Well, then I have just the thing to keep the ants away from my next picnic. Behold, the golden orb weaver picnic blanket!

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/spider-silk/

I can see how in some cases the computer would do a better job than a professor. In particular, ones that could not care less about teaching. I'm in Physics, and in one grad course there was an essay on an exam that I got a zero on. When I looked at the solutions, it appeared that the essay on the key was actually my essay with a few slight modifications. Two sentences of the short paragraph were my words exactly. When I brought this to the professor (who was also my advisor), he (a) couldn't remember my name (b) wouldn't even look at the exam (c) wouldn't discuss the answer and deferred everything to his grader, who was another grad student. The grader had better things to do and just handed my exam back to me and said, "that's what you deserve." This same professor, it should be said, makes psychotic Wikipedia self-edits about how his work "reconciles quantum mechanics with the Christian faith", rarely talks to other groups about his research (once one of his students came to me to ask a question about a problem he'd been working on for months--within minutes I identified it as being identical to a well-known NP-hard problem), and frequently "dumps" RAs he doesn't like by simply ending all communication with them.

My point is, the professors and TAs that grade unfairly don't do so because they can't. They do because they don't care. When I graded essays, I had a list of things I wanted to see in a correct answer and how many points they were worth, and a list of things that I would always take off points for. Every essay had a column of numbers next to it and a copy of my rubric so that any student could see exactly what they got points for and what they may have been penalized for. Out of classes of over a hundred students, I rarely received any complaints except for students who were on the border of failing and were desperate for one or two points. While sometimes grading essays felt like a simple application of a regular expression, searching for the gems of knowledge, equally as important was the logic that led to that conclusion. Correct answers obtained through incorrect application of concepts weren't worth any points at all, and it would be difficult for a program to match that with any regular expression.

I guess experience with bad professors did teach me one thing--despite having no passion for teaching myself, I would always treat my students like people and do my best to ensure that they got the best education possible for their tuition.

Wow. That's a remarkably cynical way of looking at things. There are plenty of occasions involving beer and a backyard that people broadcast on their favorite social network without much thought. I'm not claiming to be extremely popular nor particularly important to more than a couple dozen people, but it doesn't mean I can't have fun dancing or watching a campy zombie movie or playing a game of football with people I've met a few times, and it's just those things that being disconnected from social networking makes you miss out on.

There was an article on Slashdot a while ago about just that. Namely, that people could handle a relatively small number of close friends, and that social networking makes it very easy to keep in touch with a much larger group of people. Nonetheless, it has no effect on the number of people you can actually be meaningfully close with. So, we're not missing out on any of that.

As someone who never had a MySpace or FaceBook account, I'll be the first to say that I should have.

Back in college when MySpace was huge, I was constantly pestered by friends for my "MySpace", so that they could friend me. My canned response was, "I don't use MySpace, but if you want to find me you can just type my name into Google and my professional website is the first result." Well, guess who didn't get invited to the cool parties because the invite went out over MySpace? It still happens today with friends who use Facebook to send out invitations. You can tell people to use your e-mail, text you, or call you, but it's just not something that people think to do anymore. Facebook has become the preferred means of communication. I've even had a relationship fail out of the gate because the girl preferred Facebook flirting and I refused to indulge her. Just last week I got a call on my office phone from some friends from long ago who'd been looking for me. Since I wasn't on Facebook, it literally didn't occur to them that they could try entering my name in Google and find my contact information at the first result. Instead, by some circuitous route they managed to find a phone number I didn't even know--my office phone--since I just use my cell phone!

So, here's the moral of the story. To the masses, Facebook is the new phone book, post office and phone. If your address and number is unlisted, you may as well be living in a shack in the vast wilderness, because unless they're exceptionally close to you then your friends aren't going to find you, aren't going to contact you, and might even find it easier not to be your friend at all.

Somehow, I still decline to use Facebook. I'd rather go through my list of contacts on a rotating basis and send them a text to let them know that I still care. It is kind of funny to meet friends of my girlfriend and have them say, "Oh, you're that guy that's not on Facebook!"

So, maybe not being on Facebook makes me more memorable after all.

What would the impact have been on Earth if this had been pointing directly towards us? Would it have been on the scale of the Carrington event?

