Tag: tool

Building the case for ancient blood and DNA

A team of international researchers led by the University of Victoria’s April Nowell has discovered 250,000-year-old protein residue – the oldest ever found – extracted from stone tools used by early humans. –Animal residue on ancient stone tools shines light on early humans

Keep an eye on more and more discoveries of blood and blood proteins on ancient artifacts and in ancient fossils – something experimental science deems impossible until it now becomes unavoidable with many recent discoveries.

Now, even without a plausible mechanism for preserving this organic material, science is beginning to say it is possible for blood artifacts to last hundreds of thousands and millions of years, in spite of the clear and obvious conclusion from experience that they decay far, far faster.

What is happening is a case is being built that blood can last millions of years in order to avoid the contradiction with claimed ages of presumed ancient species such as dinosaurs. The truth is blood, blood proteins, and DNA can last thousands of years, not hundreds of thousands or millions of years.

In the near future it will become common place to extract blood and DNA from fossils thought to be millions of years old but it’s not because they are, it’s because they’re thousands of years old, as the blood testifies to and as the Bible book of Genesis plainly says.

Further Reading

Logitech G27 900 Degrees Steering Across Racing Games

Update 2015-03-22: Mind blowing update here for G27 owners! I’ve just come across a thread, via a question I posed on the iRacing forums, about how to reset the G27 wheel when it glitches in a session and feels like it goes back to the default 200deg rotation. A friendly iRacing member provided the link and…well you just have to go there yourself right now! Here’s what it boils down to: There are undocumented codes for the buttons on the shifter for setting degrees of rotation and one of them is the 900deg setting which you’ll need to reset to if the wheel happens to glitch. Here’s a pic from that thread to help explain:

G27_UDG_miniYou press 1+2 and then one of the T,S,O,X buttons. Here’s my take on what each does: 1+2+T=240deg, 1+2+S=450deg, 1+2+O=630deg, 1+2+X=900deg.I think what they were trying to accomplish is shortcuts for cars with different steering ratios like 240deg for open wheel cars, 450deg for GT cars, 630deg for drift cars, and 900deg for street cars.

Update 2014-08-03: Okay, while I’m not at the point where I want to research every car’s steering ratio, I might be okay with researching types of cars. :) Here’s what I want: I want to use 540 degree wheel rotation (ie. setup in Logitech Profiler) but I want to make it feel like sort of realistic in-game via the use of steering lock settings. For example, F1 steering (540 degrees-ish with 13:1 steering ratio) should feel dramatically more twitchy than a road sports car such as a Porsche(900 degrees-ish with 15:1 steering ratio). So, here’s the list of car types, their wheel rotation, steering ratio, and steering lock: Family: 1080deg wheel rotation, 20:1 ratio, 27 lock; Sports: 900deg wheel rotation, 15:1, 30 lock; Drift/Rally: 720deg wheel rotation, 15:1, 24 lock; GT/Touring: 540deg wheel rotation, 15:1 ratio, 18 lock; F1/Formula: 540deg wheel rotation, 13:1 ratio, 21 lock. For the 540s you have what you need but for the rest we’d need to calculate it: Check this chart (backup link) out instead, from a Live For Speed Forums thread, that lays them all out nicely.

Update 2014-07-26 – 3: Handy online tool for calculating steering locks from wheel rotation and steering ratios. Also, some good reading on wheel rotation/steering ratio/steering locks.

Update 2014-07-26 – 2: I prefer realism in sim racing when I can get it, but I’m also not yet at the point where I want to research every car’s wheel rotation and steering ratio just to set that up in game to get a realistic feel. So I’ve settled on a GT-style 540degree wheel rotation and 18degree steering lock for 15:1 steering ratio. iRacing appears to be the only game I have so far that automatically applies a 900degree setup to real-world wheel rotation and steering ratio in each car they have. For all other games you have to set it manually and often that means every time you get into a car you have to load your custom setup file. After googling a lot, I find most people are happy with a middle-ground GT-style 540degree wheel rotation with 15:1 steering ratio which needs an 18degree steering lock setup. This is a generalization, not all GT cars use those numbers, but what you get in the end is one wheel setup for all racing sims where you get a consistent car turn feel across different car types.

