The girls have landed in Australia. Now it's my turn to get the house sold, get all the rest of the stuff packed up and then I'll soon be joining them.

Apologies for being brief, but there's a lot to do and not much time remaining.

The latest dispatch from al-Zawahiri didn't get a lot of press. You might have missed it if you were instead watching the more serious events of the world, such as the Anna Nicole drama.

But this dispatch was odd. Zawahiri is pledging allegiance to Omar. He is asking his followers to do the same.

Where's Osama? 

Rumour has it that he is in fact deceased. Presumably died of typhoid sometime around October.

Then again, it is very popular for a person being hunted to fake their own death. I wouldn't put any stock in rumours. But faking one's death usually requires at the minimum faking some evidence so that it might be believed. That's what makes this twist of events perhaps interesting. There doesn't seem to be a shred of evidence to support an untimely demise. Yet the org chart is undergoing a complete revision - and Osama isn't on it. If not dead, it should nevertheless be of moderate interest that he's apparently not the boss anymore. It's also somewhat interesting that Zawahiri has no apparent interest in being number 1. He's a cleric. A bit uncomfortable being a savage warrior, though he can still talk the talk. 

CNN Entertainment:

Anna Nicole was a beautiful train wreck.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Here's a toast to obscenely large mammae and obscenely large amounts of money. But for somebody larger than life, death is not the end. The memory of Vicky Lee Hogan aka Anna Nicole Smith aka Mrs. J. Howard Marshall II will live on in legal proceedings for at least another ten years. Drink up. 

(CNN) 

"Some people say that the U.S. president is not prone to calculating the consequences of his actions," Khamenei said in remarks broadcast on state television, "but it is possible to bring this kind of person to wisdom."

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It is? Hey Ali - ya' mind sharing with us?

Seems that preliminary talks have been going on to get Courtney Love to replace Paula Abdul as a judge of American Idol talent. Ms. Abdul if you recall is still on the show even after influencing the decision on a contestant that she also slept with a year or two ago. The fact she's still here is just short of incredible, and proves the old adage it's not what you know.  

At first I was thinking this new twist is likewise just short of incredulous.  Courtney knows what it takes to be a professional musician? Really? I can hardly sit through her music without conjuring up words like 'CD frisbees', 'gag reflex' and 'projectile vomit'.

...And I'll listen to almost anything.

Then it dawned on me. Sure, she has zero natural talent. That's a given. But maybe she'd be OK on AI. She hooked up with the late Mr. Cobain after all. It's entirely possible that she has some inate ability to recognize talent.  

NASA officially remains silent on the issue, and nobody involved has ever talked about it in public;  but sex in space has most definitely been going on a long time. I've written about this before.

For those wishing to join the hundred-mile-high club, there are some significant obstacles. The largest of these is that the number of potential partners is small, so those pursuing this path have to go through a lot of logistics hassles to end up in the right place at the right time with a willing partner.  Once in the right place, some steps would need to be taken to get the other crew members to look the other way. There's no privacy on a shuttle.

Recall that members of one flight team were newlyweds. But even ignoring this, there have been co-ed flights going on for 30 years. I suspect the number of club members is somewhere upwards of 30 - even given the significant obstacles.  Homo sapiens have natural urges and curiosities, and there would be some amount of personal ego gratification from being able to say you did it in space; even if you couldn't exactly talk about it. Someday when all these folks start getting old the stories will start to emerge. Remember how long it took to find out about all the off-camera goings-on of the Brady Bunch and Happy Days folks(?)... and these were Hollywood stars whose entire business plan involves publicity and gossip.

Anyway, today the tip of the iceberg was finally exposed, showing some of the logistic hassles in play. The subject finally made national headlines when one astronaut pepper-sprayed another, who were both competing for the affections of yet another.

The perp is a married mother of three. She is said to have worn diapers during her 1000 mile drive to confront her rival so as not to have to stop at the restroom. It's a tragic story really, but unfortunately quite amusing;  and is likely to open up a lot of public scrutiny into a very private world.  

From CNN: 

Police found in Nowak's bag a tan trench coat, a new steel mallet, a folding knife with a 4-inch blade, 3 to 4 feet of rubber tubing, large plastic garbage bags and about $600 in cash, the report said.

Nowak acknowledged details of Shipman's allegations, according to police, and allowed officers to search her car. There, police found diapers, six latex gloves, directions from Houston to Orlando International Airport, e-mails from Shipman to Oefelein, a letter indicating how much she loved Oefelein and directions to Shipman's home address in Florida, the report said.

Nowak told police she didn't intend to harm Shipman and "that she only wanted to scare Ms. Shipman into talking with her," a police report said. Asked about the BB gun, Nowak told police it "was going to be used to entice Ms. Shipman to talk with her," the report said.

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In the coffee break room at the office somebody left a bag of Jelly Beans to share.

Why am I writing this?

I grabbed a few. All were very funny looking candies. Warped, conjoined, pimpled. The strangest looking jelly beans I've ever encountered. I looked at the bag. They are called 'Belly Flops' - by the Jelly Belly company. Everything that didn't meet their rigorous standards for presidential candies. (Some of you may recall that Ronald Reagan kept a bag of Jelly Belly's on his desk to share with visiting heads of state.)

Late last week the L.A. Times reported that the California Highway Patrol had cleared the failed Angelides campaign of wrong-doing in accessing some derogatory sound bites from one of our governator's websites. 

You can access the original article here.

Seems that Angelides aides found a way to troll the website and find some files that didn't have public links. Not a crime, just not very good website security.  

