I’m a kind and gentle person. I think every living thing on this planet is miraculous and deserves to live out its life without human interference… but I make an exception for parasites. That’s why this article elicited a bloodthirsty cheer. Go, science! 🙂
(Original article linked to from Boing Boing has apparently been pulled. Here’s another one describing the same research, culled from the comments.)
I wish this stuff had existed twenty years ago (or that I’d known about it then). It could have saved me a lot of time scrubbing. Assuming it works, anyway. I’ll have to try it some time, though I rarely work with grease and oil anymore.
As I’ve long suspected, the scientists sounding the Global Warning alarm have been playing fast and loose with the data. Deliberately.
I understand some of the reasons for it: if they had told the truth, intelligent people would have dismissed the problem, quite reasonably demanding more information before taking the problem seriously. And by the time the science could back up their assertions, it could well be too late to stop or reverse it. But as a long-time fan of science as a path to truth and understanding, I (for one) feel betrayed by the scientists involved.
A failure to think through the consequences.
I was discussing our password security schemes with Ploni over (encrypted) e-mail recently, which reminded me of a post I recently saw on the subject that uses a different take: an MD5 hash of a file or phrase as the core.
(Interesting idea, though not as convenient as simply learning to remember secure passwords.)
I’ve never been able to understand people who reject scientific evidence outright, in favor of whatever their chosen authorities dictate. (I recently saw a quote that sums it up: “[T]he problem with all the “science deniers” is they think the argument is about power and “we” think it is about what reality is.”) The book mentioned here (available as free PDF files on the site) promises a deep delving into the psychology of such people, with scientific evidence backing up every premise.
I haven’t read it yet, but quite frankly, I think such people have a mental illness and need treatment — and if they refuse treatment, or if one can’t be developed, need to at least be barred from any position of authority. Especially in government!
(This will probably be denounced as religious persecution, since the vast majority of religious fundamentalists have this authoritarian mental illness. But consider… we, as a society, don’t allow pedophiles to work in child care, so why do we allow authoritarians to run for public office? The two cases are a lot more closely related than they first appear.)
Ground-Source Heating. Nice to see that it’s getting more air time now, because it’s a great technology. I looked into it for our place last year, but determined that it would take a long time to pay for itself — far longer than we’re planning to stay in this house, and there’s no guarantee that it’ll increase the sale value of the place by an offsetting amount. If/when we build a place to settle down in permanently, we’ll definitely get it.
The answer, in my case, is probably not. At least for now.
On the get-more-RAM side: I do use a several virtual machines (VMs) regularly. With eight gigabytes, I could open all of them at once, and increase the RAM available to each of them too, and still have plenty of RAM left over for other purposes. I could also run Windows 7 in a VM, something that might be problematic with only 4GB.
On the not-right-now side: in my current setup, so long as I don’t open more than two virtual machines at a time, I don’t run into memory problems. And the current allocation of memory to each VM, while not massive, seems sufficient to prevent most swapping within the VM itself. But the biggest argument against it is the cost: replacing my current 4GB with 8GB on this machine would run about $750 from Newegg.com (the least expensive option I’ve been able to find so far). The advantages aren’t worth that to me.
On the other hand, electronics prices almost always drop over time. If this stuff drops fast enough, or if I find that Project X needs a lot of RAM to operate at full speed (possible, I’m not sure yet), I might end up getting it. We’ll see.
Of course, the answer might be different for you, especially as memory for most computers is a lot cheaper than for mine. Read the article and make your own determination.
I wonder if one if the prime drivers for entrepreneurship is bad management. I have to think that bad management pushes a lot of capable people out of their day jobs, and those people go on to become entrepreneurs. […]
Sorry, Scott. I’m an employee-turned-entrepreneur myself, and bad management had very little to do with the change. You come to expect stupid management decisions; it’s part of the background, you don’t even notice it after a few weeks on the job.
It’s not until you leave to run your own business that you start to see just how stupid some of those decisions were… and how unexpectedly intelligent some others (that seemed equally stupid from a worker’s perspective) were. You really do have to walk in a business owner’s shoes for a while to really understand the things driving him to make those decisions.
On the other hand, bad management (elsewhere) is definitely part of the reason I stay an entrepreneur. 🙂
And the game of cat and mouse continues, with the good guys looking decidedly mouse-like at the moment.
I’m sure this is good for us, on the whole. It forces us to continue improving the state of the programming art, in much the same way that disease forces us to continue improving the medical arts. But it’s also a major pain in the posterior.