Blue Crab Boulevard

Apple has just released a version of its Safari web browser that will run on Windows platforms (XP or Vista only, however). Analysts say they are doing so to expose Windows users to their superior products. The program (it is a beta, be aware of that) is available for free and can be downloaded from the Apple site.

"Safari is another Trojan horse that introduces an innovation of Apple to the Windows community and entices them to the Mac platform," said Tim Bajarin, an industry analyst at Creative Strategies, a technology consultancy.

The free program is the latest move by Apple to expand its reach beyond its Macintosh computers and, at the same time, attract new converts to its products. The upcoming iPhone seeks to be another draw.

In fact, Apple said Monday it would run a full version of Safari on the iPhone, thus allowing developers to create Web-based applications for the hybrid smartphone-iPod. That new opportunity for third-party applications on the iPhone veered a bit from Apple's earlier stance, when it said it wouldn't support programs from outside developers due to security concerns.

Apple's fortunes have surged in recent years as it has opened up its products to non-Mac users. Previously, Apple made its iPod media player and iTunes Store compatible with Windows, introducing Apple's touch to millions of Microsoft Windows users.

The slickness of its gadget designs notwithstanding, the key to Apple's success and reputation for ease of use is its software and how well it integrates with its hardware.

"There are a lot of connections between our products and here's one more," Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller said of the Windows version of Safari. "And the more people who like our applications, the more it might mean they'll buy other products from us."

The strategy is apparently paying off. Mac sales have grown significantly over the past two years, pushing its slice of the PC market in the United States from 3.5 percent in 2004 to 4.9 percent in 2006, according to IDC, a market research firm.

About half of the Macs sold today in Apple's retail stores are to people new to the Mac platform.

If Safari wins over more users of Windows-based machines, the iPhone — a combination cell phone, iPod and wireless Web-enabled mobile device — could also ultimately become more appealing.

Well, I can vouch for the fact that it downloads and installs very quickly, but I have not tried using it yet. But it does not run on Linux - Apple may be missing an opportunity there. Both Firefox and Opera run perfectly on Linux (Firefox is pre-installed on Ubuntu, in fact). And sadly, older operating systems are right out of luck on this. I'll be interested to see how Safari operates.

Space shuttle Atlantis is to remain an additional two days in orbit so that a 4×6-inch gap in a thermal blanket can be repaired. NASA engineers are not worried about the gap on re-entry as much as they are about possible required repairs after landing.

No decision had been made on whether the loosened blanket, covering a 4-by-6-inch area over a pod for engines, will be repaired during a previously planned third spacewalk or a fourth, extra one, managers said.

The loosened blanket was discovered Saturday during an inspection of the shuttle.

Engineers think the blanket was loosened by aerodynamic forces during launch, not by being hit by a piece of debris during liftoff. The rest of the vehicle appeared to be in fine shape, NASA said.

Engineers didn't think the intense heat when the shuttle re-enters Earth's atmosphere could burn through the graphite structure underneath the blanket, but they worried it might cause some damage that would require repairs on the ground.

With three additional shuttle flights to the space station planned this year, NASA can't afford any delays.

"I don't want to take the risk of damaging my flight hardware," said John Shannon, chairman of the mission management team.

While mission managers debated fixing the thermal blanket, two astronauts floated outside the international space station Monday to begin connecting the orbiting outpost's newest addition: a 35,000-pound segment that will increase its power capability.

The start of the spacewalk was delayed by more than an hour because the four spinning gyroscopes that keep the space station properly positioned became overloaded. Space shuttle Atlantis was used to help control the station's orientation until the gyroscopes were able to take over again.

According to NASA, there will be an additional spacewalk to make the repairs (the linked article was written before that decision was made). The gap can be seen in the NASA image gallery for day two of the shuttle mission (image gallery here).

China - you know, those friendly folks who are deforesting the planet - have another bit of bad news for the true believers. They have decided to halt production of ethanol. Why? Because it uses too much food. And you know what? They right this time.

China’s communist rulers announced a moratorium on the production of ethanol from corn and other food crops yesterday at the very time that Western leaders are rushing to embrace alternative food-based fuel technology.

Beijing’s move underlines concerns that ethanol production is driving up rapidly the costs of corn and grain. It appears to reflect a growing reality about food-based alternative fuel: it is far more expensive both economically and environmentally, than Western politicians are likely to admit.

Calls for biofuels are politically attractive for European and US politicians, amid rising petrol prices and concerns about global warming and an overreliance on Middle Eastern oil.

Communist officials in Beijing, however, who do not have the political concerns of democratically elected leaders in the West, have reacted to a rapid rise in food prices and an intense demand on farm land that threatens to make ethanol production unsustainable.

President Bush, who with Britain wants to see a huge increase in corn-based ethanol, called in January for the annual production of 35 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol in the US.

