This is a collection of links to sites I find interesting, and an indication of why.

Things

First of all, the Theory of Honest Signalling, also known as the Handicap Principle.You'll never understand human social behaviour until you've groked this one. The most important ramifications of understanding this principle are

• Knowing when you're in a handicapping situation
• Think conciously about how to maximise the sent signal while minimizing cost (in effect, the Theory of Dishonest Signaling)
• Make a pile of cash by providing handicaps for other people to compete with (Auto Detailing, Fashion Designer, etc)

This concept is especially poignant to those of us who have ever met a rooster. They're a wonderful example of a tasty, flightless bird with almost no defensive weapontry which has had it's Suicidal Insanity switch thrown to "ON".

Ah, the War on Drugs. If you want to read a very well written account of why american-style drug enforcement is the best thing to ever happen to drug importers, read chapters 10 and 11 of The Consumers Union Report - Licit and Illicit Drugs. The others are also worth it, but those two are the key. It's all about the money.

A site I dearly love to visit regularly is JPL. These folks are a ray of light in a world pre-occuopied with buying larger and larger SUV's until resource exhaustion knocks us back into a permanent stone age.

On the downside, NASA's funding seems to get cut every yearto provide money for the various levels of the US government to bribe special interest voter groups, drop bombs on third world countries, and just line their own retirement funds. I ask you, what's more important to the long term developement of humanity: The cancelled Europa Orbiter mission, or Montana's Cheese Subsidies?

Grumble grumble.

If I had a billion dollars...Why, I'd launch A Rocket a Day!

Email me if you want to reserve a spot on the engineering team.

Here's an extremely good article on the theory of bolted joints. This should have been required reading at the University. AN ENGINEERING INSIGHT INTO THE FUNDAMENTAL BEHAVIOUR OF TENSILE BOLTED JOINTS. In return for graciously allowing me to post his article, Dr Fernando asked me to link to a few of his company's products. Here's two of them:

That almost looks like a DS iButton on the head of that smart-bolt. That would be quite clever. Most of our new equipment (comms electronics) now uses iButtons for ID and service tracking. They're small, quick and easy to read, and with intelligent placement are almost indestructable. I wonder if AJAX got DallasSemi to package a strain guage reader into an iButton case (I seem to remember a battery supervisory IC being used for strain guage reading somewhere), with a bit of EEPROM for service life checking ("I'm bolt SN 230333476. I was last checked on Sept 15th. My strain readings, for the last 10 checkups were x,x,x....x. I'm due to be replaced in Oct 2006."). This would be a handy product for high-reliability industries.

Note that the article on bolted joints was published in the Australian Steel Society Journal. They didn't bother responding to my request to use the article, which I'm going to assume means they don't have a problem with it.

Also on the engineering guidance side, this is a simplified version of MIL-STD-1472. It provides a subset of the anthropomorphic data, and loads of handy information about how to lay out mechanical constructs to facilitate their use by humans. Since a human is part of almost every system we build, it behooves us to study this. Information like: How tall should I make that desk? How wide should a corridor be for two people to pass each other? How big/long/far from the surface should a handle be to allow a 95th percentile male to exert full pulling force on it without hurting their hands? How much mechanical feedback gives a user a good feeling that a control is doing something?

It doesn't pay to ignore Dr. Malthus. Everytime the Earth's population passes some major new milestone I swear I hear him chuckling in the distance.

People

'Fraid I don't know many of those..

Check out The Rookery (This being an amusing play-on-words related to his last name!)

You are keenly encouraged to purchase many of this person's products, and employ him as a contractor. He comes highly recommended, and has the cutest fuzzy ears! My Bro

Check out Dave's Site. Although I admit I don't go there often enough to keep up with the changes. Dave/Bonnie recently became proud parents!

I've never met this guy, but check out Rob Cockerham's Site. The "How much is Inside" section is especially good. I bow to his creativity and web authoring skills ('till my forhead smacks the ground).

Did I mention that I didn't know many people?

This is an interesting site containning pictures of how to build various structural features. It's aimed at agro-mech applications, but generally useful as well.

Want to save yourself a couple of bucks? Cancel your cable/satelite. Here are some instructions for putting up an antenna in the attic using a few cheap components. A couple of friends have done this with good success. It still lets them pull in a handfull of local stations for the news.

Realplayer=Spyware of the most incidious kind. Here's some instructions that can help:

RealPlayer

The well-known RealPlayer seems to be full of spyware agents as well. We have not tested each version ourselves, but many complaints have been coming in about this. From what we can gather the Basic version may not be infested, but the full version is (for which you have paid for). If you remove the spyware agents, the program won't run anymore. To avoid their spyware agents from taking control keep RealPlayer from loading on startup (Realplayer interferes with the msconfig file on your PC so it starts on boot even when its not being used). It sends data to Realmedia about what you've been using it for. Use a firewall when using it on the Internet. Go to Preferences and disable any option that allows the player to call home. RealPlayer overrides cookies settings in IE and it will put cookies on your system regardless of how you configure it.

So, if you're in need of a media player, try downloading something else from this page.

Or you can try to configure RealPlayer as follows:

1. uncheck all the options under Internet (the cookie setting doesn't help).
2. uncheck all the options under Automatic Services incl. automatic updates.
3. exit RealPlayer.
4. locate the subfolder 'Real' which is somewhere in c:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\Real, then right click on the folder and go to Sharing, then to Security. Click the advanced tab and uncheck inherit parent permissions. This will bring up a dialog to Copy or Remove. Click on Remove.
5. Click on Add and enter "Administrators." Allow the last three options: read permissions, change permissions and take ownership. Click OK until all the property boxes are gone. You need to change the permissions, or RealPlayer will replace the contents of the Real folder and start collecting information again.

To prevent the cookies, locate the file 'hosts' in your C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc or C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc. Open it with any text editor such as Notepad, and add these lines to it: