Let’s do a little mini-roundup on the theme of science. Let’s start with something that I want to see on CSI (and mean real CSI–not CSI:Orange Filter or CSI:Blue Filter): Researchers develop fingerprint detection technology … MXRF actually detects the sodium, potassium and chlorine elements present in those salts, as well as many other elements, if they are present. The… Read more →
Category: Science and Technology
We live in science fiction
I keep seeing little things that remind me that we are in fact living in the future (despite the best attempts by the Republicans and Stephen Harper, et. al., to drag us kicking and screaming back into the Dark Ages–but more on that later). For example, we can now apparently make concrete that sucks the carbon dioxide out of the… Read more →
Pointing to CommonBits
So, let’s take a moment to talk about CommonBits. What, you may be asking yourself, is CommonBits? Well, let’s pinch the answer straight from the site: What is CommonBits? CommonBits is a free community directory of progressive political media that anyone can contribute to. Search for audio, video, photos, reports, transcripts and other files in the directory. Submit links and… Read more →
I for one welcome our new cyborg monkey overlords…
We are so totally living in the future. Of course I would be so much more impressed with some kind of robotic octopus, but that’s what you get when science works towards some kind of practical application instead of just focussing on what would be cool. Brain-controlled ‘robo-arm’ hope By Michelle Roberts BBC News health reporter, in Washington DC Scientists… Read more →
WP 1.5 stuff
Warning: geeky stuff to follow OK, I have the template looking more or less the way I want it to now. I’ve managed to make the necessary alteration to the wishlist thing to get it working with 1.5, so if you actually come to the blog (as opposed to reading the RSS feed) you will see a little box with… Read more →
WordPress 1.5
I’ve upgraded the engine for this site to the shiny new WordPress 1.5 Immediate differences for you: 1) Until I have a chance to update my snazzy Terrence the African template, etc, you will see the default WP1.5 template. (This won’t really matter to people reading in RSS) 2) My plugins are gone until I can upgrade them too–so no… Read more →
Those would scare me away
I can understand the idea that wearing very obvious security paraphenalia can be a deterrent to crime, I guess–but I can’t understand an instantiation of this concept that involves things that look like a combination of a Dalek with the combat lingerie from The Linguini Incident. That’s an image from the detail page for one example of Existech’s “Domewear” line.… Read more →
Just a few months left to build your DVR
What am I talking about? “Build my own DVR?” you say in the same way you would say “Make a radio from coconuts?” Well, here’s the two paragraph summary from the Electronic Frontier Foundation issue page on the ‘broadcast flag‘: Responding to pressure from Hollywood, the FCC has adopted a rule requiring future digital television (DTV) tuners to include “content… Read more →
Silence fear, engage brain
The thing about doing security analysis is that you really have to think about the threats, and you really have to look at your assumptions, and then you have to evaluate the costs of security measures against the threat reduction. It’s hard to do that while you are being terrified. For example, imagine two security systems A, and B, that… Read more →
Cool content, bad format
So, I’ve been digging around on the “cult” section of the BBC’s website, and I’ve been finding all kinds of great stuff there. Today’s happy discovery is that they have a bunch of Sherlock Holmes stories up, written by some great British SF (and SF-ish) writers, including Jon Courtenay Grimwood (who I talked about earlier) and Paul Cornell (who wrote… Read more →
Weird spam attack
Well, the blog has been getting a ton of weird spam lately. I say “weird” because, unlike the normal comment spam, these posts have no links in their bodies, nor are the posters entering a URI to some casino or “pharmacy”. Instead they are anonymous comments that have no linkage at all, and contain what are clearly machine generated compliments… Read more →
Automatic face morphing
During an interminable meeting today, I was playing with the St. Andrews Face Morpher, a tool that lets you take an uploaded face image and apply various transform to it for interesting results. For example, this is an image of my friend Alex that I yanked off his photography site: Now, here is what the Face Morpher says Alex will… Read more →
Bill “McCarthy” Gates
So, Bill Gates apparently thinks that people with different notions of intellectual property from him are commies. This kind of bounces off of me, since as a Canadian I am considered a crypto-communist by most Americans anyway, and as a leftist NDP I’m considered a bit of a communist by lots of Canadians too, but it’s a less frivolous matter… Read more →
The Long Tail
If you missed Chris Anderson’s great article The Long Tail, you should definitely take a minute or two to go back and read it. It’s about… well… let’s say it’s about the market effects of massively big potential customer bases for items of niche interest. The examples are drawn from practical retail things like bookstores, but they apply just as… Read more →
Safecracking for the Computer Scientist
This Slashdot story lead me to check out Matt Blaze’s site. (I have geek jealousy of his domain name.) Matt’s a CS prof who specializes in security issues, and in addition to the safecracking paper, there’s lots of other interesting bits on his pages. I suspect I will be reading stuff there for several days at least. Read more →