Although that is a hugely popular rhetoric in the Mid-west wheat belt states — the heart of America’s political battleground — environmentalists soon pointed out that such a goal would require an additional 129,000 square miles of farmland, an area the size of Kansas and Iowa combined.

The rush to corn-based ethanol is causing food-price inflation in the US, as it increases the cost of corn grain feedstock and the availability of the crop for such staples as cereal and corn syrup. The ethanol boom has created mass planting of corn at the expense of other crops, which helps to drive up prices, too. Futures prices for corn in the US have nearly doubled in eight months.

In China grain security has for decades been at the top of the party’s political priority list, and a 43 per cent increase in the price of China’s staple meat — pork — over last year to recent record highs as a result of rapidly rising feed prices is certain to have triggered concern at the highest level of the party.

The impetus from the true believers to "do something" with no forethought whatsoever; the kneejerk genuflection to the Al Gore cult is going to have devastating results on the people of this planet who can least afford it. The sanctimonious pontifications of the indulgence sellers - oh, sorry - carbon traders - will sentence a huge number of people and animals to a horrible death. Gaia worship is all about human loathing, nothing more. And the new boss will be much more ruthless and uncaring than the old boss. That should be evident. It is already happening. Ask the orangutans. Ask the poor people in Colombia. Ask the forests. Oh that's right, you can't.

They're all dead.

Yesterday, we linked to a wire story that described how a six-year old Illinois boy managed to find a blue-eyed cicada. Now, this isn't all that odd, it happens in about one in a million cases according to the experts. But we here at Blue Crab Boulevard, helpful as always, thought we should provide a handy field guide on cicadas, so you know which kind are attacking you. Now a normal cicada has red eyes. But there are those blue-eyed ones, also known as Norwegian cicadas or Sinatra cicadas:

Then there are the green-eyed cicadas, also known as the jealous cicadas:

But the most dangerous of all is the hard-living, all-nighter cicada, also known as the "Where the hell did I leave my car" cicada:

(Yes, it's been one of those days….)

An Australian man, out for the evening at the local pub, made sure he left a nice tip when he left. In fact, it was more than just a mere tip.

It was the whole finger.

SYDNEY, Australia - A man who lost part of his finger in a bar brawl walked out of the pub and down the street before he noticed it was gone, police said Monday.

"He didn't know it was missing until he left the (pub)," police Inspector Mark Kellert told The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper. "He was out on the street and realized there was blood on his hand, noticed his finger was missing, and went to hospital."

Security guards later found the severed finger "and a large amount of blood" in the pub's bathroom, New South Wales state police said in a statement.

Well, we rather suspect there were copious quantities of alcohol involved here. We'd personally notice missing body parts if we were sober. We're pretty sure we'd even notice them if we were drunk. At least if we had to scratch our nose.

Ok, the history buff in me is jumping up and down making figurative high-fives. This is a stunning use of modern technology to look at the ancient world. Bernard Frischer from the University of Virginia has developed a 3-D virtual model of ancient Rome. The initial version shows Rome in about 320 AD when Constantine was emperor. That is about the height of Rome, building and population-wise.

ROME (Reuters) - Tourists puzzled by the jumble of buildings in classical and modern Rome can now find their bearings by visiting a virtual model of the imperial capital in what is being billed as the world's biggest computer simulation of an ancient city.

"Rome Reborn" was unveiled on Monday in a first release showing the city at its peak in 320 AD, under the Emperor Constantine when it had grown to a million inhabitants.

Brainchild of the University of Virginia's Bernard Frischer, Rome Reborn (www.romereborn.virginia.edu) will eventually show its evolution from Bronze Age hut settlements to the Sack of Rome in the 5th century AD and the devastating Gothic Wars.

Reproduced for tourists on satellite-guided handsets and 3-D orientation movies in a theatre to be opened near the Colosseum, Frischer says his model "will prepare them for their visit to the Colosseum, the Forum, the imperial palaces on the Palatine, so that they can understand the ruins a lot better."

"We can take people under the Colosseum and show them how the elevators worked to bring the animals up from underground chambers for the animal hunts they held," he said, referring to the great Roman amphitheatre inaugurated by Titus in 80 AD.

Frischer's model is sourced from ancient maps and building catalogues detailing "apartment buildings, private houses, inns, storage facilities, bakeries and even brothels," plus digital images of the vast "Plastico di Roma Antica" model built from plaster of Paris in 1936-74, which measures 16 by 17 meters.

The "reverse modeling" by Frischer and the Politecnico di Milano and University of Florence enables scholars to populate ancient monuments with virtual reality figures for experiments on practical details like ventilation, capacity or acoustics.

For now you can only see videos (the one on the Colosseum is particularly good), but they are working on ways to make the model available on the internet. Then you'll be able to take a virtual tour of the city, presumably. I can't wait. But go check out the videos they do have posted so far:

http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu/

It wasn't all that long ago that Harry "Bozo" Reid insulted Dick Cheney over approval ratings (the name was given him by his hometown paper, incidentally, not by me). Which is pretty humorous since Cheney's have been holding more or less steady around 38% favorable for some time now. While Reid's have been dropping - and now stand at a stellar 19%. 45% see him in an unfavorable light. Some other tidbits of interest:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is now viewed favorably by 19% of American voters and unfavorably by 45%. Just 3% have a Very Favorable opinion while 22% hold a Very Unfavorable views.

Reid has been very visible over the past week in the furor over immigration reform. The effort to pass a bill that was more popular in Congress than among voters may have hurt public perceptions of the Democratic leader. His ratings are down from a month ago when 26% had a favorable opinion of the Democratic Senator. Reid’s highest ratings were 30% favorable in February.

Each week, Rasmussen Reports updates favorability ratings for a number of political figures and others in the news. The latest numbers for Defense Secretary Robert Gates reflect a steady decline in recent months. He is now viewed favorably by 36% of Americans and unfavorably by 34%. Last December, 49% have a favorable opinion and only 26% held a negative opinion.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s numbers held steady—38% favorable and 58% unfavorable.

Among Presidential hopefuls, it was a good week for Fred Thompson. He is now viewed favorably by 45% and unfavorably by 31% A month ago, 39% had a favorable opinion and 27% voiced the opposite view. Thompson moved into second place among those seeking the GOP Presidential Nomination and is competitive in general election match-ups with many leading Democrats.

I still maintain that it will not be very long until the Democratic party rank and file look back on the Reid-Pelosi regime and revile them both for their ineptitude. Hey, I could be wrong.

But I don't think I am. If anything I'm being kind here.

It seems that the world's forests are diminishing in size at an annual rate of 32 million acres per year. That is an area, according to the article, equivalent to the nations of Greece or Nicaragua. And who is leading this deforestation?

China.

NGAMBE-TIKAR, Cameroon (Reuters) - From outside, Cameroon's Ngambe-Tikar forest looks like a compact, tangled mass of healthy emerald green foliage.

But tracks between the towering tropical hardwood trees open up into car park-sized clearings littered with logs as long as buses.

Forestry officers say the reserve is under attack from unscrupulous commercial loggers who work outside authorized zones and do not respect size limits in their quest for maximum financial returns.

"I lack words to describe what is going on here," says Richard Greine, head of the local forestry post, 350 km (220 miles) north of Cameroon's capital Yaounde.

"Both illegal and authorized exploiters have staged a hold-up on the forest."

From central Africa to the Amazon basin and Indonesia's islands, the world's great forests are being lost at an annual rate of at least 13 million hectares (32 million acres) — an area the size of Greece or Nicaragua.

The timber business is worth billions of dollars annually, and experts say few industries that size are as murky as the black market in wood.

Evidence of rampant deforestation around the globe points in one direction: booming demand in China, where economic growth is fuelling a timber feeding frenzy.

In just the past decade, China has grown from importing wood products for domestic use to become the world's leading exporter of furniture, plywood and flooring.

Chinese firms might not be chopping down the trees themselves, but their insatiable appetite is driving up prices, spurring loggers to open more tracks like those torn through Ngambe-Tikar and drawing huge global investment to the companies.

You know, the country that is poised to become the biggest greenhouse gas emitter this year. The country that is exempt from Kyoto. The country that is laughing itself sick at the West and its obsessions. And who, exactly, is suffering from all this? Why, the poor, of course.

In Mande village on the fringe of the Cameroon jungle, Pierre, a hunter dressed in tattered shorts and T-shirt, does not know that more than half his country's original forest cover has been cut down in his lifetime.

But he knows the local eco-system has been ravaged.

Once upon a time, wild animals would sometimes stroll right into his compound. "These days you don't see any. They don't fall into our traps anymore. You need to go very far, deep in the forest to see or catch one," he tells Reuters.

As usual, it is the poorest who pay.

So not only is China bringing coal-fired power plants online at an astonishing rate, they are also denuding the planet of the forests that true believers swear will be the salvation of mankind. True believers who think the West is the villain here. True believers who will gut Western economies and excuse China and by default allow the poorest to suffer the worst. Good thinking.

Well, this will get a lot of people all het up. Researchers have demonstrated a method for transmitting power, wirelessly. The reporter gets all excited about it, but there are a few glaring problems with the idea buried in the depths of the report.

MIT physicist Marin Soljacic began thinking years ago about how to transmit power wirelessly so his cell phone could recharge without ever being plugged in. Scientists have pursued wireless power transmission for years— notably, eccentric genius Nikola Tesla, who devoted much energy toward it roughly a century ago.

