So I’m finally getting around to figuring out this twitter stuff and have added a bunch of people to my twitter feed. The default page is so unorganized that I got chest pains and had to go re-organize my dvd’s to restore some balance in my life after I tried to visit twitter.com, so I am looking for a program to deal with the chaos. Are there any out there you would recommend? What about as gadgets for Windows Seven or Mac?

My feed is johngcole, btw. Not sure how much I will use it.

Since it has been about six days since we have had an OS flame war, let me state that one thing I hate about Apple is that no matter what program I want to use, whether it be firefox, itunes, office, photoshop, dreamweaver, or acrobat, any time I try to use a program I have to install critical updates for five minutes first.

Now you can say this is not Apple’s fault, per se, but I do not run into these issues on Windows Seven. They just install themselves at night. I swear to God Itunes updates more than Drudge.

The findings of this research really suck:

When Seattle oncologist Dr. Marc Chamberlain was treating his brain cancer patients, he noticed an alarming pattern. His male patients were typically receiving much needed support from their wives. But a number of his female patients were going it alone, ending up separated or divorced after receiving a brain tumor diagnosis.

Dr. Chamberlain, chief of the neuro-oncology division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, had heard similar stories from his colleagues. To find out if these observations were based in fact, he embarked on a study with Dr. Michael J. Glantz of the University of Utah Huntsman Cancer Institute and colleagues from three other institutions who began to collect data on 515 patients diagnosed with brain tumors or multiple sclerosis from 2001 through 2006.

The results were shocking. Women in the study who were diagnosed with a serious illness were six times more likely to become separated or divorced than men with similar health problems, according to the report published in the journal Cancer.

I’m really not sure how some people live with themselves.

The New Yorker is shrill:

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.

I found this story to be interesting (and, for me, local):

U. ROCHESTER—In 2005, a gigantic, 35-mile-long rift broke open the desert ground in Ethiopia. At the time, some geologists believed the rift was the beginning of a new ocean as two parts of the African continent pulled apart, but the claim was controversial.

Now, scientists from several countries have confirmed that the volcanic processes at work beneath the Ethiopian rift are nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world’s oceans, and the rift is indeed likely the beginning of a new sea.

The new study, published in the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that the highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of little by little as has been predominantly believed. In addition, such sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events, says Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and coauthor of the study.

It brings up a couple points:

• Does the fact that this is happening so quickly make the theory of plate tectonics more believable to young earthers?
• Thank God this wasn’t Kenya or they’d be looking for a birth certificate in there.

Update. This is good news for conservatives.

As much as I love the professional climatologists who write RealClimate, they rarely let the anti-science crowd bait them into the kind of high dudgeon that makes PZ Myers or Tom Levenson so much fun to read.

Part of the reason for their patient tone is that most denialists are either too limited (e.g., Inhofe) or too mercenary (TechCentralStation, George Will) to absorb any correction. Since the debate opponent won’t even acknowledge that you exist most of the time, real climate scientists usually write for interested third parties. That is what makes the response from RC to the pseudo-denialist authors of Superfreakonomics (in truth, contrarians of the vanity kind that DougJ writes about), professionals with credibility to defend, so worthwhile to read.

I have very much enjoyed and benefited from the growing collaborations between Geosciences and the Economics department here at the University of Chicago, and had hoped someday to have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. It is more in disappointment than anger that I am writing to you now.

I am addressing this to you rather than your journalist-coauthor because one has become all too accustomed to tendentious screeds from media personalities (think Glenn Beck) with a reckless disregard for the truth. However, if it has come to pass that we can’t expect the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor (and Clark Medalist to boot) at a top-rated department of a respected university to think clearly and honestly with numbers, we are indeed in a sad way.

No more excerpts. The whole post is great so go read it.

Following the advice of too many readers to name, I wrote this post on a Toshiba Netbook running Win7. After removing the crapware and installing Google Chrome and MalwareBytes the tiny computer runs quite smoothly. A system like this will not power the next Pixar movie, but for office tasks and internet surfing, even image-heavy sites like flickr, the system honestly runs just as fast as any other computer that I have used.

Win 7 unquestionably works better out of the box than Vista, at least on a new machine (sorry, John), and several people have told me that it even benchmarks a little faster than XP. On the other hand Redmond made the weird decision to bundle a crippled version of Win7 (“starter”) that will not do ordinary things like play a DVD movie unless you pay for a $79 upgrade. The decision makes some sense since you cannot use DVDs at all without buying a separate external drive, but it still feels like a dick move.

Battery life looks like a high point. A test similar to what Walt Mossberg does* suggests that the 6-cell battery should weather more than seven hours of continuous use. God knows how long it will run in Toshiba’s proprietary “eco mode”. For those who need to know, Toshiba took a hint from Prius and tossed in meters that can measure savings in units ranging from processor power to amusing trifles like grams of carbon.

Overall the netbook seems like a well thought out niche product for people like me who travel professionally and don’t need to play Crysis on the plane.

(*) Internet radio streaming through itunes, surfing the net with Chrome, OpenOffice running, no sleep for the screen or processor, medium sound volume and screen brightness.