Update 2014-07-26: Understanding SimBin Steering Sensitivity: The following applies to RaceRoom Racing Experience, Race 07, GTR 2, and I assume all SimBin racing games. I finally understand what they’ve done with steering sensitivity. 50 is linear, but either side of 50 is not linear-but-different-ratio as I expected. I finally got it when I was really looking at the steering meter. If I turn the wheel 90deg three times it goes from nothing to full. At 50 each 90deg takes up the same amount of space – so each 90deg physical wheel turn actually represents 90deg virtual wheel turning (broken animations aside). But, at 100 the first 90deg takes up the most, the second 90deg takes up less, and the third 90deg takes up even less – so each 90deg physical wheel turn may not actually represent 90deg car turning. At 0 it’s the other way around. So I choose 50 for steering sensitivity in SimBin titles to ensure that all degree ranges on my wheel rotation act and feel the same way.

Update 2014-07-19: I finally got 900 degrees in Race 07. It is, in fact, the same method as RaceRoom Racing Experience (Set it in the Logitech Profiler and then set the Steering Lock in the Car Setup) but apparently the steering wheel animation won’t be correct if you do that. That would have been okay except there’s no default steering lock like RaceRoom Racing Experience has so you have to set it on every car. I guess that’s technically correct but more hassle than I wanted so I went back to Logitech Profiler default degrees for Race 07. I wish these games would just do the ‘auto-magic’ thing like iRacing does.

Update 2014-07-08: I finally got 900degrees in RaceRoom Racing Experience: (1) Set it in the Profiler, (2) set it in R3E under Vehicle Settings > Wheel Animation (remember this is only animation it has no effect on how it feels), (3) go in to Control > Advanced Settings and set Steering Lock between 28 and 32. You need to google about steering lock and the ratio between that and the rotational degrees of your steering device. I just found the 28-32 metric after reading some discussions. For 540 degrees I’ve seen recommendations of 18-22. I believe the same steering lock applies for Race 07 but I haven’t tried it yet.

Logitech G27 900 Degrees Steering Across Racing Games

race07-3I loved the way iRacing was so easy to setup for the 900 degree turning ability of the Logitech G27 so I tried RaceRoom Racing Experience and Race 07 and was very disappointed there was no way to get that linear steering working when the G27 was setup for 900 degrees. Well, it’s not a real fix, but it’s here’s a decent work-around…

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The right tool for the right job: Not so simple.

The right tool for the right job, like most things in life, is more complex, more difficult to understand, and takes effort to grasp the reason and benefits of its true meaning.

The argument “the right tool for the right job” is as old as they come. It’s similar in spirit to the old adage that you can’t put a “square peg in a round hole“.

The problem is no scenario is black and white.

You’re on Microsoft Windows so you should use .NET? You’re on Mac so you should use Objective-C and Cocoa? You’re on linux so you should use C and GTK?

The right tool for the right job is not just about price/performance ratios, the primary goal of a language, or what a language has tradionally been used for.

You use a programming language for a task because you’re an expert in that language and you can bend it to your will with greater ease than implementing in a new language.

Business understands this. It’s about efficiency not “perl is for data” and “python is for prototyping” and “C is for algorithms” and “java is for apps.”

It’s not black and white.

Microsoft Office might, in a very base sense, be the best tool for the job if you’re dealing with Microsoft Office format files. But the “right tool for the right job” includes conditions like price, licensing, security risk, training, etc.

Licensing is a big issue. The internet and the FOSS movement, from which we all benefit enormously today, was built on open standards, open protocols and open code.

Stallman understands that we’re where we are today because IT pioneers simply found it easier, better and more fulfilling to craft open source and have all modifications on open source returned back to the source.

We have a great computer ecosystem because the right-tool-right-job mentality did not include the idea that one should go with the status quo which is so often the case when people bring up this argument.

The right tool for the right job, like most things in life, is more complex, more difficult to understand, and takes effort to grasp the reason and benefits of its true meaning.