But I'm not writing this to regurgitate political news.  

I'm writing to draw attention to the fact that we now have the California Highway Patrol investigating software security and political issues. They seem to have received this mandate as a result of being somehow responsible for investigating California property issues; and this has somehow been extended to cover intellectual property.

This might make sense if you consider that unlike many states, we Californians do not have a so-called 'state police'. There is a big black void between local law enforcement and federal investigators.  The CHP are the closest thing we have to a statewide police agency.

I'm not saying this is wrong, just saying that this event exposed some little known workings and otherwise invisible chains of authority in our state government.  

Ya know, the more I think about - I believe that the next wave on the web is going to be heuristics. OK, that and pay-per-view. But think about it. This wave has been all about collecting and value-adding zottabytes of data. Folks are starting to harvest all these data collections and finding other ways to add value.

The real value will come from using this info-wealth as training data that our systems can learn from. That's what heuristics is all about... learning. Then this internet could get really freaking smart. People who looked at this page or bought this thing almost always looked at that one or bought this item. You've already seen this on Amazon. We'll need this kind of machine learning to get through the pending info glut. I already mentioned infinite content streams. The web has grown bigger than any of us can ever hope to visit in our lifetimes - even to find the places that interest us. We're going to need help. Things we are interested in will need to know our interests and either find us or migrate to the top of the pile.

But not the junk. There isn't enough time for it. For information based companies, survival will depend on being good at doing this. You can't rely on Google page rank alone. There are way too many people fighting for that pole position. You won't be able to hold it forever. 

Let's move this idea to something bigger than Amazon. Take it to the whole web. Let's go to CNN. Ah, we see that you don't care about the presidential primary. Libertarian buddhist males over 45 traditionally tend to lose interest in the event. Would you like some tech news? And nine out of ten people who saw this particular article also liked to see this other one from our Offbeat section. Should we show that to you now?

Now for Google. Paris Hilton. Hmm. We noticed that every time a male in your age group asked for a (female) celebrity search they followed it shortly thereafter with 'naked'. Shall we just cut to the chase and take you there instead? Yesterday it seems that 40 million people downloaded a particular video of her. Is that what you're after? 

Then for web 4.0 we'll be able to feed our own data into the mix. Web 3.0 is learning based on populist trends. Web 4.0 is personalized. Grab my entire weblog. All my surfing habits. Use that as training data. You'll know what I'm going to like or where I like to go even before I do. Then we might finally achieve the computing vision we all grew up hoping for. Hello computer. Give me a quick summary of everything in the world that I care about. Yes, I'd like to have breakfast at Frank's Place. Just like on every third Tuesday of the month. A new Indiana Jones movie came out? Great! It's already on my Netflix queue? Thanks.

The down side is that they'll have you pegged. The systems will know what you're going to buy and who from and how much you're willing to spend and when you're going to buy it.

The bright side of this is with negative content. Accuracy goes up as you acquire more training data. It would be hard to beat a heuristic spam filter that has been trained with 30 trillion spam messages. If you don't want to see porn, it could just as easily be removed by a neural net. We certainly have enough data on the net to train it to almost foolproof accuracy today.  

Before you scoff, consider that in most cases we already have the data. That's the hard part. The easy part is writing a little function/script to take what we know about you and then (based on that) spit out a probability that a particular piece of content will please you. For some web properties this could be as easy as twenty lines of code. It's the same thing they use to show reports to management. For the rest of us, it could be a page or two - still not a big deal in the larger scheme of things. 

Today is the annual face-off between a large burrowing rodent and the NOAA (and/or News5) to see which one is better at predicting the weather. I prefer a more scientific approach. Let's see what rand(0,1) has to say...

This time it's '1'. Guess that means we're in for another six weeks of various weather.

Pulled from cashstruck.com who pulled it from elsewhere -  please pass it on.

Scientists may have cured cancer last week.

Yep.

So, why haven’t the media picked up on it? Here’s the deal. Researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada found a cheap and easy to produce drug that kills almost all cancers. The drug is dichloroacetate, and since it is already used to treat metabolic disorders, we know it should be no problem to use it for other purposes. Doesn’t this sound like the kind of news you see on the front page of every paper? The drug also has no patent, which means it could be produced for bargain basement prices in comparison to what drug companies research and develop.

Scientists tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body where it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but left healthy cells alone. Rats plump with tumors shrank when they were fed water supplemented with DCA. Again, this seems like it should be at the top of the nightly news, right? Cancer cells don’t use the little power stations found in most human cells - the mitochondria. Instead, they use glycolysis, which is less effective and more wasteful.

Doctors have long believed the reason for this is because the mitochondria were damaged somehow. But, it turns out the mitochondria were just dormant, and DCA starts them back up again. The side effect of this is it also reactivates a process called apoptosis. You see, mitochondria contain an all-too-important self-destruct button that can’t be pressed in cancer cells. Without it, tumors grow larger as cells refuse to be extinguished. Fully functioning mitochondria, thanks to DCA, can once again die. With glycolysis turned off, the body produces less lactic acid, so the bad tissue around cancer cells doesn’t break down and seed new tumors.

Here’s the big catch. Pharmaceutical companies probably won’t invest in research into DCA because they won’t profit from it. It’s easy to make, unpatented and could be added to drinking water. Imagine, Gatorade with cancer control. So, the groundwork will have to be done at universities and independently funded laboratories. But, how are they supposed to drum up support if the media aren’t even talking about it? All I can do is write this and hope Google News picks it up. In the meantime, tell everyone you know and do your own research.