How many times have you been in this situation: many of your co-workers and friends have gone to see a movie and everyone seems to be chattering about it. You find yourself left out of lunch discussion or not getting jokes because your missed it. The problem is, the movie just doesn't sound interesting to you, or you don't have time, or you're waiting for the DVD release. Now replace "movie" with "video game" or "book" or maybe even "technical paper outside your area of expertise."

Spoilers in Wikipedia allow me to be "in" on every piece of pop culture that I don't particularly care about without commitment of time and money. If I decide I want to see the whole picture, I'll check it out. Usually, though, all you need to know are the bullet points!

My parents had a theory about this. When I was young, Ritalin was the biggest fad. Better than half the elementary school was on it, and every day they would line up around the corner to get their medication. Further, it was recommended for nearly every child in the school whenever they got in trouble of any kind.

The contributing factors that made the perfect storm of Ritalin were as follows:
-The drug company wanted to sell as much Ritalin as possible.
-The company bought legislation that classified ADHD as a learning disability, so that schools got more money for each child who was diagnosed.
-The same legislation meant that if you qualified for government assistance, you'd get more money for each child that was on Ritalin.

So the school now became the company's taxpayer-financed agent to push Ritalin, a drug required long-term to treat a condition that no one quite understood. The school had a financial incentive to have the psychologist diagnose everyone he could with ADHD, and if you were on welfare they could extend an incentive to you as well. I can offer one other piece of evidence: I had a friend whose parents did not want to give him these drugs under any circumstance as they understood neither ADHD nor the effects of the drug. When they were pressuring the family to medicate him, they handed his parents a stack of teacher's notes ostensibly to show he's been acting up. As my friend's parents looked at the notes, they noticed that some of the notes had inconsistencies such as wrong gender (she vs. he) and wrong name. The administration making the Ritalin sales pitch had taken notes about a child with ADHD and simply changed the name on them! At this point, they pulled my friend out of school and moved to a different area.

Ultimately, I'm not surprised that this is the case. I'm only surprised that it took so long for people to see through the ruse. I'm happy that my parents did, and sad that most of my friends' parents could not be convinced that ADHD was for my generation a huge drug-pushing scam!

When two people are on an elevator and one farts, they both know who did it.

I don't see this technology as being bad at all.

Suppose Apple would like to give away a free or reduced-price iPhone, for instance. A user not willing to pay for the ad-free iPhone would now be a potential customer if they were willing to deal with periodic advertisements with Apple recouping the lost hardware profits from the advertising. From a consumer's point of view, this is just another option: if you don't want to pay for or use ad-subsidized hardware, pay for the ad-free version or buy something else.

I just gave that a try, but Flash apps don't load at all for me after making said changes. :(

Thanks for the info, though. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they fix this soon! Not having flash is pretty annoying.

~Ben

I installed this on my work and home PC with no obvious problems, and was really pleased with the responsiveness.

It wasn't until later that I realized that Flash no longer responds to mouse clicks. It makes YouTube and Pandora hard to use, and other Flash apps nearly impossible to use. A workaround was recommended, which unfortunately causes Firefox to crash on loading a Flash app.

~Ben

This might have something to do with it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_antigenic_sin

The idea is that if your immune system learns to recognize an antigen similar to, but not sufficiently similar to, the antigen of a new threat, then your body may mount a less effective immune defense against the variant than it already knows. In other words, your body learns to fight seasonal strain of flu, then encounters similar H1N1. Now your body produces antibodies to the original flu, which bind more weakly to H1N1 proteins than an antibody that would have been made especially for H1N1, leading to an overall more severe infection than you otherwise would have had.

~Ben

Done and done:

http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Western_internet_censorship:_The_beginning_of_the_end_or_the_end_of_the_beginning%3F

I was at the American Physical Society meeting last week, and was initially surprised that the distribution of laptops was about 1/3 each Windows, Linux (usually Ubuntu), and Apple. I would have expected that given the density of users UNIX clusters there that Linux would have been preferred, but then I remembered that Apple has a UNIX terminal out of the box. Windows, by comparison, needed a separate SSH client and XWin32 in order to work remotely, and even then didn't work well. It was the combination of compatibility with the systems that I worked with and compatibility with existing hardware that got me to switch to Linux, but in the sense that in most people's eyes the OS choices are Windows and MacOS, I can see why a lot of grad students and faculty would choose Apple.

Nonetheless, I doubt that the academic crowd is exactly the demographic Ballmer wants to cater to. There's just not enough of us to matter.

~Ben