Archive of entries posted by Head Geek

“Bug powder causes male bedbugs to stab each other to death with their penises”

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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. …

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“Climategate: Why it matters”

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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 …

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“Understanding the psychology of authoritarianism”

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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 …

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“GSHP: The green tech even carbon sceptics will like”

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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 …

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“Do You Really Need More Than 4GB of RAM?”

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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 …

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“Ruggedised botnets pushing out even more spam”

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And the game of cat and mouse continues, with the good guys looking decidedly mouse-like at the moment. I’m sure this is good for us, on the whole. It forces us to continue improving the state of the programming art, in much the same way that disease forces us to continue improving the medical arts. …

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