I’m an avid listener of the Edmonton based podcast Skeptically Speaking, not only for the sultry tones of it’s host Desiree Schell, but also for the engaging discussions and interviews.
I loaded up Episode 56 in anticipation of the Baba Brinkman interview, but recieved a bonus bit of information about a skeptically focused news feed aggregator called Skepticator. This service pulls blog posts and news entries from skeptic and science feeds into one handy location. Skepticator features a fairly speedy search engine and if you’d like to subscribe to a single RSS feed with content from all 290 featured sources, Skepticator’s got you covered.
Of course I registered MeddlingKids with the service, so you have another option for keeping up to date with our ramblings as well.
Marc
I was just reading a recent entry on 80beatsthat talks about the sudden appearance of malicious worms for the iPhone. It’s crazy to think that someones phone could give out such information, but it’s foolish to think that they couldn’t, and in theory it would be easy as hell to do. Personally, I don’t have an iPhone. I’m not against them, but when I went to buy my latest phone, they were not yet available on my cell provider’s network, so I got myself a BlackBerry instead. But the same holes are presumably open.
The other day, a friend of mine had a newer BlackBerry and was stunned when simply passing her phone over mine didn’t suck up my BBM PIN. The joys of Bluetooth open up so many doors. Why couldn’t I write a tool that sits on my phone and looks for other Bluetooth enabled phones and either transmits them malicious code or sees what it can snoop from them? I’ve never looked into the Bluetooth technology from a development perspective and presumably there are some checks and balances involved, but a dedicated hacker eats checks and balances for breakfast. I’m not suggesting everyone go back to the days of analog Nokia flip phones, or worse, those heavy-as-a-brick Motorolla gray jobbies, I’m just saying that like all other communications devices, we need to be aware that they are not guaranteed to be secure. Use your heads, people!
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Ok, does everyone remember what happened around this time last year? The world went bat-shit crazy over the fact that the LHC was about to create a giant black hole and eat the planet, or destroy the universe or make Sarah Palin Vice-President of the media of the USA!! GASP!
We’ll get your aluminum foil hats and Black Hole detection kits ready, cause it all about to go down again!
For the last few weeks CERN has been accelerating batches of sub-atomic particles faster and faster and this Friday they will enter the main chamber and collide. I expect the lunatics and fear mongers will have a heyday with this, however until then, read this great article explaining what they’re looking for, why it’s so cool and whether or not we’ll live to talk about it.
BoyInfidel
As many of you know, I’m a computer programmer. I have a long resume of applications I have written for a variety of clients, and I’m very good at what I do. But for a long time I’ve been feeling like a dinosaur in terms of my profession, and this morning it occurred to me why.There is less and less science in my profession.
I’ve been saying for ages that we’re moving in a dangerous direction. As a Java developer, we’ve been focused more and more on turnaround and less on quality. We’ve built tools like Hibernate and Rails that infinitely improve the speed with which we can develop, but remove us further and further from the code we write. When errors occur, they are immensely difficult to track down and resolve because we don’t honestly know what is happening inside the box.
This is all in response to budget concerns from business. They want us to cut down on the costs of our development time. And we want to keep them happy, so we work with them. We come up with things like Agile and rapid application development and we use CASE tools to build our applications faster and better. But this is a Wal Mart approach. You end up building cheaper crap instead of proper products.
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As an IT professional, my job is about as far away from research computing as you can get. I work for a big oil and gas company, and the apps I build for them are based on solving their particular issues and not on the theoretical or the new-fangled.
The end result is I’m no expert in what is happening in the realm of theoretical computing, but I find it all fascinating. Quantum bits, petaflops… so much interesting stuff!
But I had never heard of a DNA computer before. Holy smokes that is cool. The article I just linked to is actually entitled World’s Smallest Computers Made of DNA and Other Biological Molecules Made to ‘Think’ Logically. And that rather verbose title cleanly sums up the article. They’ve made these little chains of DNA that they can program, and they can get them to answer questions based on logic. It starts easy (IF all men are mortal AND Socrates is a man THEN Socrates is mortal) but then they start, as they say on The Jefferson’s, Movin’ On Up. They even have a compiler to translate from a higher level programming environment down to DNA code.
Tell me that’s not completely bad ass.
Jim
As¬†a computer programmer and all-around science geek, this tremendously interests me. I’ve heard about this whole notion of programming bacteria, and the concept definitely intrigued me. In a TED talk I saw by Craig Vetner, I first began to imagine what we could accomplish by doing this. I shared it with friends, almost all of whom said “OMG WHAT IF TEH BACTERIAS MUTATE AN KILL US ALL”, which made me giggle. All technologies have their potential risks, and hopefully the people working with them understand and plan for those risks. But if they don’t, then that’s why we take the time to understand what we’re working with before we release it into the world. Duh.
Well, today on Science Daily, there was a really interesting articleabout some research being done in this area. Essentially, they are finding that things are not quite as easy as we had originally assumed them to be. E. coli cells that the researchers were working with demonstrated a bistability similar to the concept of a toggle switch in electrical engineering. Depending on the state of the bacteria, some would react in one fashion and others in another.
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I love it when people think creatively and start modeling things on other things that may or may not be obvious choices. Case in point, I just finished reading an article on Science Daily that details how a group of IT security professionals decided to model a new computer security approach on the ant.
It makes sense. There’s not that many animals in nature more effective at dividing up labor and handling security. Don’t believe me? Step on an ant hill and don’t move your foot. When I was a kid my sister decided that would be a funny thing to get me to do, so I’m two years old shrieking “they’re biting my pee pee!” and running in circles. I love my sister.
The idea is basically more like a monitoring process. Little processes (ants) are released in the environment looking for certain telltale behaviors. When an ant finds something, it releases the digital equivalent of a scent message that attracts other ants. When enough ants agree that there is an issue, the attraction will be strong enough to draw more and more ants. Swarming will trigger a reaction that ultimately alerts the human operators to deal with the problem.
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