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, overall, so maybe some are paying attention.
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 I figured it was all coming from that. But I just saw a note on a developer’s mailing list that everyone (or at least, a whole lot of people) has been getting hammered with tons of spam recently. I suspect it’s either an attempt to cash in on the holidays or a new bot-net… probably just (!) a holiday thing, given the timing.
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”), there are six completely different chemical processes that might theoretically support life. I don’t know what progress has been made in proving or disproving any of them since then, but before this, only one of them was known to work (the one we’re based on). Now we can add a second working one, which wasn’t on the original list at all. 🙂
This, along with the recent discovery that there are probably three times as many stars as we thought, means that the chances of eventually finding extraterrestrial life have just jumped significantly. 😀
(Thanks, Ploni!)
I don’t know about Sagan, but I apparently dressed geekily enough to attract self-described “geek groupie” GoddessJ. Fortunately, she’s taught me a little about fashion in the years since we met. 😉
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 got a laptop, it’s a lot less important (because of the laptop’s internal battery), but I still insist on having one to run my other peripherals. GoddessJ’s desktop has one too, and we had to put one on my mother-in-law’s system as well, just because she was experiencing small brown-outs that were unnoticeable to the naked eye, but that would glitch her computer.
If you use a desktop system, I highly recommend a UPS. Even if it’s just a small one, it will let your system shut down properly before the power runs out, which will save you lots of time and headaches in the long run.
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 that the Mars rover Spirit, which is stuck in what increasingly looks like its grave, is still turning up surprises:
Space boffins analysing pics from the mired Mars-prowler say that the ground its wheels have churned in a futile effort to escape “holds evidence that water, perhaps as snow melt, trickled into the subsurface fairly recently and on a continuing basis”.
If both Mars and our moon have water, space travel and colonies on planets other than Earth both become a lot more feasible. Now if someone would just invent the Lyle drive…
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 greener pastures.
Maybe he thinks that I’m manually deleting them, and that if he floods the blog with them, I’ll soon give up in disgust. No such luck — they fail to penetrate even my first level of defense, so I never have to see them. The only way I know about them is the small line of text on my dashboard that reports them, and the dozen or so obviously-computer-generated names that are being registered daily to try to fool whatever automated defenses I’ve got.
Keep it up, anonymous spammer. It amuses me.