In a ha-ha-only-serious investigation, Robin 'Roblimo' Miller explores the link between the music of Frank Zappa and the GNU/Linux operating system, the Free Software (free as in freedom, not (necessarily) as in price) alternative to corporate bastards like Microsoft and Apple.

And this is why he can say, with total authority, that Zappa's "Dinah-Moe Hummm" is totally about Linux, at least in spirit, while the song "Montana" with its talk of zirconium-encrusted tweezers and dental floss, "is obviously about Mac users."

...

In the early 70s Zappa wrote and performed a song called "Penguin in Bondage," a foretelling of the various anti-Linux lawsuits and threats from SCO, Microsoft, and other evildoers.

Zappa was also a heavy user of the Synclavier, an electronic music-machine that was a precursor to today's "studio on a computer" recording and sound editing software. Today, I strongly suspect Zappa would be using Linux and Ardour for most of his recording and composition.

From the really-really-dumb idea department: California;s Department of Pesticide Regulation has proposed allowing the use of methyl iodide -- a chemical so toxic that even chemists are reluctant to handle it.

"This is one of the most egregious pesticides out there," said Sarah Aird, the state field organizer for Californians for Pesticide Reform, a coalition of watchdog groups opposed to the use of potentially harmful chemicals. "It is really, really toxic. It is actually used in the laboratory to induce cancer cells."

Methyl iodide was approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2007 for use as a fumigant over the protests of more than two dozen California legislators and 54 scientists, including five Nobel laureates, who signed a letter opposing registration of the chemical.

What makes this such a stunningly bad idea is not just the notion of using toxic chemicals to grow food, with the obvious health risks that entails, but that this stuff is purposefully used to sterilize soil. But that would mean destroying the beneficial microorganisms that make soil fertile. Of course, that means you'll need more fertilizer -- conveniently supplied, no doubt, by the same company that sold the methyl iodide.

Computers, as many people know, at root work with numbers in the binary (base 2) system. This is because the on-off nature of digital circuits maps very easily to a series of 1s and 0s.

How, then do we get letters (and other symbols), and fractions, and very large numbers, out of the thing? We need to have ways of encoding them in binary.

For example, we might all agree that 01000001 represents 'A'. It wasn't too hard back in the days when we only let Americans use computers (I kid, I kid) and so had a relatively small number of letters, numerals, and punctuation marks to account for; but as we started to deal with accented characters, and typographical symbols like ©, and then Chinese and Japanese and Arabic and...well, it got complicated, and it's something that programmers often get wrong. Gobbledygook all too often shows up in web pages and other documents.

And on the math side, rounding errors continue to be a problem in many applications.

So here are two useful guides that everyone who writes software ought to read:

• Joel on Software's "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)", dealing with the binary-numbers-to-letters (and other symbols) problem; and
• floating-point-gui.de's "What Every Programmer Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic", which explains how we get fractions and very large numbers out of strings of 1s and 0s.

Here's another good reason to go outside: exposure to dirt may make you smarter.

PhysOrg reports on research suggesting that ingesting Mycobacterium vaccae, a soil bacterium, stimulates neuron growth, increases serotonin levels, decreases anxiety, and increases learning ability -- at least, in mice.

"This research suggests that M. vaccae may play a role in anxiety and learning in mammals," says Matthews. "It is interesting to speculate that creating learning environments in schools that include time in the outdoors where M. vaccae is present may decrease anxiety and improve the ability to learn new tasks."

The May 31 episode of the CBC's As It Happens (available as streaming WMA or MP3 download) features an interview with Mark Regev, official spokesman for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, regarding the recent attack on the relief convoy headed to Gaza, which reports say killed between 9 and 19 people. In this interview (around 14:20 in the MP3 file) Regev admits that the Israeli special forces team assaulting the ship in the middle of the night opened fire with stun grenades, tear gas, and smoke grenades before boarding.

Regev considers firing on a civilian ship in international waters with these less-lethal weapons "restrained", which shows just how far out of line Israel's behavior has become.

If you're trying to figure out how the hell we got to the point where Israel is attacking ships in international waters like some crazed nation of pirates, killing at least nine and kidnapping hundreds of people, and stealing relief supplies intended for one of the most desperate regions on the planet, here is some background reading:

• the title of the Guardian's article, "Israel's Gaza blockade targets Hamas while citizens suffer", pretty much sums it up:

  The blockade, preventing all exports from Gaza and confining imports to a limited supply of humanitarian goods, has failed to bring down Hamas but has heaped misery on Gaza's 1.5 million residents.

  The UN humanitarian co-ordinator said last week that the formal economy in Gaza has "collapsed" and 60% of households were short of food. According to UN statistics, around 70% of Gazans live on less than $1 a day, 75% rely on food aid and 60% have no daily access to water.

• the wik's article on the Gaza blockade:
  

  On January 24, 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Council released a statement calling for Israel to lift its siege on the Gaza Strip, allow the continued supply of food, fuel, and medicine, and reopen border crossings. According to the Jerusalem Post, this was the 15th time in less than two years the council condemned Israel for its human rights record regarding the Palestinian territories. The proceedings were boycotted by Israel and the United States.

