Is your hotel trying to choke you with an iPhone app?

Is that cool?

(Credit:
Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)

Some like it cold.

It's not everyone's idea of comfort, but sitting in a cool hotel room -- especially when it's hot outside -- can offer a certain pleasure. At least for me.

It's a pleasure that a certain group of people want to deny me. They're called hotel owners.

Hotel owners, it seems, are rather fonder of making a cool profit.

It's bad enough when the room has no windows you can open. However, an ever-increasing trend is for hotels to restrict how cold you can make your room temperature.

You click furiously on the thermostat's "down" arrow and it makes like a prison guard.

Recently, I stayed in a hotel where it was verboten to have less than 67 degrees in your room.

To me, 67 degrees is balmy and barmy. So I called the front desk and wondered whether an engineer might help me in my unreasonable quest to choose the temperature in my room.

When he arrived he took one look and said: "Yes, 67 degrees. That's the hotel policy."

"But my policy is a little different," I explained. "I have blood that boils easily."

"Hotel policy," he repeated.

I gave him a look that explained my blood was already far beyond 67 degrees.

An hour later, his boss arrived. I pointed to the thermostat. He nodded caringly and said: "Hotel policy."

"Sir," I began. "If I owned a restaurant and you ordered fish and chips and I brought them to you cold, would you get annoyed? Would you send them back?"

Look, it was the first thing that came into my head. It was hot in that room. I wasn't thinking so clearly.

"Well, yes," he replied. "But this is hotel policy for all floors. It's 67 degrees."

"My policy is cold fish and chips," I repeated.

He looked at me as if I had drifted in from the Planet PoohBah.

I asked him whether there was anything he could do, you know, just for me. Because I am clearly mad. In the insane sense.

Could he not perform some feat of engineering because I am a little unusual, a little excessively human?

He pulled out his iPhone. I assumed he was going to call some men in dark suits who would attempt to bring my head down to my knees and my blood down to 32 degrees.

Instead, he said: "Look, it's all on this iPhone app. You see, here I can control the temperature in the whole hotel."

"So is it a floor-by-floor thing?" I wondered.

"Oh, no. I can change the temperature in every room," he explained, unwisely but helpfully.

"This is nothing more than a money-saving thing, isn't it?" I whispered.

He nodded.

More Technically Incorrect

Perhaps fed up of my insistently polite European accent, he looked up and sighed: "How cold do you want it?"

"60 degrees," I said. "I want the option to make the temperature in here to go down to 60 degrees."

With one touch of his iPhone, it was done. Suddenly, the down arrow on my thermostat was free to slide toward perfect coolness and he slid away, perhaps regretting he'd shown me the truth.

I can understand that some people carelessly leave the aircon or the heating on all day, when they're not in their hotel rooms. I can understand that hotels are businesses. But the essence of staying in a hotel is comfort.

Temperature shouldn't be any different from the need for hypoallergenic pillows, clean sheets, respect for the "Do Not Disturb" sign and a massive array of exciting movies for all ages on the TV.

So if you happen to be one of those people who simply prefer a little global cooling in your hotel room, it may well be that you need to invite the Head of Maintenance up to your room for a quick chat.

You know, about cold fish and chips.

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Pictures: The Story Behind Sun Dogs, Penitent Ice, and More

Photograph by Art Wolfe, Getty Images

If you want the beauty of winter without having to brave the bone-chilling temperatures blasting much of the United States this week, snuggle into a soft blanket, grab a warm beverage, and curl up with some of these natural frozen wonders.

Nieve penitente, or penitent snow, are collections of spires that resemble robed monks—or penitents. They are flattened columns of snow wider at the base than at the tip and can range in height from 3 to 20 feet (1 to 6 meters). The picture above shows the phenomenon in central Chile. (See pictures of the patterns in snow and ice.)

Nieve penitente tend to form in shallow valleys where the snow is deep and the sun doesn't shine at too steep an angle, said Kenneth Libbrecht, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who studies ice crystal formation.

As the snow melts, dirt gets mixed in with the runoff and collects in little pools here and there, he said. Since the dirt is darker in color than the surrounding snow, the dirty areas melt faster "and you end up digging these pits," explained Libbrecht.

"They tend to form at high altitude," he said. But other than that, no one really knows the exact conditions that are needed to form penitent snow.

