You know, there may be a lot of truth to this. But I think there’s more going on there than today’s science alone can explain. I do keep my eyes open around machinery (mechanical, electrical, or electronic), and I tend to understand it very well, by a combination of aptitude, interest, and training. But when …
Continue reading ‘“What Lucky People Do Differently than Unlucky People”’ »
I think the spammer registration problem may be dealt with, at least for the moment. Since I added the new layers of defenses, only one spammer account has gotten through the first layer of registration (which checks its information against multiple online databases of known spammers). It failed the e-mail confirmation step and was auto-deleted …
Odd as it may seem, it’s not such a bad idea. When I was living in Illinois, I heard an offhand remark on a science program that that area of the country was “overdue” for an earthquake already, and that was twenty-five years ago. I don’t know what science might be behind that assertion, but …
Continue reading ‘“Central U.S. prepares for earthquakes”’ »
I’d be all for this idea if it weren’t for one thing: at this point in history, do you really want to give the people currently running various levels of the US government the ability to commandeer a walking weapons platform explicitly designed for really big lasers? (I’m mostly joking… but only mostly.)
More on the nuclear “disaster” at Fukushima, and its consequences. And a few facts about Chernobyl that most people aren’t aware of as well. (And this will be my last post on the subject for at least a month, I promise.) This is the problem that everyone faces, who describes nuclear incidents as they really …
Continue reading ‘“Mummy, mummy, there’s a nuclear monster!”’ »
You know, when I see things like this, I have to ask where these guys were when e-mail was the sole domain of us geeks. Does anyone else remember Operation Sundevil? Or the raid against Steve Jackson Games (makers of one of my favorite games in my late teens, Car Wars) around the same time? …
Continue reading ‘“Email protected by Fourth Amendment, says appeals court”’ »
This post is old, but touches on a topic that’s near and dear to my heart — methods of stopping spammers from overwhelming a publicly-available e-mail address. It argues that posting an address in a somewhat-obfuscated form (like “myname AT spamtrap DOT com”) actually helps spammers, because it’s much easier to search for using Google …
An interesting twist on the idea, beloved by science fiction readers for the last fifty years, of using a solar sail for space travel. And it just might work, too.
Another fun one. Try to figure it out before it’s explained. 🙂 (Hint: as with yesterday’s entry, perspective is everything.)
This one‘s fun. I couldn’t figure it out until the guy turns the board sideways to make it obvious.