Includes stuff about anything where feedback causes the system to adapt, including the systems of nature, those that are man-made or cultural, and those of the human mind.
Given the recent demise of so many juicy and useful pseudo-threats, politicians and other fearmongers are probably watching this with anticipation. After all, it’s never too early to start planning your strategy of terrifying people into giving you more money and power.
This article by Ben Hamamoto makes the case that how we see and judge authority is changing, and that the Internet could be responsible: […] with science and health, we do value a certain cold detachment. Public health organizations in the U.S. have traditionally been very careful to appear serious, probably because appearing too casual …
Oops, another perfectly good disaster scenario down the drain. Unless something like the metavirus from the novel Snow Crash appears, capable of infecting both humans and computers, I think we’re fairly safe on that front. At this rate, right-leaning politicians and other fear-mongers must be seeing a new disaster on the horizon: running out of …
Continue reading ‘“The cyber-weapons paradox: ‘They’re not that dangerous’”’ »
Apparently the historical size of horses is inversely proportional to the temperature — in other words, when temperatures were hotter, the ancestors of modern horses were smaller, and vice versa. It makes sense, since smaller bodies are easier to cool. Unfortunately it’s also well-known that reptiles have just the opposite response, getting larger as temperatures …
Continue reading ‘“Global warming COULD SHRINK THE HUMAN RACE”’ »
It’s so hard to find a good, credible, looming disaster to panic about, and then those pesky scientists keep destroying the few that we manage to find. Runaway global warming keeps getting kicked in the teeth by inconvenient facts. Nuclear power disasters persistently refuse to be anywhere near as disastrous as people hope. Scientific advancement …
Continue reading ‘“RIP: Peak Oil – we won’t be running out any time soon”’ »
I did this (thanks for the early heads-up, Ploni), though I had a few problems getting to the history page. Once I managed it, I was appalled to see how much stuff they’d managed to associate with me… nothing damning, just massive amounts of it. If someone wanted to cause me problems, or wanted to …
Continue reading ‘“How to remove your Google Web History”’ »
My nephew just introduced me to geek&poke, a web-comic that only true geeks could love. Needless to say, I’m lovin’ it. 😉 While scanning through the recent strips, I ran across this one, which gave me a chuckle, and also got me thinking. I’ve heard a lot of opinions on comments in programs over the …
Ever since I read Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, I’ve been wondering what would happen when anyone could download a set of plans and print their own, for example, Star Wars toys. And more to the point, what would happen when those plans could be pirated. Anything digital can easily be copied; the Internet is …
Continue reading ‘“The Pirate Bay torrents printable 3D objects”’ »
Some people have a lot more money than sense.
I’ve always stressed that passwords should never be shared with anyone, to everyone I discuss them with — the only passwords that my wife and I both know are the ones to the iTunes and e-book accounts that we both share. Unfortunately there’s a problem when it comes to minors: parents only have a limited …
Continue reading ‘“Password Sharing Among American Teenagers”’ »