"They're fairly strong," Libbrecht said. "People have found [the spires] difficult to hike through."

—Jane J. Lee

Published January 25, 2013

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Brazil Nightclub Fire: 232 Dead, Hundreds Injured

Flames raced through a crowded nightclub in southern Brazil early Sunday, killing more than 230 people as panicked partygoers gasped for breath in the smoke-filled air while stampeding toward a single exit partially blocked by those already dead. It appeared to be the world's deadliest nightclub fire in more than a decade.

Witnesses said a flare or firework lit by band members may have started the blaze.

Television images showed smoke pouring out of the Kiss nightclub as shirtless young men who had attended a university party joined firefighters using axes and sledgehammers to pound at windows and walls to free those trapped inside.

Guido Pedroso Melo, commander of the city's fire department, told the O Globo newspaper that firefighters had a hard time getting inside the club because "there was a barrier of bodies blocking the entrance."

Teenagers sprinted from the scene desperately seeking help. Others carried injured and burned friends away in their arms.

"There was so much smoke and fire, it was complete panic, and it took a long time for people to get out, there were so many dead," survivor Luana Santos Silva told the Globo TV network.

The fire spread so fast inside the packed club that firefighters and ambulances could do little to stop it, Silva said.

Germano Roratto/AFP/Getty Images

Another survivor, Michele Pereira, told the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper that she was near the stage when members of the band lit flares that started the conflagration.

"The band that was onstage began to use flares and, suddenly, they stopped the show and pointed them upward," she said. "At that point, the ceiling caught fire. It was really weak, but in a matter of seconds it spread."

Police Maj. Cleberson Braida Bastianello said by telephone that officials counted 232 bodies that had been brought for identification to a gymnasium in Santa Maria, a major university city with about 250,000 residents at the southern tip of Brazil, near the borders with Argentina and Uruguay.

An earlier count put the number of dead at 245. Another 117 people were being treated at hospitals, he said.

Brazil President Dilma Roussef arrived to visit the injured after cutting short her trip to a Latin American-European summit in Chile.

"It is a tragedy for all of us," Roussef said.

Most of the dead apparently suffocated, according to Dr. Paulo Afonso Beltrame, a professor at the medical school of the Federal University of Santa Maria who went to the city's Caridade Hospital to help victims.

Beltrame said he was told the club had been filled far beyond its capacity during a party for students at the university's agronomy department.

Survivors, police and firefighters gave the same account of a band member setting the ceiling's soundproofing ablaze, he said.

"Large amounts of toxic smoke quickly filled the room, and I would say that at least 90 percent of the victims died of asphyxiation," Beltrame told The Associated Press by telephone.

"The toxic smoke made people lose their sense of direction so they were unable to find their way to the exit. At least 50 bodies were found inside a bathroom. Apparently they confused the bathroom door with the exit door."

In the hospital, the doctor "saw desperate friends and relatives walking and running down the corridors looking for information," he said, calling it "one of the saddest scenes I have ever witnessed."

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Get cirrus in the fight against climate change

FEATHERY cirrus clouds are beautiful, but when it comes to climate change, they are the enemy. Found at high-altitude and made of small ice crystals, they trap heat - so more cirrus means a warmer world. Now it seems that, by destroying cirrus, we could reverse all the warming Earth has experienced so far.

In 2009, David Mitchell of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, proposed a radical way to stop climate change: get rid of some cirrus. Now Trude Storelvmo of Yale University and colleagues have used a climate model to test the idea.

Storelvmo added powdered bismuth triiodide into the model's troposphere, the layer of the atmosphere in which these clouds form. Ice crystals grew around these particles and expanded, eventually falling out of the sky, reducing cirrus coverage. Without the particles, the ice crystals remained small and stayed up high for longer.

The technique, done on a global scale, created a powerful cooling effect, enough to counteract the 0.8 °C of warming caused by all the greenhouse gases released by humans (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1002/grl.50122).

But too much bismuth triiodide made the ice crystals shrink, so cirrus clouds lasted longer. "If you get the concentrations wrong, you could get the opposite of what you want," says Storelvmo. And, like other schemes for geoengineering, side effects are likely - changes in the jet stream, say.