So it took a while (most likely due to operator error), and I was up until about 4 am working on things, but I have Windows Seven up and running and I have to say it is really sweet. I don’t know what the lingo is, but I really like the tray at the bottom with your applications.

And btw- don’t forget about Bitsy! We are so very close.

Only took twelve hours.

Now I get to reinstall all the software.

So I went and bought a WD terabyte external HD, something I should have done years ago anyway with all the important stuff I have on this computer, and am now backing up all my porn my important work files. Once that is done, I now have a clean copy of Windows 7, not an upgrade, and I will start over.

The joy of this is hard to describe.

And Tunch ate his day’s allotment of food by 4:30 pm and has been standing behind me shrieking since then.

And I now have my desktop running Vista at half the functionality it was working at before the “upgrade.” I have no video card drivers and am looking at everything in 800×600 on a 24” lcd, no virus protection, and for some reason or another, my secondary monitor is now recognized as my main monitor. Why?

Why the fuck not? This is Microsoft!

I have a local Italian deli that delivers that is a lot like a Microsoft product. Sure, you can order whatever you want, but you never know what you are going to get. I’ve had an order of wings and blue cheese come as chicken tenders with ranch and a large fry, an order of lasagne and a salad show up as stuffed shells and cheese sticks, and so on. If you point out they have made a mistake, they get huffy and then take two hours to get you the right order. By then you are full on the cold cereal you ate while waiting the three hours for your food to show up.

At any rate, the new plan is to just put everything on my external hd, take this upgrade back to the Best Buy people and throw it at them, and then do a full install of Seven tomorrow.

If any of you rocket scientists at Microsoft want to try and fix this disaster you have created, feel free to email.

Did precisely what I was asked, uninstalled my antivirus, uninstalled itunes, and uninstalled my ati drivers, followed all the instructions, and now my desktop PC is in an infinite loop with Microsoft 7 halfway installed. It restarts, boots to the Windows 7 install screen, sends me an error message that the “install can not be located,” and then reboots. Rinse and repeat.

Heckuva job, guys. I now have a several thousand dollar paperweight.

BTW- That Windows Upgrade Advisor was teh awesome. I like downloading shit that tells me stuff will be fine before installing software that kills my computer.

And not to reignite the Mac v. Windows flame wars, but I am writing this on my MacBook because my windows “upgrade” has left my PC worthless as breasts on men.

Never had a problem with Vista, but am about to upgrade to Windows 7. If you don’t hear from me again, you know why. Also, vote for Little Bitsy:

Every vote counts.

Have any of you heard of this before:

Our plan is to retrace the route of the automotive CEOs who went to Washington DC asking for government loans. But instead of looking for aid, we’d like to present President Obama with a homegrown solution to the transportation crisis. And instead of flying in a corporate jet, we’re riding Brammo Enertia powercycles. We’re just a couple of guys who work for Brammo, but we want to show that there’s a better way to get from Point A to Point B. And we want to have a little fun while we’re doing it. So join us as we surf from plug to plug in a quest to meet Obama, fueled by nothing more than electricity and the kindness of everyday Americans.

I honestly don’t think I have ever heard of an electric motorcycle before. At any rate, looks like they are having fun, although I would think it would be a touch chilly to be on a bike in Michigan. Apparently the bike can travel 15,000 miles on 100 bucks worth of electricity.

The superlight sub-notebook computer format has interested me since at least the mid-90’s, but for the most part tiny, portable computers seemed like a half thought-through niche product. Starting about a year ago, it appears that Asus and now pretty much everyone have hit on a winning formula that deservedly opened a huge new segment of the computer market.

Like most professional scientists Dr. Mrs. Dr. F and I usually arrange our talks at the last minute, often on the plane on the way to a conference. Given the bulk of most laptops and their life support systems, it is hard to ignore the appeal of a super-battery life computer the size of a day planner. Too bad for me, when I walked into Best Buy today they had just cleaned out their PC shelves to make room for new models that run Windows 7. For travel reasons we need one of these things pretty soon, so I am turning to you guys for help.

Has anyone tried Windows 7? I could wait until Monday and buy a new model, but past experience makes me skeptical. I had the dubious pleasure of managing digital microscopes separately controlled by Windows ME and Vista , the two biggest mistakes in the history of operating system rollouts and I fucking dare you to convince me otherwise. Plus I’m still coping with post-clippy stress syndrome. I like the idea of a portable computer running a minimal necessary OS*. Should I find an XP-powered netbook online and hope that it ships in time? Maybe you guys can convince me that Win 7 will not crash and burn like Windows f*cking ME.

If you have a netbook and want to let others know how great it is, or if you want to warn others away, feel free to share. Any and all advice will be appreciated.

(*) One other baffling point – as I recall Windows XP is just a prettier and memory-intensive graphics upgrade of Windows 2000. So why not ship netbooks with Win2K? That should free up the minimal processor and the RAM to work on computing tasks rather than unnecessary microsoft crapware. Apparently I don’t know anything about computers.