Sorry, Taliban guys. Even if you’d succeeded, Samson already topped you, and with nothing more than the jawbone.
Archive of entries posted on December 2009
“Bug powder causes male bedbugs to stab each other to death with their penises”
I’m a kind and gentle person. I think every living thing on this planet is miraculous and deserves to live out its life without human interference… but I make an exception for parasites. That’s why this article elicited a bloodthirsty cheer. Go, science! (Original article linked to from Boing Boing has apparently been pulled. Here’s [...]
“Invisible Glove Keeps Your Hands Clean, Doesn’t Hamper Dexterity”
I wish this stuff had existed twenty years ago (or that I’d known about it then). It could have saved me a lot of time scrubbing. Assuming it works, anyway. I’ll have to try it some time, though I rarely work with grease and oil anymore.
“Climategate: Why it matters”
As I’ve long suspected, the scientists sounding the Global Warning alarm have been playing fast and loose with the data. Deliberately. I understand some of the reasons for it: if they had told the truth, intelligent people would have dismissed the problem, quite reasonably demanding more information before taking the problem seriously. And by the [...]
“Energy-saving traffic lights blamed in crashes”
A failure to think through the consequences.
“Use MD5 Hashes and Your Favorite Site for a Secure Password”
I was discussing our password security schemes with Ploni over (encrypted) e-mail recently, which reminded me of a post I recently saw on the subject that uses a different take: an MD5 hash of a file or phrase as the core. (Interesting idea, though not as convenient as simply learning to remember secure passwords.)
“Understanding the psychology of authoritarianism”
I’ve never been able to understand people who reject scientific evidence outright, in favor of whatever their chosen authorities dictate. (I recently saw a quote that sums it up: “[T]he problem with all the “science deniers” is they think the argument is about power and “we” think it is about what reality is.”) The book [...]
“GSHP: The green tech even carbon sceptics will like”
Ground-Source Heating. Nice to see that it’s getting more air time now, because it’s a great technology. I looked into it for our place last year, but determined that it would take a long time to pay for itself — far longer than we’re planning to stay in this house, and there’s no guarantee that [...]
“Do You Really Need More Than 4GB of RAM?”
The answer, in my case, is probably not. At least for now. On the get-more-RAM side: I do use a several virtual machines (VMs) regularly. With eight gigabytes, I could open all of them at once, and increase the RAM available to each of them too, and still have plenty of RAM left over for [...]
“The Bad Management Stimulus”
I wonder if one if the prime drivers for entrepreneurship is bad management. I have to think that bad management pushes a lot of capable people out of their day jobs, and those people go on to become entrepreneurs. [...] Sorry, Scott. I’m an employee-turned-entrepreneur myself, and bad management had very little to do with [...]