Topics pertaining to science and technology, current or future.
I have no doubt that it will — but in five years? That seems more than a little overly optimistic. I’d love to be proven wrong though. Oddly enough, this sort of thing rarely appears in science fiction, at least the SF I know of. When people in SF literature deal with computers, it’s almost …
Continue reading ‘“IBM: Mind-Reading Machines Will Change Our Lives”’ »
Wow… it seems that hacking, and hacker pranks, got their start well before the first computers were created. I can’t imagine how Marconi could have thought any clear-text wireless signal was secure against eavesdroppers. Even if his patented tuning system worked to keep the signal on a very narrow band, all it would take to …
Continue reading ‘“Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker’s 1903 lulz”’ »
I’ve often said on this blog that if the governments of the world had realized the power that the Internet would give to their people, they would have quietly strangled it in its cradle. Apparently the wish for retroactive infanticide extends to large corporations as well, which makes sense.
The LA Times recently published a four-part investigation of autism. It’s pretty good, it has more information on it than I’ve been able to find in my own research elsewhere. I’m not a scientist, and I’m operating solely on my own experience and what I’ve read of others, but it seems to me that autism …
Continue reading ‘“Autism boom: an epidemic of disease or of discovery?”’ »
I can’t figure out whether this is EPIC LIZARD-BRAIN FAIL or simply hilarious. Maybe I’ll settle for both. I especially find it amusing when, between rounds, the lizard looks up at the guy behind the camera, as if he really wants to convey his disgust at the proceedings. Here is a short clip of a …
Continue reading ‘“Technology confuse lizard! Lizard no like!”’ »
I never noticed, but that phrase really doesn’t mean anything at all. All learning rewires your brain — if it didn’t, you wouldn’t have learned anything. Maybe stories like this one aren’t as important as people think.
The ad is funny enough on its own, but this take on it had me laughing aloud.
I’ve always wondered about people who only sleep a few hours a day. I’ve found that I need at least seven and a half hours a day to feel rested (which usually means an afternoon nap since I can rarely stay asleep more than six hours at night). But it seems that a single brain …
Continue reading ‘“How Much Sleep Do You Actually Require (and Why)?”’ »
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”’ »