!



Peter

A man who made a difference

I'd meant to post about this earlier, but in the rush of other activities it kinda slipped my mind for a bit. Still, better late than never, as they say in the classics.

Dr. David Warren, inventor of the so-called 'black boxes', the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder (sometimes separate instruments, sometimes combined in a single unit) found in almost all commercial and military aircraft, died on July 19th at the age of 85. Commercial aviation owes him an incalculable debt.

In 2003, Gizmag published an overview of Dr. Warren's work. Here's an extract.

Dr Warren worked in his capacity as a chemist specialising in aircraft fuels at the Aeronautical Research Laboratories where he found himself [in the early 1950's] part of a "think-tank" investigating the possible causes of a recent Comet Jet Aircraft crash and prepare Australian infrastructure for commercial jet aircraft.

New fuels being used in Jets in the early 50's were more likely to become explosive at altitude than conventional aircraft fuels and this was identified as a possible cause of the Comet crash. This was the area of specific investigation for David - then still in his early 20's - but it was at this two-day meeting the he hit upon the idea of a flight recorder.

While listening to the arguments over possible causes of the crash, one of which was the new phenomenon of hijacking, Dr Warren realised that the solution could well be at hand if someone on the plane had been carrying a device similar to the then newly released Protona Minifon portable recorder that had caught his eye at a trade fair. Mention of the device to his superiors fell on deaf ears initially, but with support from colleagues and his own faith in the idea he continued to refine the idea in his own time.

The device would be fire proof (using steel wire as the recording medium like the "Pocket Recorder") and erase itself so that the last hours of the flight were always recorded.Dr Warren wrote the initial ground breaking report for ARL entitled "A Device for Assisting Investigation into Aircraft Accidents" in 1954.

Despite being published twice (including overseas), the report still failed to generate much interest and with further support form new Superintendent Tom Keeble, it was decided to take a "Show and Tell" approach by creating a prototype. After a series of tests the first "ARL Flight Memory Unit" was then produced.




The device consisted of a single steel wire as the recording medium and provided four hours of recording and automatically switched itself on and off with the aircraft. It was during this period that Dr Warren incorporated the idea of recording instruments on a separate channel - his interest in electronics as a schoolboy was brilliantly applied to turn instrument readings into recordable dots and bleeps.

Using this technique, the original unit was able to record data from 8 instruments every 2 seconds.The response was still less than encouraging with authorities still reluctant to accept the potential benefits of the device.

The project was given fresh impetus after David, who was working on the prototype during a lunchbreak) was given a brief introduction to the Secretary of the UK Air Registration Board, Sir Robert Hardingham in 1958. Hardingham immediately recognised potential of the flight memory device and David was put on a four day flight to England to demonstrate the invention. The flight (almost the only tangible reward Dr Warren has ever received for his invention) was an adventure in itself.

A detour through Africa eventuated in a historic recording of a lion hunt in Nairobi and the first ever "black box" recording on the last leg of the flight - chiefly because Dr Warren was nervous about the fact that one engine was out.

The recorder was well received in England (where the name "Black Box" was coined by a journalist at a briefing) and also in Canada where the idea was seen as a potential addition to beacons being developed there.

Dr Warren continued to lead the project, developing the Flight Memory device to record more instruments with greater accuracy. This led to the first commercially produced flight-recorder - the Red Egg - which was manufactured by British firm of S. Davall & Son and captured a large part of the British and overseas market at that time.




Following the crash of a Fokker Friendship plane in 1960 in Queensland, a judicial order required that all Australian airliners carry speech recorders. Australian authorities ignored the local talent and awarded the contract to USA company which caused delays in development and installation.

A further disaster at Wintoon in 1967 saw Australia became first country to make both flight data and cockpit voice mandatory on all turbo-props and jets.

