Topics on my particular interests.
I’ve talked more than a few times about terrorists, terrorism, and the TSA on this blog, often quoting security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier. He’s posted links to a new article by a former airline advisor which sums up the problems with the TSA’s responses to date, and offers suggestions about how to do things …
Continue reading ‘“Assessing Terrorist Threats to Commercial Aviation”’ »
I’ve been baffled by this for the last couple days. I’m not sure I follow their numbers, but I’ll accept them on faith for the moment. The thing that baffles me is the source: a very conservative think-tank. Political conservatives have railed against anyone who was different practically since the ink was dry on the …
Continue reading ‘“The cure for US job woes: More immigrants”’ »
Back at the beginning of April, I killed about a thousand spambot accounts on this blog and added some new defenses against them. Those defenses helped quite a bit; I was still getting about ten attempts a week, but any spambot that gave an invalid e-mail address got blocked, as was any that gave a …
Ever since I heard the report about the captured US spy-drone earlier this week, I wondered how it could possibly have happened. Well, my curiosity was satisfied today: it was reputedly caught by sending it false GPS signals — a vulnerability that military officials have apparently been aware of since at least 2003, and one …
Continue reading ‘“US spy drone hijacked with GPS spoof hack, report says”’ »
SF authors generally make up their technologies based on the needs of the story they’re trying to tell, rather than based on reality, but the more “hard” science-oriented ones try to make their science as believable as possible too. This site seems to fit a common theme in this blog, of “track[ing] predictions and descriptions …
There’s a good bit of evidence suggesting just the opposite. Though it might all be down to Porn-Induced Sexual Dysfunction.
More news on the effects of violent video games. Only preliminary results, but it’s something to keep an eye on. As a somewhat-related item: most of us figure out the difference between reality and make-believe when we’re very young. Apparently those who don’t end up in organizations like the Red Cross, which is considering accusing …
Continue reading ‘“One week playing violent video games alters brain activity”’ »
A nice idea, but I suspect the execution would be pretty difficult. Hollywood special effects are a lot better now than in 1938, but there are many more science-educated people who would be a lot harder to fool too. All it would take is one slip-up, caught and pointed out by some bright teenager, and …
Continue reading ‘“Paul Krugman: save the economy by staging an alien invasion hoax”’ »
This sort of thing has been talked about for decades (it was the idea that spawned the book Jurassic Park, published in 1990, after all). I look forward to seeing the results, but I have to wonder how much mammoth behavior in the wild was learned and passed down from the herd. I suspect that’s …
Continue reading ‘“Japan, Russia in plan for elephant to birth CLONE MAMMOTH”’ »
A short quote to sum up the main idea behind the article: […] according to researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Basel, we’ve pretty much hit the limits, and we’re never going to develop a science fiction-style ‘supermind’. Thomas Hills and Ralph Hertwig looked at a range of studies, including research …
Continue reading ‘“Human beings unlikely to get cleverer”’ »