Oops, another perfectly good disaster scenario down the drain. Unless something like the metavirus from the novel Snow Crash appears, capable of infecting both humans and computers, I think we’re fairly safe on that front. At this rate, right-leaning politicians and other fear-mongers must be seeing a new disaster on the horizon: running out of [...]
Archive of entries posted on February 2012
“Global warming COULD SHRINK THE HUMAN RACE”
Apparently the historical size of horses is inversely proportional to the temperature — in other words, when temperatures were hotter, the ancestors of modern horses were smaller, and vice versa. It makes sense, since smaller bodies are easier to cool. Unfortunately it’s also well-known that reptiles have just the opposite response, getting larger as temperatures [...]
Git makes website maintenance easy too!
We’re gearing up to release our first program for the general public in quite some time, so we’re going to need a real website again, rather than the one-page placeholder that I put up several years ago. The last time I had to design a website was before the turn of the century. I started [...]
“DIY ‘Back to the Future’ hoverboard actually hovers”
Nice. I might even be tempted to buy something like that.
“RIP: Peak Oil – we won’t be running out any time soon”
It’s so hard to find a good, credible, looming disaster to panic about, and then those pesky scientists keep destroying the few that we manage to find. Runaway global warming keeps getting kicked in the teeth by inconvenient facts. Nuclear power disasters persistently refuse to be anywhere near as disastrous as people hope. Scientific advancement [...]
“How to remove your Google Web History”
I did this (thanks for the early heads-up, Ploni), though I had a few problems getting to the history page. Once I managed it, I was appalled to see how much stuff they’d managed to associate with me… nothing damning, just massive amounts of it. If someone wanted to cause me problems, or wanted to [...]
“Laser used to cool semiconductor”
I can imagine the marketing blurb now: “Now with lazer cooling!” (Yes, I know laser is spelled wrong, but marketing guys are very fond of their Zs. Which might explain why it’s so tempting to sleep through most of their presentations, but I digress.) With some work, this sort of thing might someday be employed [...]
“Lesbian Necrophiliacs”
You don’t find an article whose title includes the phrase “Lesbian Necrophiliacs” too often. And it’s safe-for-work (and for my more prudish readers) too! Even without the title, the article is pretty interesting. Cloning has apparently evolved lots of times over the history of Earth, but it’s almost always a death sentence: if every creature [...]
“Crush! Kill! Destroy!”
Remember that one? It came from an episode of Lost in Space that I saw when I was maybe seven or eight, and it has stuck with me all these years. I even looked it up a little while back… apparently I’m not the only one it has stuck with.
Comments in Code
My nephew just introduced me to geek&poke, a web-comic that only true geeks could love. Needless to say, I’m lovin’ it. While scanning through the recent strips, I ran across this one, which gave me a chuckle, and also got me thinking. I’ve heard a lot of opinions on comments in programs over the last [...]