Now you, too, can be a cephalopedant

You remember all those dinosaur books you read as a kid, page after page listing species, with illustrations? (Wait, you don’t? What was wrong with you?) Well, now you’ve got the same thing for cephalopods, and it’s all free. You can download two volumes in pdf form of a massive catalog of species, all for yourself. Put ’em on your iPad, and then you can read it under the covers in bed. Hey, I just realized…this generation may be the last to do the ol’ “smuggling books and a flashlight into bed to read past your bedtime” thing — tablets make the whole procedure so much easier.

Here are the two volumes; each is about 20Mb.

Jereb, P.; Roper, C.F.E. (eds) Cephalopods of the world. An annotated and illustrated catalogue of cephalopod species known to date. Volume 1.
Chambered nautiluses and sepioids (Nautilidae, Sepiidae, Sepiolidae, Sepiadariidae, Idiosepiidae and Spirulidae).
FAO Species Catalogue for Fishery Purposes. No. 4, Vol. 1. Rome, FAO. 2005. 262p. 9 colour plates.

This is the first volume of the entirely rewritten, revised and updated version of the original FAO Catalogue of Cephalopods of the World (1984). The present Volume is a multiauthored compilation that reviews six families: Nautilidae, Sepiidae, Sepiolidae, Sepiadariidae, Idiosepiidae and Spirulidae, with 23 genera and the 201 species known to the date of the completion of the volume. It provides accounts for all families and genera, as well as illustrated keys to all taxa. Information under each species account includes: valid modern systematic name and original citation of the species (or subspecies); main synonyms; English, French and Spanish FAO names for the species; illustrations of dorsal and ventral aspect of the whole animal (as necessary) and other distinguishing illustrations; field characteristics; diagnostic features; geographic and vertical distribution, including GIS map; size; habitat; biology; interest to fishery; local names when available; a remarks section (as necessary) and literature. The volume is fully indexed and also includes sections on terminology and measurements, an extensive glossary, an introduction with an updated review of the existing biological knowledge on cephalopods (including fisheries information and catch data for recent years) and a dedicated bibliography.

Jereb, P.; Roper, C.F.E. (eds) Cephalopods of the world. An annotated and illustrated catalogue of cephalopod species known to date. Volume 2.
Myopsid and Oegopsid Squids.
FAO Species Catalogue for Fishery Purposes. No. 4, Vol. 2. Rome, FAO. 2010. 605p. 10 colour plates.

This is the second volume of the entirely rewritten, revised and updated version of the original FAO Catalogue of Cephalopods of the World (1984). The present Volume is a multiauthored compilation that reviews 28 families, i.e. (in alphabetical order), Ancistrocheiridae, Architeuthidae, Australiteuthidae, Bathyteuthidae, Batoteuthidae, Brachioteuthidae, Chiroteuthidae, Chtenopterygidae, Cranchiidae, Cycloteuthidae, Enoploteuthidae, Gonatidae, Histioteuthidae, Joubiniteuthidae, Lepidoteuthidae, Loliginidae, Lycoteuthidae, Magnapinnidae, Mastigoteuthidae, Neoteuthidae, Octopoteuthidae, Ommastrephidae, Onychoteuthidae, Pholidoteuthidae, Promachoteuthidae, Psychroteuthidae, Pyroteuthidae and Thysanoteuthidae, with 83 genera and the 295 species known and named to the date of the completion of the volume. It provides accounts for all families and genera, as well as illustrated keys. Information under species accounts includes: valid modern systematic name and original citation of the species (or subspecies); synonyms; English, French and Spanish FAO names for the species; illustrations of dorsal and ventral aspects of the whole animal (as necessary) and other distinguishing illustrations; field characteristics; diagnostic features; geographic and vertical distribution, including GIS map; size; habitat; biology; interest to fishery; local names when available; a remarks section (as necessary) and literature. The Volume is fully indexed and also includes sections on terminology and measurements, an extensive glossary, an introduction with an updated review of the existing biological knowledge on squids (including fisheries information and main catch data for recent years) and a dedicated bibliography. Due to the conspicuous amount of literature addressing many squid species, an appendix is included in the online version, where those references considered most pertinent to the species are listed, by family and species, in alphabetical order by author; key words, also, are reported.

There. Now everybody should be happy.

More juicy stuff for Minnesotans

Sorry, all you foreigners who don’t live in an awesome state like Minnesota, but I have to mention another cool local series of events. The Hennepin County Library is sponsoring DNA Day, with multiple opportunities to learn about genetics, genetic diseases, cancer genetics, and genetic family trees. I don’t know why it’s called DNA Day, though, because they have multiple events spread out between 19 April and 1 May at various libraries around Minneapolis. There is limited space, so registration is required (these events are free, though), and you’d better get in there fast.

WORST. INTERNET. ACCESS. EVER.

