computers
revere | May 5, 2009If you've ever wondered how spammers got your email address, the answer might be that you gave it to them by following a link you thought had important or interesting information. We all know the kind of "interesting" information people will follow. Sex is the biggest business on the internet. But spammers have also learned that breaking news events can also be a lure, especially if there is public anxiety and uncertainty. About things like swine flu:
About five per cent of global spam volume mentions 'swine flu' to trick people into opening the e-mail message, say security experts.
As the…
revere | April 12, 2009Fomites are inanimate objects that act as modes of transmission for infectious agents. You know. The doorknob or airplane armrest handled by someone who coughs on his hand or blows her nose. We know that some agents, like influenza viral particles, can remain viable (i.e., retain their ability to replicate in a host cell) for days or weeks. This doesn't automatically mean that fomites are an important mode of transmission, however. There is evidence those same viral particles lose their ability to replicate after only a few minutes on your hand. The apparent paradox is probably related to the…
jrosenhouse | March 12, 2009We chess players have had to put up with taunts from our Go playing counterparts for quite some time. First there was the jibe that Go is so much easier to learn than chess. Then the dubious charge that Go is actually more complex than chess. Some have argued that the superiority of Go over chess represents he difference between Eastern and Western values. (In Go you start with an empty board and gradually build up structures that control territory. Chess is just a bloodbath where rival armies try to slaughter the other guy's leader.) And then there was the undeniable fact that chess-…
oracknows | March 10, 2009...the reasons are threefold.
Reason #1 is my iPhone. As I mentioned the other day, the microphone mysteriously stopped working while I was in Phoenix. At first I thought it was a network thing, as on less rare than I would like occasions I had had difficulty with AT&T in which I might have trouble making a phone call or people I called couldn't hear me even though I could hear them. But the problem persisted after I got home. (In restrospect, I wonder if the occasional problems I had had when people couldn't hear me after I connected were the canary in the coal mine for this total…
oracknows | March 8, 2009So here I sit in the Phoenix airport, which (woo-hoo!) has free wifi, contemplating a most puzzling problem.
My iPhone, which was working just fine last night and which still seems on the surface to be working fine is behaving most strangely. My wife tried to call me, but I couldn't pick up because it happened to be while I was on my way through security. So I called her back, and, while I could hear her, she couldn't hear me (although on one attempt it seemed that I couldn't hear her either). 3G and Edge networks both work fine for surfing the net, sending and receiving calls (except for the…
palmd | February 23, 2009So I've been dealing with a sick computer for a while now. It died ungracefully during ScienceOnline09, first giving me the dread blue screen of death, then giving me a black startup screen that said the pc equivalent of "piss off".
My other computer is a mac, but the hospital's system isn't mac-compatible, and my wife needs it, so I'm in a bit of trouble. As far as I know, I don't keep a lot of irreplaceable data on it, so I'm not too worried about that, but I really, really want my computer back.
It's a lovely little hp tc4400 tablet pc. I don't use it in "tablet mode" very often, but…
revere | February 21, 2009The good news (for me) is I've been doing a lot of science lately. The bad news is that I have had to use some research software written in C# that uses Microsoft's .Net framework. Said another way, I, a long time Mac user, have been forced to use the Windoz operating system. It's not just extremely painful. It's infuriating. It assumes it's smarter than I am and insists on doing what it thinks I want to or should do (like install an update and then restart while I'm in the midst of trying to figure out a dataset). I am not a violent person, but I understand completely the growing genre of…
oracknows | February 10, 2009Poor Jeni Barnett.
You remember Jeni Barnett, don't you? She's the U.K. radio host whose ill-informed rants against vaccines Ben Goldacre exposed so gloriously last week. Unfortunately, the price Ben paid consisted of threats of legal action for "copyright infringement" in the form of his having posted audio of the relevant segment of Barnett's show. Yes, LBC, the radio station on which Barnett's show runs, threatened to sue, forcing Ben to take down the audio. However, as almost always happens when a blogger is threatened in such a manner, the specter of legal action led to the audio files…
clock | January 31, 2009...but some people knew waaay back then that news will, one day, move from expensive paper to cheap internet:
From here
TechCrunch surfaced this look at a story that ran back in 1981 that covered
how internet news would someday be delivered. At least watch the last 30 seconds. The reporter remarks it would take more than 2 hours to deliver the digital text needed to read the "online newspaper." She added the per minute (i think) charge was around $5 and comments about the difficulty the new approach would have when competing with the .20 cent daily.
What's in store for us over the next 30…
oracknows | January 24, 2009It's no secret that I'm a Mac geek, at least not to any of my readers, family, or friends.
