OpenCL

Ryan Smith discusses the state of OpenCL support at Anandtech. Surprisingly some of the comments to his post are actually useful too.

Ardipithecus ramidus: 15 or 4,400,000 years late.

Carl Zimmer (at The Loom) and Matthew Cobb (at Why Evolution is True) have nice short write-ups (with links) on Ardipithecus ramidus, our 4.4 million year old cousin.

Update: John Hawks' weblog has the most detailed runthrough and independent analysis of the Ardipithecus papers I've seen (starting here). If your interested in Ardi, this is the place to go.

Ayn Rand didn't like physics?

I've been very busy with work and other functional duties, but this is worth a link.

Jonathan Chait has an excellent essay on Ayn Rand and the irrational beliefs of her followers on the political right. There is much worthy of discussion, from her bizarre upbringing and even more outlandish cult-like cliques through to her and modern conservatism's absurdly anti-factual beliefs regarding worth, work and taxation, but I'd love to follow up on this snippet of information:

(she considered the entire field of physics "corrupt")

Maybe the library will get the biographies referred to in the essay, but I doubt I'll have the time to follow up on Rand's physics hatred. After all, some of us have real work to do.

"Unix is the best screwdriver ever built"

Unix is now 40 years old, if measured from August 1969 when Ken Thompson decided to spend a month while his wife was away by writing the core of what became Unix.

The BBC has a nice article by Mark Ward on Unix's history, ending with a quote

"Unix is the best screwdriver ever built," said Dr Salus.

that echoes the theme of Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" that compared Unix to a Hole Hawg drill.

Amazon MP3 downloads from Linux: clamz

Amazon.com offers quite competitively priced full album DRM-free mp3 downloads. You can purchase and download individual mp3 songs without requiring additional software. But they do require you to install and use their Amazon MP3 Downloader software in order to purchase and download the albums, which are of course better value for money as long as you want most or all of the album.

To their credit they provide their software not only for MS Windows (XP and Vista) and Mac OSX (10.4 and higher), but also for Linux (Debian 4, Ubuntu 8.10, Fedora 9, OpenSUSE 11.0).

Sadly if you're using a version of Linux other than those supported you may have trouble: the Fedora 9 amazonmp3.rpm will not install under Fedora 11 (although vwbusguy provides a work-around for Fedora 10).

Luckily there is another option: a command line tool called clamz (vwbusguy has produced Fedora 11 RPMs of clamz). Attempt to purchase the mp3 album from amazon as normal and once it offers you the chance to open or save the .amz file choose "save to disk" instead. Then run clamz on the .amz file, e.g.

clamz -d ./ AmazonMP3-*.amz

If you don't use the official amazon downloader you do have to jump through some hoops to get the *.amz file that clamz uses:

• Select the album you wish to purchase and click the "Buy MP3 album with 1-Click" button.
• A page appears asking you to install the Amazon MP3 Downloader application, presenting links to Windows, OSX and Linux versions. At the bottom of this page is a small link saying that if you've already installed the application you need to enable it in your browser and offering a link to do so. Click that link.
• You are redirected back to the web page for the album.
• Click the "Buy MP3 album with 1-Click"button again.
• A new window appears asking if you really want to purchase this album. Click OK.
• A dialog window will appear offering options to "Open with" and "Save as". Save the *.amz file its offering you.
• Go to the command line and run clamz on the amz file.
• Note that you can only run clamz ONCE on any *.amz file.
  

One thing that is slightly worrying about this is what happens if the download fails? If Amazon thinks you've downloaded the album they wont let you download the files again.

[Updated 10/20/09.]

Coyne reviews Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God"

Jerry Coyne (author of "Why Evolution is True") has a lengthy review of Robert Wright's latest book "The Evolution of God" (Amazon link).

In short: Wright cherry picks examples in an attempt to demonstrate "moral" progress mediated by historical (supposedly evolutionary) changes in (monotheistic) religions, as his previous books attempted to show progress in biological evolution towards greater complexity (and hence mankind). In short this is a classic religious attempt to ascribe purpose and direction to the Universe.

Nevertheless Coyne's review itself is worth reading.

Gemmel, Quist and Polar Shifts

Fans of British fantasy novels will no doubt remember David Gemmell as being one of the biggest names in fantasy writing between the mid-1980's and his untimely death from heart disease in 2006.

Gemmell's books were a breath of fresh air in the late 80's, washing away the stale Tolkien-imitation that seemed to dominate the field and replacing it with gritty tales of flawed heros, often hopeless odds, and major characters often dying. Sadly, the more books Gemmel wrote the more formulaic this style became.

One re-occurring theme Gemmell used to tie together the different series of his earlier books was of periodic catastrophes that shifted the Earth's rotation, drowning continents and emptying seas. At the time I read his books I assumed these ideas (absurd, but good fodder for fantasy) were Gemmell's own adaptation of Velikovsky's catastrophism, but most of the Polar Shift concepts used in Gemmell's work appear directly taken from Charles Hapgood's "Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age."

The reason I now know this is John McKay's excellent post on Allan Quist's hilarious attempt to disprove global climate change by claiming that ancient maps show an ice-free Antarctica based on Hapgood's work.