NOTE:

Dear visitor (if there is any) please note the following: The blog "Broken Radius" is hosted at Google Blogger's server. I can therefore not guarantee that your visit to the blog or any comment you write wont be recorded by the NSA. If you have any worries about this, you can visit instead my alternative blog Letters-to-a-Persian-Cat. This one is hosted at a European server which hopefully acknowledges visitors privacy.

28.4.15

The communist mutations

In one of Monthy Python's series there was this animated cartoon (by Terry Gillian) about the eminent yellow danger, world wide communist conspiracy that finally causes dental canker and severe tooth loss in people of the free, western countries. To combat this threat, all people in the free western world should therefor use the new toothpaste "Crelm", making the teeth resistant against the communist conspiracy. This was really a fine irony about the hypocrisies of the commercial advertisement business.
Today I was reminded to this crazy Monthy Python sketch, while a colleague of mine from the Cambridge Sanger Center gave a talk about stem cell's involvement in cancer progression. Inhis talk I heard for the first time about a new kind of mutation in the p53 gene, called the communist mutation. What this should be ?  Is this a mutation that causes a disorganization of tissue architecture ?  Or will people who carry the communist p53 mutation develop persistent revolutionary ambitions ? Or maybe cells which acquire this communist mutation turn red, like those transfected with a red-fluorescence protein ?  So I asked the scientist during the next coffee break what characterizes a communist p53 mutation and if there are also capitalist ones.



First he did not understood my point, but than he started laughing and excused for his northern accent. He said that he meant that this mutation is the "commonest" of all the mutations in this gene. But shouldn't this correctly be called "the most common mutation" ?
I had never expected that I will propose the correct English grammar to an Englishman from one of the famous red-brick (hic!) Cambridge / Oxford colleges.

25.4.15

Wordpress.com is down (or attacked)

Saturday, 25th of April 2015, 10 am CET:
since several hours all blogs hosted at Wordpress.com are down.

For instance 

Andreas Moser's "Publish or Perish"


Golnoosh' "High on Words"

Radius'  "Broken Radius"

Banooye Sabz'  "Iranian Opposition Site"

and I guess a lot of others. I am curious to see if Wordpress.com, who turned the original open-source and free Wordpress CMS into a money-making machine, have employed stuff who works on a Saturday to repair this technical problem. 
But the error message that is displayed when trying to open any of the above blogs looks suspicious. 

 
Maybe Wordpress.com has been hacked.  Maybe some blog activists did not liked their business concept of exploiting a community open-source code for commercial purposes. I was also a bid disappointed to see, that in order to keep my Wordpress.com hosted site (brokenradius.com) free from banner adverts, they want to charge me 99 $ per year.  Is is a ridiculous price for some Mb of server space.
So for today, I hope people have a backup blog server such as blogspot. But for the longterm, I wish that Wordpress.com is warned that users are not completely passive when it comes to refuse and fight money-making offers of web hosters.

It appeared that not only the customers blogs hosted by Wordpress.com are unaccessible, but Wordpress.com own homepage as well.