All my blog posts and articles
Page 73 of 142 (2823 total posts)
Another old-wives-tail bunked. (opposite of de-bunked?) > “At the end of the study period, the group that regularly gargled had a nearly 40 percent decrease in upper respiratory tract infectionscompared with the control group, and when they did get sick, “gargling tended to attenuate bronchial symptoms,” the researchers wrote.” (from New York Times)
From an article about Google’s hardware: > “Google’s big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there’s a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers–each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.” (from CNET) There are lots of other choice tidbits about the design of the millions (?) of tiny servers that Google uses to run its data centers. Quite interesting.
A BBC Headline says: > “Leaked list suggests 180 quangos to be abolished” (from BBC Web Site) Inquiring minds want to know, what the heck is a quango? Before you look it up, can you guess? First I thought it was a derogatory word for some ethnic group. Then I thought it might be a currency. Who knows?
This never happened… We were working on some piece of software or something and the Russians invaded our workplace and demanded that we create it for them. We were threatened in big ways. We had a kind of a robot thing small which had a video camera and it was left in the Big room while we were put ...
Read more →Just go to this link. United States Postal Service: Free Shipping Box Nothing more to it. No strings attached (as far as I can see 🙂 No kidding. I just did it. Share and share alike!
My head is full of democracy and elections these days. How come, you ask? Well for the last year or so I’ve been working for the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, on elections technology. This month’s focus is generating ballots for two elections happening in November. So more than usual, I am ...
Read more →I came across the idea of the Johari Window during one of the presentations at the Bif-6 Conference. I’d never heard of it before. To me it’s an interesting formalism to think about ones self knowledge. Reading about the Johari Window on Wikipedia (where...
Read more →I saw an article in the New York Times and other places about the future of the University, and even the End of the University. I have a bit of a curiosity about this topic as Lecturer at Brandeis University. Here’s a [blog post fr...
Read more →Have you heard of this thing, the Tor Anonymizer? Ok again admittedly another highly geeky system, but pretty fascinating. Makes you think that the handwringing worrying of the security wonks isn’t as over the top as all that. > Tor is a [sophisticated privacy tool](http://tor.eff.org/overview.html....
Read more →Say what? I came across this paper; Mathematical Foundations of Consciousness. I generally love this stuff: Mathematics and writings on the nature of consciousness. When I saw this paper the title really intrigued me. Now my math is not strong enough to tackle anyth...
Read more →The more businesses reward me for showing up at their establishments, the more likely it will be that a bad guy would want to pretend that they were there to garner those rewards. I came across a very interesting paper that proposes the notion of ‘location proofs.’: [Enabling new mobile application...
Read more →Continuing my quest to get into the subtleties of security and measures to protect against ‘bad guys.’ I came across an interesting article in the New York Times, about choosing passwords. One of the fundamental questions that i grapple with...
Read more →As you can imagine I’ve been reading and learning more about security with my work in Elections (http://www.trustthevote.org). It’s a hall of mirrors and I struggle to really grasp when a possible threat is worse than the cure for it — in real world terms, rather than theoretical terms.This article ...
Read more →We’ve been on an SEO binge over the last 4-6 weeks. I’ve been educating myself by listening and reading to everything I can find my hands on. What’s SEO anyway? It stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and it refers to the **science and art of getting your site to come up when people are searc...
Read more →[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmG9jzCHtSQ&fs=1&hl=en_US]
What are high reactives? > “Temperament is a complex, multilayered thing, and for the sake of clarity, Kagan was tracking it along a single dimension: whether babies were easily upset when exposed to new things. He chose this characteristic both because it could be measured and because it seemed to ...
Read more →“Harry, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it,, don’t wait for it, just … let it happen. Could be a new shirt at the men’s store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee…”(Dale Cooper, in Twin Peaks) Don’t ask me why, the quote just strikes me as funny! Originally posted on Apr 28, 2007. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.
Check out this post Chefs and Editors from Dilbert.com Blog: > And that’s your future of the Internet. The cost of content, such as this blog, and my comic strip, will continue to approach zero. The art will h...
Read more →You may not have followed the discussion that ensued when Ray Kurzweil was reported to ‘not understand the brain‘, but it’s pretty fascinating. Here’s what PZ Meyers said: > “There he goes again, making up nonsense and ...
Read more →I bet many of you didn’t realize that Roger Ebert is still writing a fantastic column, with movie reviews yes, but also some excellent written commentary. For example, check this fine post [Ten things I know about the mosque](http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/08/ten_things_i_know_about_the_mo.htm...
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