Topics on my particular interests.
Have I ever mentioned that the late Richard Feynman is one of my heroes? This is a perfect example of why — he could have taken the easy way out and given a BS answer that would have satisfied the interviewer, but instead he tried to explain why he couldn’t explain it properly, while giving …
Continue reading ‘“Why Richard Feynman can’t tell you how magnets work”’ »
There’s a lot of useful research available about what makes people happy. I’ve mentioned some of it on this blog in the past. This is the latest piece. The free availability of all this solid happiness research kind of makes you wonder why so many people still seem so unhappy. But things are getting better, …
Continue reading ‘“Many Little Things That Make You Happy are Better Than a Few Big Ones”’ »
I’ve mentioned that the blog has been hammered with spam attempts recently, but I thought nothing of it — it happens every now and again. And I thought that my own e-mail inbox was getting an abnormally large amount of spam as well, but GoddessJ’s young cousin recently had her Yahoo e-mail account hacked, so …
Our young cousin has apparently had her Yahoo e-mail account hacked. We’ve been getting several spam messages a day purporting to be from her through it. The funniest part is the text auto-appended to the bottom of each spam message: Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com …
Major news for space enthusiasts: NASA has found “life as we do not know it” in California! The arsenic-based life form apparently uses completely different metabolic processes from anything else we know of! According to a 1962 article by science and science-fiction giant Isaac Asimov (titled “Not as We Know it: The Chemistry of Life”), …
I was a little shocked (pun not intended) to see this article on LifeHacker. Doesn’t everybody know about Uninterruptible Power Supplies already? Then reality asserted itself, as I remembered that to most people, computers are just magic boxes. When I was running a desktop system, the UPS was a must-have item. Now that I’ve only …
Continue reading ‘“Set Up a UPS for Crash-Free Shutdowns During Power Outages”’ »
Amazing stuff… a brief Internet search turns up assertions (such as a few here) that the healing properties of honey were well known in ancient civilizations, but if that’s true it apparently went out of vogue when modern antibiotics were discovered, and medicine is only now rediscovering its usefulness.
(No entry yesterday because we were on the road, driving home from a Thanksgiving visit to my family. Seventeen and a half hours, to travel less than 800 miles by highway… now I remember why we usually travel on the Saturday or Monday after Thanksgiving, instead of the Sunday. The traffic was horrid.) It seems …
Continue reading ‘“NASA Mars rover leaves moist skidmarks in boggy struggle”’ »
I thought I’d written about this before, but a search doesn’t turn it up now… there has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about how McDonald’s food is so unhealthy that even microbes won’t eat it. But as appealing (and health-promoting) as the idea may be, apparently it’s pure rot.
Some spammer’s automated spam-bots have targeted Geek Drivel over the past few weeks, for reasons unknown. Well, okay, the surface reasons are obvious — but since they haven’t managed to get a single spam published, despite weeks of effort and hundreds of attempts per day, you’d think the spammer would notice and turn them to …