Different model assumptions give different "safe" amounts of bismuth triiodide, says Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter, UK. "Do we really know the system well enough to be confident of being in the safe zone?" he asks. "You wouldn't want to touch this until you knew."

Mitchell says seeding would take 140 tonnes of bismuth triiodide every year, which by itself would cost $19 million.

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SPP's Chiam See Tong congratulates MP-elect Lee Li Lian

SINGAPORE: The secretary-general of the Singapore People's Party, Mr Chiam See Tong, has congratulated MP-elect Ms Lee Li Lian and the Workers' Party for their decisive win in the Punggol East by-election.

Mr Chiam said the wide margin of victory shows that Singaporeans increasingly want more democracy and more opposition members in Parliament.

He said, together with the Workers' Party, the Singapore People's Party will work hard in Parliament to scrutinise the government's population White Paper and the 2013 Budget.

The Singapore People's Party will also speak up for Singaporeans and make sure no Singaporean is left behind.

- CNA/ck

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Oppo BDP-105: Not your average Blu-ray player

The Oppo BDP-105 Blu-ray, SACD, and DVD-Audio player

(Credit:
Oppo)

Even by Oppo's high standards the BDP-105 is an extraordinary Blu-ray player. Sure, it's loaded with up-to-the-second features -- 4K upscaling, 2D-to-3D conversion, and a high-quality USB 2.0 digital-to-analog converter -- but what really makes the Oppo special is the sound. Pop the cover and look inside and you'll see why. Most of the 17-pound component's chassis space is devoted to the audio circuitry. That's nice, but the audio advantages will be completely irrelevant if you connect the BDP-105 to your receiver with a HDMI cable (the digital-to-analog conversion would then be handled in the receiver). The 105 was designed for buyers still using older $1,000 or $2,000 receivers from the days before HDMI connectivity, that would like to hear the Blu-rays' high-resolution DTS Master Audio or Dolby TrueHD soundtracks at their best. Since the audio won't be transmitted over the HDMI cable, you would run audio cables between the 105's seven- or five-channel analog outputs and the AV receiver's analog inputs.

The BDP-105 has 7.1/5.1 analog output jacks

(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg/CNET)

Or you could forgo the receiver entirely and hook up the BDP-105 directly to a five- or seven-channel power amplifier. That approach would produce better sound quality, but would lack the connectivity, flexibility, and convenience of today's better receivers. Still, the BDP-105/power amp combo would sound better and be more powerful than most top-of-the-line receivers. The 105's connectivity options won't match any decent receiver, but its connectivity suite is a lot more extensive than most Blu-ray players. The Oppo has two HDMI inputs, so you can connect external devices such as set-top boxes and network streaming devices, three USB 2.0 ports, coaxial and optical digital inputs for satellite boxes, televisions, video-game consoles, etc., and there's a built-in headphone amplifier. The BDP-105's extensive bass management options are on par with a lot of AV receivers. The player's digital volume control is easy to use.

For my listening tests, I hooked up the BDP-105 ($1,199) with an assortment of self-powered Audioengine and Emotiva monitor speakers, and a Hsu subwoofer. With this setup I didn't need to use an AV receiver or separate power amp, but the Raconteurs' "Live at Montreux" Blu-ray was vivid and very live sounding. The system's freewheeling dynamics were really impressive, and the surround mix on King Crimson's "Red" DVD-A projected a remarkably seamless wrap-around soundstage. Each instrument was precisely focused in a near 360-degree sound environment.

The BDP-105 has full speaker setup and bass management options, just like an AV receiver.

(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg/CNET)

Classical music on SACD was just as impressive, the front three speakers produced a three-dimensional soundstage with lots of depth, and string tone was top notch. Dramatic movies on Blu-ray and DVD sounded great. I plugged headphones into the BDP-105, but the sound wasn't special, Schiit Audio's $99 Magni headphone amp was a lot better.

The $499 Oppo BDP-103 shares most of the BDP-105's features, but lacks the upgraded digital-to-analog converters, so if you're planning on using HDMI to connect the player to your receiver, buy the 103, and save $700. You can use the 103's 7.1 analog outputs with an old high-end receiver lacking HDMI connectivity, but the 103's digital converters are a step down from the ones in the 105.

The BDP-105 is an update of the Oppo BDP-95, and the new one has lots of features the old player lacks, but the two players sound about the same. Oppo still has 95s in stock and sells them for $799.