Dr Warren is aware that support in the initial phase of his invention could have resulted in wider benefits to Australia and himself, but remains philosophical - the attitude he faced at the time was one of "if its any good the Americans would have it already" but Dr Warren takes satisfaction from the benefit the idea has wrought and believes that keeping an open mind will help us to avoid the mistakes made by his superiors in the past - "As you get older, you shouldn't lose the excitement of something new".

There's more at the link.

I had to laugh at the excuses offered by pilots and bureaucrats opposed to implementing 'black boxes' in aircraft. In its obituary of Dr. Warren, the Independent reported:

The idea was not at first well received by airlines. Pilots rejected the concept, fearing that these black boxes might be used to spy on crew, and their union, the Pilots' Federation, insisted that "no plane would take off in Australia with Big Brother listening". The Royal Australian Air Force further commented that "such a device is not required" and that "... the recorder would yield more expletives than explanations".

The irony of the RAAF's opposition was not lost on Dr. Warren when, following an accident, an Australian judge ordered that country's aircraft to be equipped with 'black boxes' - the first country in the world where this became mandatory. In what seems to have been a deliberate slap in the face to their local inventor, the contract for these early recorders was awarded to a US firm.

Dr. Warren's family seems to share his irreverence for authority, tradition and bureaucracy. 'Black boxes' are typically labeled with a warning not to open them. I was therefore delighted to see that his family decorated his coffin with a label reading 'Flight Recorder Inventor - Do Not Open'! (Click the picture below for a larger image.)




I'm sure that somewhere up there, Dr. Warren was laughing his head off!

The current safety of commercial aviation is due, in very large part, to lessons learned from past disasters - lessons we would never have learned without Dr. Warren and his 'black boxes'.

Peter

All fall down . . .

This compilation of falls, spills and tumbles made me laugh.

Seems like an amusing way to start the week, no?



Peter

Meet Lawdog's brother!

My buddy Lawdog announces that his brother Chris has joined the blogosphere. Welcome to the madhouse, Chris! Nice to have you with us.

For those of you who may not have read about the traumatic, troubled childhood of Lawdog and his brother Chris - traumatic and troubled more for those around them than for our two heroes - here's a six-part adventure from Lawdog's archives that will tell you more than you ever wanted to know (or would believe possible).

(Caution: there is a Class III Beverage Alert in effect while you read them.)

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Having grown up in Africa myself, I'm here to tell you that it's just as they describe it, if not more so. Oh - and their description of the ratel? It's very accurate. That's why South Africa named its armored infantry fighting vehicle after that animal.





Peter

Save your relationship - avoid romantic comedies!

An Australian satirist tenders this advice to those wanting their relationships to last.

So-called feel-good films are making people feel sorry for themselves. There is no doubting the warm glow induced by the onscreen requiting of love, the stars and fates aligning and the little joke at the end followed by funny out-takes during the credits. However, this fades almost as soon as the lights go up and the viewer turns to the seat next to her.

If her man has a wet T-shirt, in all likelihood it is not because he has just emerged, muscles rippling, from a lake, but because he's been drooling on himself while snoozing for the past hour and a half.

. . .

In a poll of 1000 Australians, almost half said romantic comedies, or rom-coms, had adversely affected their expectations of relationships, Reuters reported last week. One in four said they were expected to know what their partner was thinking, while one in five believed their partners expected gifts and flowers "just because".

"Just because they're shallow, materialistic individuals who can only be happy when they are given stuff?" an expert suggested. Naturally, he asked not to be named.

An entirely different expert said happy endings were making us sad. "It seems our love of rom-coms is turning us into a nation of happy-ever-after addicts," said sex and relationships expert Gabrielle Morrissey. "Yet the warm and fuzzy feeling they provide can adversely influence our view of real relationships. Real relationships take work and true love requires more than fireworks."

So much for surprising the missus with a box of sparklers. Honestly, you can't win.

Historians say romantic love dates back to the Middle Ages, when knights began nobly expressing their adoration to ladies in the courts of Europe. The ladies would allow the most chivalrous knights to carry their "favour" or "token" in battle.

