Family reunions must have been very confusing

This is NOT how a family tree is supposed to look…
[Via reddit.com: what's new online!]

submitted by enjoiskate09 to WTF
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Here is the family tree:

Having a Grandmother who is also an aunt is not good. I just wonder about Phillip iV marrying his sister’s daughter.

Tough being a royal. According to wikipedia, Charles II had a genome more inbred than the children of siblings.

He had lots of problems – did not walk until 8, he could not chew.

This is how inbred strains of mice are created. These sorts of crosses produce mice with pairs of chromosomes that are identical. That is pretty much what Charles II was like.

He was king for 35 years. He had two wives and no children.

His death lead to the War of the Spanish Succession and also as an example of what severe inbreeding can lead to.

CNN’s failure

 

by TimWilson

CNN falls into the abyss
[Via Scripting News]

First — what’s happening in Egypt is awful. The US was taking the wrong approach — Mubarkek isn’t really a dictator, but that changed, and the President’s remarks yesterday were right on the money. We can’t get too involved, publicly — because Egypt is a sovereign country. But please, an 83-year-old man needs to be thinking seriously about moving on, and it’s pretty clear that until the popular uprising Mubarek wasn’t planning on leaving any time soon.

But.. This blog is called Scripting News, so we’re focused on media and from our point of view the big story is that cable is punting bigtime and the Internet is, finally, coming into its own as the source of realtime video news — thanks to the excellent coverage of Al Jazeera.

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al Jazeera has become a part of my viewing habits of the Egypt uprising. Dave sees this also. And he makes a statement that absolutely captures my feelings:

Al Jazeera offered their feed to CNN, but apparently CNN didn’t take it (I don’t know for sure, as I said earlier I was part of the great news blackout that covers the US where the Internet doesn’t reach in full broadband strength). In the conference rooms at Time-Warner they must now realize that they have to offer their full video news feed for free via the web. And they need to showWolf Blitzer the door, and get a new generation of news people in there, who ask the hard questions, and call bullshit for what it is when they talking heads start spouting. Let’s scare the crap off the wire, and replace it with people who believe in the American values of bravery and freedom.

I turned off CNN because Wolf was awful and it was all about the US  ”What does this mean for the US? – with none of the analysis I expected. Cooper was better.

But, in particular, I needed real time streaming on the Web, so I could watch/listen while working. Only al Jazeera did this and I was impressed with their work.

If I need news about breaking events in the Middle East, that is where I will turn.

Unless someone follows what Dave Winder suggests. But, since the biggest innovation the major media have brought us is the disappointing The Daily, I have little hope.

Sounds you never want to hear

Dread clicks and whirs: the sounds of hard drives failing
[Via Boing Boing]

Datacent, a data-recovery house, has a page of recordings of the sound of hard drives failing, segmented by vendor and cause of failure (e.g., “Western Digital 250GB desktop drive with stuck spindle can’t spin up, chatters” and “Fujitsu laptop hard drive with bad heads making sweeping sound”). I love the idea of listening to these until you can identify them by rote, like Sherlock Holmes examining a cigar ash or a birder identifying some exotic warbler’s song.

More practically, as Datacent notes, “If your hard drive makes noises like these and you are still able to access your files – backup immediately.”

Hard drive sounds

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I may have nightmares from hearing some of these sounds. I’m a cyberchondriac when it comes to my own health. Now I can worry about my computer’s.

They’ll switch until the Verizon iPhones are sold out

 

by Yutaka Tsutano

Survey: 44% of Verizon Android users likely to switch to iPhone on Day One
[Via Brainstorm Tech: Technology blogs, news and analysis from Fortune Magazine » Apple 2.0]

For Blackberry users it’s 66%, and nearly a quarter are willing to stand in line to get one

We’re not familiar with the work of uSamp, a high-tech online research firm based in Los Angeles, but if the results of the survey they released last week are accurate, Research in Motion (RIMM) is in trouble and the run on Google (GOOG) Android phones is about to hit a wall.

Drawing from a pool of 4.7 million panelists, uSamp asked a sample of 700 AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ) smartphone owners how likely they were to switch to Verizon’s version of Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone next Thursday, Feb. 10, the first day it goes on sale.

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Of course, polls only measure what people are willing to say in response to a specific question, so there are some worries about taking everything about the poll as truth. But it is fun working some of the numbers.

And in doing so, we can see that this survey may not hold many connections with reality.

Over 50% of Verizon Blackberry or Android users were likely or somewhat likely to switch on Day 1, with almost a quarter willing to wait in line!  And 29% of ATT iPhone users would switch to Verizon on Day 1 and wait in line.

But percentages can be a little deceiving because only about 14% of the the 727 people in the survey own an Android or Blackberry.

Doing some back calculations, there were 378 ATT smartphone owners in the survey. So, the total number of ATT people in the survey who would switch on Day 1 was about 100.

There were 196 Android and 155 Blackberry users in the survey. From the table, 86 Android and 102 Blackberry users would change on Day 1.

Thus, of the people already with smartphones who say they will buy an iPhone on Day 1, roughly a third will be switching from ATT, a third will be switching from Android and a third will be switching from Blackberry.

Now, onto why I think the numbers do not really reflect  reality, How many people at Verizon and ATT have smartphones? According to this 2009 survey, ATT had 12 million smartphone subscribers and Verizon had 5.1 million. I am sure the number is much higher now but let’s use these as a lowball estimate.

Thus,, according the new survey, 4,200,000 people from ATT will stand in line on Day 1 to buy an iPhone. They will be joined by 2,800,000 people from Verizon who have Androids or Blackberrys.

This survey suggests that seven million people who already have smartphones  will be in line on Day 1. According to estimates, on the first day of sales of the iPhone 4, perhaps 750,000 iPhones were sold in the US. But most of these were pre-order units, something only current Verizon users can do. And these sold out the first day online.

It would be a miracle beyond belief that the iPhone 4, which had a huge start before, would be able to provide phones for 7,000,000 people on Day 1. If that many show up, there will be a lot of disappointment.

And is it really plausible that 7,000,000 people will really buy a phone on Day 1? I think many people’s views on the survey were unrealistic. They may be enthusiastic about switching in the abstract and there is no harm in saying yes.

While the numbers may be off, they certainly do reflect a widespread dissatisfaction amongst many non-iPhone users with their current  smartphone or carrier. Apple could sell a lot of iPhones here.

 

From the “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” school of politics

by boliston

The ‘Protect Life Act’
[Via Daring Fireball]

Jodi Jacobson:

They want to “protect life” so much that they have written into the bill a new amendment that would override the requirement that emergency room doctors save every patient, regardless of status or ability to pay.  The law would carve out an exception for pregnant women; doctors and hospitals will be allowed to let pregnant women die if interventions to save them will kill the fetus.

Your Republican Party

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The GOP and their ironic choice of legislation titles. The way I read the language, a hospital could refuse to do a necessary medical procedure to save a woman’s life and that would be perfectly OK.

This follows very closely what the Catholic Church in Arizona has said. Better to let the woman and the fetus die than do a procedure that would abort the fetus. I guess some will not be happy until women dying in childbirth and pregnancy gets back to 19th Century levels.

This follows on top of the GOP’s redefinition of rape and some Republicans wishing to have the woman who has been raped called the accuser rather than the victim.

Yep, if you are beaten you are a victim but if you are raped, you are simply the accuser.

What happened to all the concern about jobs? How does this affect unemployment?