Oppo sells direct and offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, and the return shipping is free.

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Anonymous Hijacks Federal Website Over Reddit Co-Founder's Suicide

Jan 26, 2013 12:27pm

(AP Photo)

Activists from the hacker collective known as Anonymous assumed control over the homepage of a federal judicial agency this morning.

In a manifesto left on the defaced page, the group demanded reform to the American justice system and what the activists said are threats to the free flow of information.

The lengthy essay largely mirrors previous demands from Anonymous, but this time the group also cited the recent suicide of Reddit co-founder and activist Aaron Swartz as has having “crossed a line” for their organization. Swartz was facing up to 35 years in prison on computer fraud charges.

Prosecutors said he had stolen thousands of digital scientific and academic journal articles from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the goal of disseminating them for free.

Read More: Aaron Swartz’ Death Fuels MIT Probe, White House Petition to Oust Prosecutor

Anonymous says Swartz was “killed because he was forced into playing a game he could not win — a twisted and distorted perversion of justice — a game where the only winning move was not to play.”

“There must be a return to proportionality of punishment with respect to actual harm caused,” it reads, also mentioning recent arrests of Anonymous associates by the FBI.

In their statement, the hackers say they targeted the homepage of the Federal Sentencing Commission for “symbolic” reasons.

The group claimed that if their demands were not met they would release a trove of embarrassing internal Justice Department documents to media outlets. Anonymous named the files after Supreme Court justices and provided hyperlinks to them from the defaced page.

As of press time the commission’s site had been taken offline but an earlier attempt by CNN to follow the files’ links yielded dead-ends, mostly offline sites.

The file names use an “.aes256″ suffix, denoting a common encryption protocol. The same system was used to encrypt the Wikileaks Afghan war documents before their release.

SHOWS: Good Morning America World News

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Today on New Scientist: 25 January 2013

Hagfish gulped up in first video of deep-sea seal hunt

Watch the first sighting of a seal's underwater eating habits spotted by a teenager watching a live video feed

World's oldest portrait reveals the ice-age mind

A 26,000-year-old carved ivory head of a woman is not just an archaeological find - a new exhibition in London wants us to see works like this as art

Dung beetles navigate using the Milky Way

Forget the Pole Star: on moonless nights dung beetles use the Milky Way to follow a straight path with their dung ball

Stress's impact can affect future generations' genes

DNA analysis has yielded the first direct evidence that chemical marks which disable genes in response to stress can be passed on to offspring

Uncharted territory: Where digital maps are leading us

The way we use maps is evolving fast, says Kat Austen, and it will change a great deal more than how we navigate

Feedback: Tales of the stony turd industry

Fossilised faeces in Shitlington, confusing railway notices, organic water, and more

Duolingo gives language learning a jump start

First evidence that Duolingo, a new website that helps you learn a language while translating the web, actually works

Dolphins form life raft to help dying friend

A group of dolphins was caught on camera as they worked together to keep a struggling dolphin above water by forming an impromptu raft

Zoologger: Supercool squirrels go into the deep freeze

Hibernating Arctic ground squirrels drop their body temperatures to -4 °C, and shut their circadian clocks off for the winter

Greek economic crisis has cleared the air

The ongoing collapse of Greece's economy has caused a significant fall in air pollution, which can be detected by satellites

Body armour to scale up by mimicking flexible fish

Armour that is designed like the scales of the dragon fish could keep soldiers protected - while still letting them bend

Astrophile: Split personality tarnishes pulsars' rep

Pulsars were seen as cosmic timekeepers, but the quirky way in which one example shines suggests we can't take their behaviour for granted

Shrinking proton puzzle persists in new measurement

The most precise experiment yet to find the proton's radius confirms that it can appear smaller than our theories predict - is new physics needed?

Tight squeeze forces cells to take their medicine

A short sharp squash in these channels and a cell's membrane pops open - good news when you want to slip a molecule or nanoparticle in there

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Army kills six as Iraq demos call for PM to quit

FALLUJAH: Soldiers fired on an anti-government rally west of Baghdad on Friday, killing six demonstrators, the first deaths in weeks of increasingly angry protests calling for Iraq's premier to quit.