This came about after one lady handed a knight a hankie before a joust. She did so with the words, "Wash it yourself, you lazy bugger!" He spent the rest of the week writing poems and giving her posies of dandelions by way of apology and the rest is history.

Before you knew it, Ye Olde Favoure Shoppe was selling hankies galore and a hard-working peasant couldn't get a date without making up a couplet about the joys of ploughing the furrow and sunlight glinting on ripe watermelons.

. . .

Some people grow out of rom-coms. Julia Roberts, for example. The 42-year-old star of Pretty Woman and Notting Hill said last week she was giving up on the genre.

"I'm too old for those silly situations of unrequited love," the Press Association quoted her as saying.

It was "less plausible when you're in your 40s to be falling down in the hallway because a boy walks by".

When you're in your 40s you're more likely to fall down in hallways because a boy has left a skateboard lying around.

Lack of romance can become a source of great stress when couples become parents. You still get surprise parcels on your pillow but they tend to be encased in nappies [diapers] and still attached to a baby's rear end.

There's more at the link. Very funny, and highly recommended.



Peter

It's enough to make you paranoid!

I can only feel sympathy for a teenage driver in Conrad, Iowa . . . even though I also have to laugh at her predicament. She's hit five deer in less than a year of driving! Full details are in this news report.

At least she and her family can see the funny side:

Considering the seriousness of the five crashes, Kacee and her mother are keeping their sense of humor, referring to the teenager as a deer magnet.

Kacee’s mother jokingly said, “Let's find a 50 dollar car and put a steel plate in the front. That way, if she hits a deer it's just going to bounce off.”

There's more at the link.

I note that her pastor's wife advised her to pray to avoid further collisions. Does this mean that if, despite her prayers, she has another one, it'll be a benison of venison?



Peter

Smartphones - a threat to privacy?

I've noticed several articles over the past week pointing out how smartphones store a great deal of information about their users - information that might be used against them under certain circumstances.

First, the Sydney Morning Herald reports:

Australian security experts, consumer advocates and privacy campaigners have sounded the alarm over the hundreds of thousands of free smartphone applications that spy on their users.

Lookout, a smartphone security firm based in San Francisco, scanned nearly 300,000 free applications for Apple's iPhone and phones built around Google's Android software. It found that many of them secretly pull sensitive data off users' phones and ship them off to third parties without notification.

That's a major concern that has been bubbling up in privacy and security circles.

The data can include full details about users' contacts, their pictures, text messages and internet and search histories. The third parties can include advertisers and companies that analyse data on users.

The information is used by companies to target ads and learn more about their users. The danger, though, is that the data can become vulnerable to hacking and used in identity theft if the third party isn't careful about securing the information.

Lookout found that nearly a quarter of the iPhone apps and almost half the Android apps contained software code that contained those capabilities.

The code had been written by the third parties and inserted into the applications by the developers, usually for a specific purpose, such as allowing the applications to run ads. But the code winds up forcing the application to collect more data on users than even the developers may realise, Lookout executives said.

"We found that, not only users, but developers as well, don't know what's happening in their apps, even in their own apps, which is fascinating," said John Hering, chief executive of Lookout.

Part of the problem is that smartphones don't alert users to all the different types of data the applications running on them are collecting. iPhones only alert users when applications want to use their locations.

And, while Android phones offer robust warnings when applications are first installed, many people breeze through the warnings for the gratification of using the apps quickly.

Australian online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia spokesman Colin Jacobs said the issue of applications spying on their users "was something that everybody needs to be aware of".

Jacobs said that many did not think of their phone as a computer.

"Mobiles contain as much personal information as people’s everyday computers do," he said.

. . .

Intelligent Business Research Services analyst Joe Sweeney said that many users had installed firewalls on their PCs, but weren't doing so on their mobiles.

In many cases this is because they can't. Apple, for example, doesn't offer a firewall product on its iPhone.

"If the numbers in this report are correct, then obviously this is an issue," Sweeney said.

"We may need to see firewall-type software on phones."

There's more at the link.