  On December 15, 2008, following a statement in which he described the embargo on Gaza a crime against humanity, United Nations Special Rapporteur and member of the 9/11 truth movement Richard A. Falk was prevented from entering the Palestinian territories by Israeli authorities and expelled from the region. The Ambassador to the United Nations Itzhak Levanon said that the mandate of the Special Rapporteur was "hopelessly unbalanced," "redundant at best and malicious at worst."

  In August 2009, U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay criticised Israel for the blockade in a 34-page report, calling it a violation of the rules of war.

  In March 2010, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon stated that the blockade of Gaza is causing "unacceptable suffering" and that families were living in "unacceptable, unsustainable conditions".

  A UN Fact Finding mission lead by South African Judge Richard Goldstone suggested that the blockade was a war crime and possibly a crime against humanity:

  "Israeli acts that deprive Palestinians in the Gaza Strip of their means of subsistence, employment, housing and water, that deny their freedom of movement and their right to leave and enter their own country, that limit their rights to access a court of law and an effective remedy, could lead a competent court to find that the crime of persecution, a crime against humanity, has been committed." The Goldstone report recommended that the matter be referred to the International Criminal Court if the situation has not improved in six months.

  In May 2010, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stated that the formal economy in Gaza has collapsed since the imposition of the blockade.

• the BBC's guide "Gaza under blockade":
  

  Overall, the UN says the blockade has caused the economy "irreversible damage". Unemployment has soared from 30% in 2007 to 40% in 2008, according to the World Bank, though it dropped slightly in early 2010. The UN says that when aid is discounted, 70% of Gazan families live on less than a dollar a day per person.

  ...

  Before the blockade, 3,900 industrial premises were operating, employing 35,000 people - by June 2008, only 90 were still functioning, employing only 860, according to the Palestinian Trade Center. The situation improved slightly during the truce.

  An estimated total of $140m of damage was done to Gaza businesses during the December and January military operation, according to a Palestinian business body, the Palestinian Private Sector Coordinating Council.

The facts of this latest incident are not yet clear. But if, after decades of new coverage slanted in favor of Israel, you find it hard to believe that the IDF would attack an aid ship, you ought to read about how they murdered peace activist Rachel Corrie while destroying Palestinian homes, and read about and see the video of Palestinian farmers taking fire from Israeli troops.

Tom's Summer Refresher: To about one pint of water, add one teaspoon of blackstrap molasses and a dash of orange juice. Adjust the mixture to your taste. Just the thing after a street-festival day of hot sun, beer, and dancing in the street.

Blackstrap molasses is rich in iron, calcium, manganese, potassium, and copper. (Another great thing is to mix it with maple syrup and drizzle over fresh strawberries. Try it, you will not regret it.)

Orange juice, of course, is famous for it's vitamin C content, and also contains limonin and other other protective phytochemicals.

Zelda's Inferno exercise - at the Sowebo Festival. Write a poem from a word list generated around the theme "South America": sunburn tropical tango red-dirt jungle Latino snake canal lovers sand pyramid penguins

sunburned street festival
Bmore urban jungle
on a tropical May day
every fifteen minutes I run into an old friend
not seen in months

young lovers and old freaks in the beer line
the socialists passing out literature
vendors selling books, banana bread, bracelets, bags, blouses

As advocates of nuclear fission use the Gulf oil drilling disaster to claim that nuclear is a safe alternative, we ought to keep in mind the latest news from the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, where a leak containing thirteen different radioactive substances was found on Friday -- in a pipe in a hole workers dug to find the source of an earlier leak.

Vermont Yankee officials admitted that they had misled state regulators and lawmakers regarding the use of underground pipes to carry radioactive substances.

According to the plant's owners and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the public faced no danger. Whether you believe that the NRC is providing better oversight to nuke plants than the Minerals and Mining Service was to offshore oil drilling, is for you to decide.

Radioactive tritium was discovered around the plant in a monitoring well back in January. According to watchdog group Beyond Nuclear, there is evidence of 15 radioactive leaks at 13 different reactor sites between March 2009 and April 2010, and at least 102 reactor units have had had recurring radioactive leaks into groundwater from 1963 through February 2009.

Controlled nuclear fusion, and "energy amplifier" designs using thorium, may eventually provide practical and safe nuclear power. But waste, safety, fuel limits, and weapons proliferation concerns make uranium and plutonium fission poor choices. We should instead focus our resources on making good use of that large fusion reactor that Providence has located just 93 million miles away.

BP's "top kill" plan to plug the disastrous oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico has failed.

Meanwhile, Irish gambling website PaddyPower.com is giving odds on what species will be the first to go extinct as a result of the spill. Favored to die off is the Kemp's ridley turtle; a $5 bet on this engangered species would win $9 if it's listed as extinct at any time because of the spill.