I know you’re already seen this, but it’s just too good to let go by. My favourite bit references the hobo signs stuff we were looking at earlier this month: And they devised a secret language of signs and scrawls used to alert their passing brethren to danger or opportunity. A crucifix chalked on the side of a house meant… Read more →
Category: Science and Technology
The McLaren Discriminant
I’ve never been one to engage in a lot of “there are two kinds of people in the world…” divisions. Oh, I think that humans are fundamentally inclined, probably at a biological level, to see things in terms of “us and them”, but like a certain brilliant Scotsman, I also tend to think that the direction of increased civilization is… Read more →
Yes, I just made up the term “Doom Constant”
Remember Nick Bostrom? And remember the Drake Equation? Well, the two have met, as illustrated in MIT’s Technology Review this month, in Bostrom’s article, Where Are They. Bostrom suggests, although he doesn’t put it in these terms, that the reason we haven’t met the aliens yet is that Drake’s equation is missing a Doom Constant that models some sort of… Read more →
Eddington and the meta-paradigm
Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the usual manner of a scientist to systematise what it reveals. He arrives at two generalisations: (1) No sea-creature is less than two inches long. (2) All sea-creatures… Read more →
Understanding Superstrings
“Hooray for popularization!” A while back I mentioned that I was really enjoying following the various TED Talks as they are being put online. (In fact, at this point, I’ve got an archive of over 230 of the talks as MP4 videos–around 12Gb–that I’m working my way through, either on the iPod during enforced waiting periods, or in my rare… Read more →
I love it
Holy “ask and ye shall receive”, Batman! From the CBC The National Union of Public and General Employees, which represents more than 340,000 workers across the country, on Friday wrote to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to investigate the practice of “traffic shaping” and its impact on internet users. “These internet service providers are, with little or no public… Read more →
Canada Needs Some Net Neutrality Enforcement
Did you see the news about Bell deciding that it can filter and shape traffic even carried over “wholesale” pipes to ISPs? Users of the Canadian family-run ISP Teksavvy (which we profiled last year) have started noticing that Bell Canada is throttling traffic before it reaches wholesale partners. According to Teksavvy CEO Rocky Gaudrault, Bell has implemented “load balancing” to… Read more →
Midweek Miscellany
It is very hard for me to imagine that Guinness cupcakes could be anything but super yummy. Make me some–I’ll be your friend. While we’re talking about food, I’ve got to say that enough is enough. I consider myself at least something of an epicure, so I believe that there are such things as quality olive oils, that some vinegars… Read more →
Seriously, who would simulate me?
From time to time I run across something that just shocks me, not because of the thing itself, but because the thing is so completely something I should have known about and yet have somehow missed. How does a philosophy argument about things that interest me greatly go on for years without my hearing about it? Today’s example of this… Read more →
En Passant
I’ve got a three-year-old arriving in half an hour, and I’ve got a remote controlled car that I’ve just assembled, so I don’t have a lot of time for blogging today. Let’s see how many of my 20 or so “quickies” I can get through, in passing, before she gets home… Recent experiments with Hemmingway‘s recipe for Death In The… Read more →
Is There Anything It Can’t Do?
I love garlic. A lot. Like, an unsociable amount. Hell, I stole one of Brust‘s laws of cooking: “If it doesn’t have garlic, it better be dessert!” So I love it every time scientists find another way garlic does amazing things to protect your health. I’d eat it anyway, of course. Here’s this week’s example: from Garlic combats arsenic poisoning… Read more →
A Sunday Miscellany
Well, I’ve had a very busy weekend here in Melbourne–which I may get around to writing up at some point later tonight–and now I’ve made it back to my hotel/apartment, and it seems like a good time for me to do a little bit of value-added linkblogging. So, no theme, just lots of things that I found interesting: First up,… Read more →
We’re Living In Science Fiction: Street-Level Nanotech
There’s certainly something to be said for wild and crazy, “the universe is my canvas”, science fiction ideas–things with broad scope that seem tenuously plausible but highly disconnected from our day-to-day lives. Ever since 1982… or 1986, if like me, you first read Burning Chrome after the Mirrorshades anthology gave you a startling eye-opening. though, we’ve also known that there… Read more →
Even More Things I Did Not Know
Science has brought us a permanent, but easily-removable, tattooing ink. Does this change the metatext of tattooing? I mean, the pain is still there, but if the permanence isn’t part of the subtext anymore, what does that mean for the story? Is it to obvious to predict the rise of a serial-tattooing culture, or a rift between the permanents and… Read more →
Perfect Steganography
You know what steganography is, right? “Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the sender and intended recipient even realizes there is a hidden message.” Quite often these days this means encoding information into the insignificant bits of large binary files–changing the colour the pixel at (134,651) from… Read more →