Intrigued by this report, I looked for more. The Detroit Free Press reports that Apple's iPhone is known for retaining a great deal of information about its users.

There's a burgeoning field of forensic study that deals with iPhones specifically because of their popularity, the demographics of those who own them and what the phone's technology records during its use. Law-enforcement experts said iPhone technology records a wealth of information that can be tapped more easily than BlackBerry and Android devices to help police learn where you've been, what you were doing there and whether you've got something to hide.

"Very, very few people have any idea how to actually remove data from their phone," said Sam Brothers, a cell phone forensic researcher with U.S. Customs and Border Protection who teaches law-enforcement agents how to retrieve information from iPhones in criminal cases.

"It may look like everything's gone," he said, "but for anybody who's got a clue, retrieving that information is easy."

. . .

An estimated 1.7 million people rushed to buy the latest iPhone version released last month. Before that, Apple had sold more than 50 million iPhones, according to company figures.

. . .

Just as users can take and store a picture of their iPhone's screen, the phone itself automatically shoots and stores hundreds of such images as people close out one application to use another.

"Those screen snapshots can contain images of e-mails or proof of activities that might be inculpatory, or exculpatory," Minor said.

. . .

"Most people enable the location services because they want the benefits of the applications," Minor said. "What they don't know is that it's recording your GPS coordinates."

Bill Cataldo, an assistant Macomb County prosecutor who heads the office's homicide unit, said iPhones are treated more like small computers than mobile phones.

"People are keeping a tremendous amount of information on there," he said.

Cataldo said he has found phone call histories and text messages most useful in homicide cases. But Zdziarski, who has helped federal and state law-enforcement agencies gather evidence, said those elements are just scratching the surface when it comes to the information police and prosecutors soon will start pulling from iPhones.

. . .

Adam Gershowitz, who teaches criminal procedure at the University of Houston Law Center, said that the new technology brings with it concerns about privacy -- especially when it comes to whether investigators have the right to search someone's iPhone after an arrest.

So far, the courts have treated mobile phones like a within-reach container that police can search the same way they can check items in a glove box or cigarette pack, Gershowitz said, though the Ohio Supreme Court in 2009 ruled to bar warrantless searches of cell phone data. That case is being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Again, there's more at the link.

Jonathan Zdziarski, mentioned in the Detroit Free Press report, offers courses to police departments on how to extract information from iPhones. One of his courses is called 'Advanced iPhone Forensics L-1: Recovering Evidence, Personal Data, and Corporate Assets'. In it, he covers areas such as:

• What kind of evidence is stored on an iPhone, and what can be recovered through desktop trace
• Raw disk recovery of a v1.x, v2.x, and v3.x iPhone user disk partition, preserving and recovering the entire raw user disk. Recovery over USB cable or Wi-Fi.
• Making commercial tools, such as Encase, recognize an iPhone disk image
• Bypassing passcode protection and device encryption to gain access to the device’s user interface for compatibility with third-party triage tools, or for time-sensitive cases where preservation of life is priority.
• Interrupting the iPhone 3G’s “secure wipe” process
• Recovering deleted voicemail, images, email, and other personal data using data carving techniques
• Recovering geotagged metadata from camera photos (GPS coordinates taken at the time the photo was taken)
• Electronic discovery of Google map lookups, WiFi connect records, keyboard typing cache, and other sensitive data stored on the live file system
• Extracting contact information and other data from the iPhone’s database
• Collecting desktop trace and establishing trusted relationships to owners’ desktops
• Different recovery strategies based on case needs.

More details of the course are at the link.

I'm sure there are those who'll argue that if you're a law-abiding citizen, you've no need to be concerned about such courses, or about police interest in your smartphone. On the other hand, I'm sure that law enforcement authorities aren't the only people who find the wealth of information on your smartphone intriguing. Since criminals can hack a smartphone as easily as anyone else, I think I'll be avoiding them and sticking to my plain-jane cellphone for the foreseeable future!

Peter