It’s a fantastic meeting here at #atheistcon, in a beautiful part of the world, with huge crowds (I have seen the theater, and I have seen it filled with people, and I am intimidated), and I can tell this convention is going to be a huge success. But I have to complain about one thing, and that is the internet access. It’s no fault of the organizers, but it’s a universal problem of big greedy hotels.

I can say from experience staying at way too many hotels that the South Wharf Hilton in Melbourne has provided the very worst experience in wifi ever. It’s abominable. Let me tell you what fun I’ve had.

The first day was OK; we actually briefly had free access. Everything was smooth, I was pleased, but of course it could not last, because then it stopped working altogether — we were told that they were going to fix it.

The next day, it was sort of working. My wife and I could both get on, I could access it via my iPad, but that’s also where my laptop started mysteriously crashing (a problem that has since vanished, since new wifi software started working).

Later that day, though, everything changed. We’d connect with wifi, and get a login screen for “DOCOMO Intertouch”. What, you might ask, is this? It’s what greedy hotels install to fuck up the internet and bring in some additional revenue. You log into this thing and then all your access is filtered through this new layer that exists solely to monitor your usage and cut you off at a specified time limit. And it sucks.

The cost is $9.95au for two hours, which is absurdly overpriced. Nothing is too absurd for these hotels, though, because when I tried to use their Business Center, the machines there charge $26au for two hours. No thanks.

So I composed some stuff offline, and bit the bullet and paid the $9.95 to get some stuff done. I started sucking in my email, managed some essential student business, then after about ten minutes went to do some of that blogging stuff, and this is what I got instead, a big stupid error message.

image will be posted when I have better access

I followed the instructions, quit and restarted, and fired it up again…no go. Same message. Infuriatingly, the lovely DOCOMO software does put up a little countdown clock to tell you that your time will expire in 1Hour(s):43Min(s): 14Sec(s), which you can watch count down to the time it will stop working for sure. Just the fact that they use that clumsy (s) tells me these programmers are lazy relics from the 1980s. Maybe the DOCOMO code is even written in COBOL.

I let it time out.

So today, fool that I am, I figured they’ve been working on fixing this problem, and I paid them $9.95 again. I got about 3 minutes before it died. I thought I’d be smart and try to post something first; I wasn’t quick enough. So that morning I got to watch the ever-so-useful timer count down again.

Oh, well.

I’ve run into this so often it’s become a kind of expectation for me. I get a cheap hotel, the room is fine, the internet access is routine and free; sometimes you have to enter a password, but that’s a function built into the router and it all works smoothly. Get put into a pricier, nicer, fancier hotel, and oh, no, they can’t possibly just provide access to all their customers — they have to gouge more money out of them. So they contract some company to build a wall, usually badly, that their residents have to pay to get through, and then they charge some ridiculous sum for limited access. And it almost always breaks, because the people running the hotel have no idea how to manage this clumsy chunk of code they’ve interposed between us and the internet. And we get really pissed off.

Because, you know, a hotel may have lovely amenities (like this one), but some of us see the world through the lens of the network, and all we see is incompetent IT people and money-grubbing asshole management, and that means the hotel looks utterly hideous to us.

The hotel staff did try to be helpful, and cancelled the charges, but none of them knew anything about the software, and the only way they could actually help me get on the internet was to connect me to DOCOMO. No thanks. They are the problem, not the solution.

Travelers, if you expect to get anything done on the internet, stay away from the South Wharf Hilton in Melbourne. All you’ll get is aggravation and frustration. Stay just about anywhere else — I’ve talked to a few people who got cheaper local accommodation, and they’re entirely content with their service.

Some good news: we do have free wifi in the convention center! Hooray for the organizers! I’ll try to post a few updates on the meetings throughout the Australian day (first up this morning: Peter Singer), but I also suspect that, realistically, once 3500-4000 people show up and fire up their smartphones all at once, it may get a little flaky. But at least I have one place where I can get through!

Why privacy matters

We missed out. This iPhone app, Girls Around Me, has been yanked from the Apple store. It was a geolocation based mapping application that created a google map of your current location, and then checked in with facebook to find all the women who had done any social networking in that area. Then it tracked through their data to post pictures of them on the map.

Isn’t that sweet? All you women were made public targets for a kind of weird hunting game. I presume you are all now logging into facebook and trying to sort through the arcane tangle of options to limit access.

In case you’re thinking this was an app designed for creepy stalkers, though, you’ve got it all wrong. It’s the opposite of stalking. The designer has said that the purpose of the app was to allow his bros to avoid the ugly girls.

Doesn’t that make you feel so much better now?

Anti-caturday post

Honestly, cat people, wouldn’t you rather have a colony of fire ants than one of those furry beasts? You know that all that matters is survival of the fittest, and if you pitted the two against each other, it would end with a small pile of clean, polished bones on the floor…and remember, ants don’t have bones.

Also, cats hate water, so when your house floods, the cats will be in a panic…but the ants will just calmly assemble a raft from their bodies and float to safety. I think it’s clear which pet is more fit.

This one reminded me of the “Black Freighter” story within Watchmen.