The problem with wireless power transmission is that broadcasting energy in all directions—say, as radio waves—can be tremendously wasteful, with a vast majority of power ending up squandered into free space. One could imagine focusing energy along just one or a few directions—say, using laser beams—but such approaches can readily prove dangerous and cumbersome, requiring an uninterrupted line of sight between the source and device as well as sophisticated tracking systems on the device if it is mobile. (Scientists have proposed beaming power from orbital solar power stations to Earth for years.)

Soljacic and his colleagues devised WiTricity based off the notion of resonance. One well-known example of resonance can be seen when an opera singer hits the right note to cause a champagne glass to resonate and shatter. Two objects resonating at the same frequency tend to exchange energy efficiently, while interacting weakly with objects not resonating at the same frequency.

Instead of sound, the MIT physicists focused on magnetic fields. Most common materials interact only very weakly with magnetic fields, so little power would get wasted on unintended targets. "The fact that magnetic fields interact so weakly with biological organisms is also important for safety considerations," said Soljacic's colleague, MIT physicist Andre Kurs.

In their latest work, the scientists designed two copper coils roughly 20 inches in diameter that were specially designed to resonate together. One was attached to the power source, the other to a light bulb. The practical demonstration of their earlier theoretical work managed to power the light bulb even when obstacles blocked direct line of sight between the source and device, findings detailed online June 7 in the journal Science.

"In the past, there was no great demand for such a system, so people did not have a strong motivation to look into it," MIT researcher John Joannopoulos said, who also worked with Soljacic on the project. "Over the past several years, portable electronic devices, such as laptops, cell phones, iPods and even household robots, have become widespread, all of which require batteries that need to be recharged often." Kurs added their work could reduce dependence on batteries, "which are bulky, expensive and contain toxic elements."…….

……..The experimental setup radiates roughly five watts when transmitting 60 watts over a distance of more than seven feet. "This is equivalent to the power radiated by a few cell phones," Kurs said. "It is possible to drastically reduce the power radiated."

The researchers demonstrated roughly 40 percent efficiency in power transfer. Kurs told LiveScience they are currently working on improving the efficiency of the power transfer as well as the maximum distance allowed. "For the moment, we are focusing on power transfers on the order of 100 watts although, in principle, more power could be transferred," he added.

First, there is the fact that electromagnetic fields are a subject of much dispute at the moment. Second, the demonstration array is rather awkwardly large. That, presumably, can be reduced in size as they learn more. But the killer here is simple. They transmitted at about a 40% efficiency. In other words, aside from waste emissions, lighting that 60-Watt bulb consumed 150 Watts of power. And unless they can bring that efficiency up to equal a hard wired power connection, any wireless scheme will continue to consume higher amounts of energy. While gargantuan power consumption may warm the cockles of Al Gore's heart, it probably isn't a good strategy for the future. Seriously, I wish them all the luck in the world with this, but I really don't see this being a really useful technology in the near term.

Authorities in India are looking into sightings of a giant, hairy, "jungle man" in Northeastern India. The report notes - apparently with a straight face, that the beast may be a lowland variant of a yeti.

The creatures have apparently been spoken of, and occasionally spotted, for years, but a rise in the number of sightings over the past month has prompted authorities to look into the matter further.

The bizarre sightings have reportedly been made in the Garo hills area of Meghalaya state, close to the borders with Bangladesh and Bhutan.

Villagers have dubbed the mysterious creatures "Mande Burung" — or Jungle Man.

"A team of wildlife officials and other experts will conduct a study to find out if there is any truth in the locals' claims about these hairy giants," said Samphat Kumar, a district magistrate in the West Garo Hills district.

One local farmer, 40-year-old Wallen Sangma, claimed he had seen an entire family of the creatures — possibly a lowland relative of the Himalayan Yeti, or perhaps a distant cousin of the North American bigfoot known as Sasquatch, or Australia's Yowie.

"The sight was frightening: two adults and two smaller ones, huge and bulky, furry," he told an AFP reporter who visited the remote area on Thursday and Friday.

"Their heads looked as if they were wearing caps, and their colour was blackish-brown," he said, adding that the four "monsters" were about 30 to 40 metres (100 to 130 feet) away from him as he looked for firewood in a forest area.

"The four of them quietly vanished into the undergrowth," he said of the recent sighting.

Now, here's what should give this story away for what it actually is. One of the lead groups "investigating" the sightings is - wait for it - a group that promotes tourism in the region.

One Garo Hills group, the Achik Tourism society, has been trying to verify the creature's existence for the past 10 years, photographing footprints and thatched "nests" reported by locals.

"The descriptions given by people who saw the creature point to Mande Burung," said its head, T.K. Marak, a zoology professor at the state-run university in Tura, 323 kilometres (200 miles) from state capital Shillong.

We just love a good tourism scam.