The shootings came as tens of thousands rallied in majority Sunni areas of the country, railing against alleged targeting of their minority community by the Shiite-led authorities, while in a cross-sectarian show of support, Shiite clerics called on the government to heed their demands.

Protesters had been moving to an area in east Fallujah, a predominantly Sunni town about 60 kilometres from Baghdad, but were blocked off by soldiers deployed from Baghdad, police Captain Nasser Awad told AFP. They began throwing bottles of water at the troops, who opened fire.

Six demonstrators were killed, all of them from gunshot wounds, said Khaled Khalaf al-Rawi, a doctor at Fallujah hospital. Rawi said 35 others were wounded, the majority of them as a result of gunfire.

Defence ministry spokesman Major General Mohammed al-Askari said an inquiry had been opened, and pledged that victims would be financially compensated.

Officials in Fallujah earlier said the army had vacated the town and had been ordered to transfer security responsibility to the police.

Mosques in Fallujah used loudspeakers to urge calm, and security forces imposed a curfew across the town.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called for restraint on the part of security forces in a statement issued by his office, but also blamed protesters for "raising tensions" and insisted the soldiers had been "attacked".

"This is what Al-Qaeda and terrorist groups are seeking to exploit," he said, referring to apparent sectarian tensions.

Similar demonstrations, meanwhile, took place in the nearby city of Ramadi, like Fallujah a mostly Sunni town in the western province of Anbar, as well as the cities of Samarra, Mosul and Baquba, all north of Baghdad.

Rallies also took place in Sunni neighbourhoods of the capital.

The longest-running of the protests, in Ramadi, has cut off a key trade route linking Baghdad to Jordan and Syria for a month.

"The government should respond immediately to the demands of protesters, before we start a revolution and put an end to it (the government)," said Hassan al-Zaidi, a tribal chief who was protesting in Baquba.

Demonstrators in Samarra held banners calling for Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to quit, while protesters in Baquba called for the "fall of the regime", and held banners that read, "Iran out, Baghdad always free", referring to Sunni claims that the government is controlled by Shiite neighbour Iran.

Rallies also called for freeing prisoners who demonstrators allege are being wrongfully held, with one banner in Mosul reading, "Enough talk -- break the doors of the prisons".

Shiite clerics, meanwhile, called for the government to heed demonstrators' demands.

"There must be agreement with the demands," Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji, linked to the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council political bloc, said in his Friday sermon in the holy Shiite city of Najaf, south of Baghdad. "Nobody can say that the government is clean from errors."

If the authorities did not work to address protesters' demands, Qubanji warned, "There is another way, which can collapse the entire political process in Iraq."

The protests have hardened opposition against Maliki and come amid a political crisis less than three months ahead of key provincial elections.

Demonstrators began by criticising the alleged exploitation of anti-terror laws to detain Sunnis wrongfully, but have since moved on to calling for the premier to quit.

The government has sought to curb the rallies by claiming to have released nearly 900 prisoners in recent weeks, with a senior minister publicly apologising for holding detainees without charge.

- AFP/jc

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Public school system's e-mail sends parents to sex site

The botched link in the e-mail led to this page. Rather elegant.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)

School officials don't always do their homework.

Errors creep in -- sometimes creepy ones.

Still, who cannot feel a pang of guffaw-suppressing empathy for whomever wrote an e-mail on behalf of the Chicago Public Schools system?

As CBS Chicago sniggers it, parents were being notified by the Schools system of adjustments to the Illinois Standards Achievement Test.

Helpfully, the e-mail notification included a link to the Illinois State Board of Education Web site.

More Technically Incorrect

Perhaps, though, there was a copy-paste failure. Or perhaps the author decided to type out the whole link. Or perhaps... well, anyway.

Somehow, an extra letter was added to the link, which led to something less than a happy ending.

For this link directed parents to a site -- Isbel.com -- where a group "works together to explore and enrich the modern woman's sex life and sensuality."

I am fairly sure that the Chicago Public Schools system wasn't suggesting that certain mothers of the kids needed to expand their sexual horizons.

I am also fairly sure that this site featured an image of the Kama Sutra -- which is not on the school syllabus.

The Schools system apologized and sent out an amended e-mail.

I wonder how many new enthusiasts Isbel.com secured before the amended e-mail went out.

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