Neither is it a secret at my job that I'm a Mac geek, mainly because, although the university where I'm faculty is perfectly fine with Macs, the cancer center where my laboratory, clinic, and office are housed is not. Indeed, one might even say it goes beyond that in that it borders on being Mac-hostile. Oh, the IT department doesn't actually forbid Macs (although until a recent change in organization it was clear to me that they would clearly very much like to do so), but, until the recent hire of one…
revere | December 11, 2008In my younger days I was quite enamored of radiology as a specialty. I published some papers in that area and enjoyed reading x-rays, quite a complex task, requiring the reader to integrate three dimensional anatomy with two dimensional shadows and relate that to physiology, pathology, surgery, medicine and who knows what else. It was interesting and it was fun. The field has changed a lot since those days. For one thing, the pictures are not all two dimensional any more. First CAT scans and the MRIs have made it possible to reconstruct the two dimensional shadows, taken at a bunch of angles…
cevans | November 28, 2008
g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.
In a grand new tradition of using Universe as lodging for really interesting "supplemental material," I present to you the history (and mystery) of g-speak, an incredible new spatial operating environment, as told to me by John Underkoffler, chief scientist at Oblong Industries. Underkoffler designed the fantasy computer systems in Minority Report, then made g-speak, an almost frighteningly futuristic interface that will throw the proverbial brick through the computer screen. Check out the video above to get a sense of it in its…
pontiff | October 31, 2008Shor's algorithm is an algorithm for quantum computers which allows for efficiently factoring of numbers. This in turn allows Shor's algorithm to break the RSA public key cryptosystem. Further variations on Shor's algorithm break a plethora of other public key cryptosystems, including those based on elliptic curves. The McEliece cryptosystem is one of the few public key cryptosystems where variations on Shor's algorithm do not break the cryptosystem. Thus it has been suggested that the McEliece cryptosystem might be a suitable cryptosystem in the "post quantum world", i.e. for a world…
oracknows | October 6, 2008As you may remember, the evening after the Hollywood face of the antivaccine P.R. machine Jenny McCarthy was scheduled to take part in a web chat. At the time, I suggested sending questions in to the Oprah website, to see if any would get through. I'm sure there was some serious screening and vetting of possible questions; so I suggested trying to word them in such a way as to indicate Jenny's ignorance without triggering the censors. Apparently never was heard a discouraging word in the web chat (big surprise there), but apparently one rather clever wag did manage to get a question through…
oracknows | August 26, 2008If there is one thing I hate with a burning, red-hot passion in a website/blog/whatever, it's content that autoplays when I access a site. To have a John Philips Souza march start blaring unexpectedly or some video start suddenly and noisily is a jarring experience, and I consider such content to be an abomination, a blight on the web that must be eliminated. I particularly hate such content when it's an advertisement.
That is why I must reluctantly but nonetheless angrily note that our usually benevolent Seed Overlords have seen fit to place just such an abomination on ScienceBlogs,…
oracknows | August 11, 2008While I was away over the weekend, a reader made me aware of a new development in the world of "alternative"--excuse me, "complementary and alternative"--medicine (a.k.a. CAM). I suppose I should have seen this coming. In retrospect, given the proliferation of wikis of seemingly every shape and for seemingly every purpose, it was inevitable that someone, somewhere would put together a wiki for CAM, known as the Wiki4CAM: Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) Encyclopedia.
My first thought was that maybe I should register. Certainly I could edit some articles, although, despite what…
oracknows | July 24, 2008
Regular readers of this blog know that I'm an Apple geek. The Macintosh is my preferred axe and has been, with few interruptions, since the late 1980s. Indeed, the only time I've used anything other than a Mac is when I've had no choice. The first time I saw one was in 1984, not long after the original Mac was released. My roommate somehow managed to come up with the money to buy one through the University of Michigan towards the end of my senior year. I really liked it right from the start but only got to play with it occasionally for a few months. After I graduated, I didn't even own a…
pontiff | June 19, 2008Running a process to fix the utf-8 support on scirate.com using the unix "screen" command I got the following crash:
Suddenly the Dungeon collapses!! - You die...
Doh!
cevans | May 25, 2008The Large Hadron Collider is finally turning on.
A quick step backwards: the LHC is a particle accelerator, the largest of its kind, underwritten by all the wild money in science, a ringed tunnel some 27 kilometers long, deep underground, crossing the French-Swiss border at four points. It's been over twenty years in the making and has garnered the support of 10,000 scientists in 85 countries behind its unimaginable modus operandi: to recreate the environment of our universe as it was less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, and hence to reveal, among other things, the…
revere | May 13, 2008Second Life is a virtual reality site, superficially similar to some massive multiplayer role playing games one finds on the net (like World of Warcraft). But it's not a game but a social venue. I've tried it out and posted on or mentioned it several times (here, here, here and here). Second Life is a global phenomenon, not just a US one. Now Spanish public health officials are trying it out as a way to reach young people about drugs and sexually transmitted diseases:
Real doctors will log on and offer advice to their anonymous patients. What both will see is an image of a consulting room…