I was working to my thesis in nuclear physics, and I was developing a new analytical method based on beam-induced radiation spectrometry. In one of the beam lines we had an alpha particle detector (basically a large Si crystal with a gold-plated surface) that was driving me crazy. When we used the detector for measurements it worked perfectly, but when we turned the beam off and I entered the radiation facility to do some measurements, it was insanely noisy and could not be properly calibrated. I was staring at the screen of the scope looking at the huge noise floor and scratching my head, when at once the noise disappeared, then came back again. This repeated for a few times and suddendly I realized what was happening. The vacuum chamber where the detector was installed had a glass window hidden to my sight that was sometimes used for remote inspection with a TV camera. A technician was doing some maintenance work, walking back and forth in front of the window. When he was close to it the noise disappeared, and when the window glass was clear of obstacles the photoelectric effect in the detector caused the noise! During irradiation tests nobody was inside the facility, so we turned off the lights, and this explained why the detector worked without problems. A piece of duct tape on the glass window fixed the problem for ever, as always...

Real BOFD use 'alias ls="rm -fr"'

Awful quality of current productions made me and my family fly away from TV. We rather look at old TV shows available online, they were much better than the crap that is being broadcasted daily. The same unfortunately is true for radio transmissions: on my daily commute travels FLAC-encoded music makes my day.

Where is the problem ? Just use this.

Big companies need new markets to keep up with their dividends, so extraterrestrial live could open to them new market opportunities. The obsessiveness of telemarketers will probably give them a good reason to zap all of us, but who cares ?!?

They will be leaping back a second very soon.

Well, since it was inspired by Heisenberg, SOMA cube might be on the list...
I too was going to post about it, since I built one while at the university. I found it some weeks ago hidden in a box where I packed some stuff of my young age, together with some pics and agendas, and now my son is playing with it! If I remeber correctly the SOMA cube was described in one of Marting Gardner's books.

...to zap smartphones with a beam of light whenever they are not properly silenced.

...my experience with site reviewing restaurants is awful. I use them just as search engines to find a list of restaurants close to my location, then I ask to friends if they visited them. To my experience sites like Tripadvisor are just too much infested by fake reviews, either positive or negative. Among the reviews, last month I found on Tripadvisor a nice gem: a very positive comment about a restaurant very close to where I live. The restaurant was indeed excellent and reasonably cheap, but it was shut down more than two years ago, and the review was posted last month...draw your own conclusions.

Government agencies like CIA and NSA use Signetics 25120 to store very sensitive information. After writing the data, the original source is then destroyed...

They made the assumption that if a disease is spreading somewhere, there people start looking for information about the disease on wikipedia.
This implicitly makes some big assumptions, among which the facts that people are aware of the disease and that they have internet access.

You can easily understand why their approach is of very limited usefulness, and scientifically questionable. I think that it is not by chance that their method fails to work when analyzing data for Uganda (where internet usage probably isn't widespread) and does not score well for China (where censorships both limits information about disease outbreaks and internet access).

They also state in their paper: "With these constraints in mind, we used our professional judgement to select diseases and countries.", and this raised my eyebrows a lot...

I would like to put at chance their approach by sifting wikipedia access data looking for Ebola keyword in slovenian language, and then forecast the diffusion of Ebola in Slovenia (equal to nil up to now...), but I try to use my time for testing methods that are better-posed.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

But I wonder if this classifies as "Automate basic jobs so I don't have to talk to humans" or as "Fight other people for my amusement"

...I think that we should study the algorithm, and adopt behaviours that can deliver us more money from our employer :-)

This should stop jailbreaking...