Enable air-drop in every mac and interface (ethernet)

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser BrowseAllInterfaces 1




Delete Time Machine backups from the command line in Mountain Lion

The location of the bypass utility changed slightly in Mountain Lion, how the command is:

sudo /System/Library/Extensions/TMSafetyNet.kext/Helpers/bypass rm -rf /Volumes/[Disk]/Backups.backupdb/[backup]/

Note to self: Siri semweb

http://vimeo.com/9221827

Beautiful

find ./ -name ".svn" | xargs rm -Rf

find ./ -name ".svn" | xargs rm -Rf

A Tale of Three Chimps

This is a little summary of chapter 1 of "The Third Chimpanzee" from Jared Diamond. I just started the book and thought it would be would for me to summarize some of these chapters as to get a hold of the material a bit better. I wanted to do it before with "The Selfish Gene" from Richard Dawkins but thought about it to late and was too busy with the thesis. Now I'll try to stick to the plan for this book and hopefully for whatever comes next.

Summary

Relatedness of species can be determined using genetic distance, as in DNA similarity. At the same time, genetic distance can be used to determine approxima
tes to the points in which two species 'separated' from a common ancestor.

The current technique to perform this analysis dates from research from 70's from Charles Sibley and Jon Ahlquist, the first two to successfully apply the 'molecular clock' technique applied to DNA. They first applied to birds, then to Higher Primates including Humans. A little interesting summary of the last point is:

The two latest splits in the Higher Primates are the common chimp and the pygmy chimp. These come from a previous split of humans an the common of both chimps. Which basically means that form all the animal kingdom, our closest relatives are chimps. In fact we are so close that if the taxonomical classification of our species would be done with respect to genetic relatedness the genus of the chimps should be Homo instead of Pan. In consequence, there would be not just one Homo ( ;-) ), but tree: Homo sapiens, Homo troglodytes ,the common chimp in the first picture, and Homo paniscus, the pygmy chimp or Bonobo in the second picture. Bellow us, we have a common ancestor to gorillas, which in turn has a common ancestor to orangutans, etc. etc. We split from the chimp linage around 7 million years ago. Of course, before Homo sapiens and after our common ancestor with the chimp line there are other species.

We share 98.7 percent of DNA with chimps. From this DNA, a big part is "junk" DNA that very possibly does nothing. This means that the features that make us Human, that give rise to features like culture, language, science, etc., come from very few genetic instructions. Examples of this "big effect-small difference" has already be found many times in the wild.

A very interesting discussion in this chapter is about the ethical implications of our 97.8 DNA similarity to chimps. That is, how is it that we can draw a line to act in certain ways w.r.t. humans, and not with respect to some closely related animals, e.g., chimps. How come we can be outraged from hearing about the possibility of experimenting with a highly disabled human being, but not from experimenting in a chimp that could in theory be more capable than the disabled human. Chimps are so closely related that we systematically hunt them to experiment on them, even tough they are in danger of extinction. At the same time, the extreme is seems an hard option also, for example and quoting:

Why is it okay to experiment on Homo troglodytes, but not on Homo sapiens? conversely, how should we explain to parents whose children are at risk of dying from diseases now being studied in captive chimps that their children are less important than chimps

The strongest point in the chapter is the open question, what part of our DNA is responsible for our difference. On top of that, what are this differences concretely.

Not so many apparently ;-)

Using batch to manipulate several files

Running a command over several files using batch:

for i in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -vn -acodec libvorbis -ab 160k "${

i%m4a}ogg" ; done