Seattle P-I to publish last edition Tuesday

The Hearst Corp. announced Monday that it would stop publishing the 146-year old newspaper, Seattle's oldest business, and cease delivery to more than 117,600 weekday readers.
The company, however, said it would maintain seattlepi.com, making it the nation's largest daily newspaper to shift to an entirely digital news product.
"Tonight we'll be putting the paper to bed for the last time," Editor and Publisher Roger Oglesby told a silent newsroom Monday morning. "But the bloodline will live on."....

Since 1996, the non-profit Internet Archive has worked to preserve the ephemera of the digital age, capturing copies of millions of Web pages in bimonthly sweeps and maintaining its Wayback Machine, a tool that allows you to see the changes in a page over time. As you would imagine, both the collection and the haul brought in by each new sweep have grown rapidly. The library now holds about 151 billion archived Web pages in a 3 petabyte (that's 3 million gigabytes) database that is expected to expand at the rate of 100 terabytes a month (that's 100,000 gigabytes). That database is tapped up to 500 times a second by some 200,000 visitors a day.
Its mission guarantees that the archive always needs more closet space and processing power, and that has meant adding to a traditional data center building that at last count housed 800 Linux servers with four hard drives each. But with issues of expense, energy consumption and scalability all looming larger, the archive has now moved its holdings to equipment that offers advantages in all those areas.
The data's new home is
a Sun Modular Datacentera 20-foot long metal cargo container sitting outside on Sun's Santa Clara campus. Inside the box are 63 servers with a total of 4.5 petabytes of storage capacity and 1TB of memory
(take a video tour here)

The only thing needed besides [the shipping container] are the network connections, a chilled water supply and electricity," said Dave Douglas, Sun's chief sustainability officer. "Customers using this tend to be people running out of data center space and need something quickly or need a data center in remote area where mobility is key." In addition to old Web pages, the archive also houses collections of texts, audio, video and live concert recordings, including an extensive cache of Grateful Dead shows. In case of disaster, the entire database is mirrored at the New Library of Alexandria in Egypt where, based on the fate of the Old Library of Alexandria they are well aware of the importance of back-ups.

Human genome further unravelled

A close-up view of the human genome has revealed its innermost workings to be far more complex than first thought.
The study, which was carried out on just 1% of our DNA code, challenges the view that genes are the main players in driving our biochemistry.
Instead, it suggests genes, so called junk DNA and other elements, together weave an intricate control network.
The work, published in the journals Nature and Genome Research, is to be scaled up to the rest of the genome....

What a story !!

Adopted by a man who used to date my mom

Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code Unlocking This Cipher Wasn't Self-Evident; Algorithms and Educated Guesses
For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson's correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher -- a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now.
The cryptic message was sent to President Jefferson in December 1801 by his friend and frequent correspondent, Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. President Jefferson and Mr. Patterson were both officials at the American Philosophical Society -- a group that promoted scholarly research in the sciences and humanities -- and were enthusiasts of ciphers and other codes, regularly exchanging letters about them....

The "Perfect" Cipher?

Click the arrows at right to see how the code worked