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 [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Systems category.
“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 [...]
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 [...]
“The Pirate Bay torrents printable 3D objects”
Ever since I read Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, I’ve been wondering what would happen when anyone could download a set of plans and print their own, for example, Star Wars toys. And more to the point, what would happen when those plans could be pirated. Anything digital can easily be copied; the Internet is [...]
“Ambient Field Conditioner audiophile insanity”
Some people have a lot more money than sense.
“Password Sharing Among American Teenagers”
I’ve always stressed that passwords should never be shared with anyone, to everyone I discuss them with — the only passwords that my wife and I both know are the ones to the iTunes and e-book accounts that we both share. Unfortunately there’s a problem when it comes to minors: parents only have a limited [...]
“You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You”
Good God… someone actually advocating an intelligent solution to movie piracy, in a mainstream business magazine?! Unbelievable! Listen up, Hollywood. As an independent software developer, I’ve been dealing with Internet piracy for longer than you — without a single lawyer, let alone an army of them, and often on a shoestring budget. The facts in [...]
“Your Personal Placebo Profile”
I’ve often wondered if there might be a way to harness the placebo effect to actually help people get better. It seems that I’m not the only one, either.
“Study links dim wits to conservative ideology”
“US, UK research: Thick kids more likely to become bigots“. Ouch. I’ve often thought that today’s conservatives weren’t the brightest bulbs on the whole, and wondered whether there was some causal link there, but to have it bluntly spelled out like that is pretty damning. Maybe these studies should be publicized a lot more. Nobody [...]