I don't know if anyone has noticed, but February 20, 2002 at 10:02 pm is an interesting palindrome. If you use European DD/MM/YYYY notation and 24 hour time format you get 20:02 20/02/2002. Throw out the punctuation and you have 200220022002. Ok, so maybe it's a stretch. :-)
A Grim Choice: The Ravages of Age, or of Cancer?
An International Herald Tribune story about how "Scientists see a no-win link between two human scourges".
The Tick tv series to be cancelled
As reported on Slashdot, The Tick television series is going to be cancelled.
As one user said on Slashdot:
No, surely, our beloved City is unprepared for gigantic blue justice striding upon the rooftops of their daily lives. The forces of truth and justice fall silent this day, but they shall rise again like the head to the top of a cold one, if you know what I mean, chum. Yes, evildoers and television programming execs, you have won this round, but as sure as the sun will rise over the dark jungles of Tibet, your day in that sun will be over, and then you shall again face… The Tick.
The "wayback machine" for the internet
http://www.archive.org/ has been "recording" the internet for the last several years. For example you can see the history of my homepage here (wolfenet.com/~jtmartin/) and here (netjeff.com).
Raining instructions
Some people distinguish between biological life and machines. But if you look deeply enough, biological life is just a machine called DNA. Richard Dawkins said it best in chapter 5 of his book The Blind Watchmaker, after observing downy seeds falling from a willow in his garden:
It is raining instructions out there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any plainer if it were raining floppy discs.
Spreading things out for a better defense
With the increasing threat of biological terrorism, it's tempting to vaccinate everybody for all known diseases. But even if we had enough to go around, it would be enormously expensive. Vaccines also carry risks that would be unacceptable just because a terrorist might strike. For example, suppose a vaccine for anthrax has serious side effects (death or permanent disability) at a rate of one in a million (that's pretty low), then vaccinating everybody in the US would lead to 300 or so cases. That's much bigger than the number of people killed in this latest round of anthrax.
So what should we do in the face of biological terror? Oliver Morton's article in Wired magazine presents this idea:
Another distributed response to biological attack is partial immunity. There are already vaccines against most plausible bioweapon agents. If a small percentage of health workers – and indeed of the population at large – were to choose to be vaccinated against one or some of these diseases, then a reservoir of manpower would always be on hand in an emergency, ready to help with the vaccination of others or to do whatever else was necessary in places where infection was rife. You can't vaccinate everyone against everything; but if some people are vaccinated against most things and you know where to find them, their distributed immunity could be a powerful asset.
2001: The Year vs The Movie
Chris Black was doing his "Year in review" on the Daily Show when he said:
So my review for 2001 the year is the same as for 2001 the space odyssey. It went on too long, it was hard to follow, and you could only enjoy it if you were really, really stoned.
One kibibyte?
In the metric world, kilo- means 1000. For example, a kilometer is 1000 meters. But in the programming world, we sometimes say kilobyte but mean 1024 bytes, not 1000 bytes. Well apparently the NIST got into the game to resolve the confusion back in 1998.
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binar
They defined the prefix kibi- to mean 1024. So now you can say kibibyte if you mean 1024 bytes. Whew, that's a load off my chest. :-)
Joel Spolsky on "bloatware"
In the full interview, Joel addresses the concern over "bloatware", where software takes up progressively more disk and/or memory space. Among programmers, "bloatware" is a derogatory term.
Moore's law makes much of the whining about bloatware ridiculous. In 1993, Microsoft Excel 5.0 took up about $36 worth of hard drive space. In 2000, Microsoft Excel 2000 takes up about $1.03 in hard drive space. All adjusted for inflation. So stop whining about how bloated it is.
Actually, the whole article is pretty interesting. I'm putting a copy here for when the link goes bad. Read on…
Groundhog Day: Breakthrough to the true self
Here is an interesting essay on the movie "Groundhog Day". I've liked the movie since the first time I saw it, and this essay makes it even more interesting.