Encephalosponge » News

Necessary follow-up on the “Missing Link”

Jonathan Blackhall — Wed, 27 May 2009 04:36:59 +0000

Ars Technica did a fantastic follow-up on the discovery of the “missing link”, which I posted about last week. As Ars points out, it’s looking like Ida was way more hype than anything, which could end up being extremely detrimental to science. Despite being a very well-preserved and valuable fossil, she does not appear to be a “missing link” in any way. If you were interested in the Ida news, this article is a must read. Score -1 for science and the media. :-/

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Score 2 for Science

Jonathan Blackhall — Fri, 22 May 2009 03:26:13 +0000

Just popping back in to tell you about a really cool scientific discovery. Some paleontologists discovered a new genus and species in Germany that is described as the “missing link” between humans and early mammals. The skeleton, dubbed Ida (or Darwinius masillae if you prefer), is an early mammal similar to a lemur that has opposable thumbs and forward-facing eyes. Score 1 for science and Darwin! Even better, their work was published in PLoS ONE, an open-access journal. Therefore, despite the fact that this revolutionary article was just published two days ago, anyone in the world can view the full text and high resolution images for free. Plus, you can print, reuse, redistribute, or even modify the images and text as long as you give the original authors credit. Score 2 for science! (hat tip: Jamey)

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Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov

Jonathan Blackhall — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 01:24:12 +0000

“One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.”

via EOP – Blog Post – Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov.

Now that’s something I didn’t expect. Sounds like a very interesting idea! You can subscribe to the Whitehouse.gov Blog for more info on what’s going on in the new Obama Administration.

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Yo Frankie! – Apricot Open Game Project

Jonathan Blackhall — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 21:57:45 +0000

Yo Frankie! – Apricot Open Game Project » Yo Frankie! Online Release!. The folks at Blender, responsible for the “open movies” Elephant’s Dream and Big Buck Bunny, have finally released their completely open source computer game. It’s available for Linux, Windows and OS X.

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A Doctor, a Mutation and a Potential Cure for AIDS

Jonathan Blackhall — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 18:47:16 +0000

A Doctor, a Mutation and a Potential Cure for AIDS – WSJ.com.

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Wrangling the Crazyhorse

Jonathan Blackhall — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:15:33 +0000

It looks like a lot of great new features are getting picked up in the next version of WordPress (2.7), due out sometime in the next few months. One of the biggest changes is (again) revamping the administrative interface (my end of this blog), which I am very excited about. I like the current admin interface better than the previous one, but this new one, codenamed Crazyhorse, is promising to be even better. They put time, effort, and money into usability testing and seeing how people naturally expect things to work (with eye lasers!), and they even asked our opinions. This is in addition to a number of other incredibly useful features, such as automatic upgrading of WP software and the ability to browse and install plugins from within WP.

All of this just reinforces my love of WordPress and Automattic. They’re currently leading their field, but are they sitting back on their haunches waiting for someone to challenge them? No way. They’re pushing their software forward at an amazing speed, and doing a heck of a good job at it. No wonder Matt Mullenweg (founder of WP) is on the list of the Top Entrepreneurs Under 30.

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Now that’s more like it

Jonathan Blackhall — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 04:06:28 +0000

Finally, it looks RMstudents.com, the project I’ve been working on at school, is going to take off. We implemented a lot of new features this summer that are (hopefully) going to be really useful for the students. In fact, we even received a request today from a student in the Nursing college to get them (and the rest of the University) on board. That’s very exciting. But to be honest a picture is worth a thousand words. We’ve already practically gotten more outside activity since classes started a few weeks ago than we did throughout most of last year. I think it helped that the site was up and ready for the M1s when they arrived and we’ve been able to point out some great features it offers. Let’s hope it keeps up!

RMstudents is now a more happening place than it used to be!

You also might notice that I rearranged the link structure to facilitate a more task-based approach. Hopefully it will make the website easier to use by letting people log in and get right to work doing what they came to do. To see a list of what we’ve added recently, check out the Welcome Back post.

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Disease-specific Stem Cells

Jonathan Blackhall — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:53:04 +0000

A recent post on Ars Technica explains how researchers are converting adult stem cells from patients with certain diseases into embryonic stem cells. This will hopefully make studying the cellular basis of diseases like Parkinson’s easier by providing a virtually unlimited supply of tissue, which was previously difficult to come by. This technique was developed for ALS, and it’s been applied to 10 new diseases.

The full list of diseases represented: adenosine deaminase deﬁciency-related severe combined immunodeficiency (ADA-SCID), Shwachman-Bodian-Diamond syndrome (SBDS), Gaucher disease (GD) type III, Duchenne (DMD) and Becker muscular dystrophy (BMD), Parkinson disease (PD), Huntington disease (HD), juvenile-onset, type 1 diabetes mellitus (JDM), Down syndrome (DS)/trisomy 21, and the carrier state of Lesch-Nyhan syndrome.

Sound like a list of diseases we studied in class, anyone?

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Cedar Point: Christmas in July

Jonathan Blackhall — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:35:38 +0000

Cedar Point is offering admission tickets for $25 online (normally $43) if you buy 4 or more. If you’ve never been to Cedar Point, all I can say is that you’re missing out on the best rides in the world. Period. They have three out of the top ten steel roller coasters in the world (the only park to have multiple coasters on the top 10). And if you’ve only ever been to “Great” America, I laugh at you Do yourself a favor. Take a road trip this summer and get to The Point. As long as you like roller coasters, you won’t be disappointed.

Can you say 310 feet, 80 degree angle?

Cedar Point has received the Golden Ticket Award by Amusement Today for “Best Amusement Park in the World” for the past ten years. -WP

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Easy Upgrades

Jonathan Blackhall — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:09:51 +0000

WordPress 2.6 came out yesterday (ahead of schedule). It’s got a few nice new features to it, but not nearly as many changes as was found in 2.5. It was certainly more of a fit-and-finish release, but it looks like (as usual) they did their homework and fixed some good stuff. One of the features from 2.5 that’s still working great is the automatic plugin upgrades. Any time a new plugin comes out, I get notified and upgrading is as easy as clicking a link that pulls the latest version right on to my site. Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) had mentioned a similar idea to automatically upgrade WordPress itself in the future. Well as I was going to download the WP database backup plug-in (that I didn’t have installed for some reason), I saw that an automatic upgrade plug-in for WordPress has been implemented (but not by the WordPress team). Once I was sure I had everything backed up correctly (I learned my lesson), I decided to try out this new plug-in. Needless to say, it worked great. It even has automatic back-up features built in for files and the database. If only Drupal made upgrades as easy as WP, it would make maintaining RMstudents a whole lot easier.

So far, WP 2.6 seems to be working great! Man, I love this software. It’s got to be one of the best pieces of FOSS out there. Grab it today!

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