Month: March 2008
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Bash’s IRC Quotes
Back in the day I used to spend a fair amount of time in various IRC channels. If you did too, you’ll feel a pang of nostalgia reading the great quotes at Bash.org. <Patrician|Away> what does your robot do, sam <bovril> it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls…
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Online ‘Shopping
That’s photoshopping to you, Mr Layman. Yesterday, Adobe released the long-awaited, online version of the coveted Photoshop; Photoshop Express. At first glance it looks impressive and offers many neat features. Now before you go berserk, let us exercise some journalistic caution — it’s not everything you can do in Photoshop fit into a web browser.…
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Overestimating Threats Against Children
Bruce Schneier recently wrote about the MySpace ‘safeguards’ being put in place to protect minors. His very succinct closing comments are a must-read. …there isn’t really any problem with child predators — just a tiny handful of highly publicized stories — on MySpace. It’s just security theatre against a movie-plot threat. But we humans have…
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Sir Arthur C Clarke’s Final Message – Peace and Climate Change
By now everyone knows that Sir Arthur C Clarke recently passed away – a truly sad event. However, you may not have watched his ‘final message to earth‘. Communication technologies are necessary, but not sufficient, for us humans to get along with each other. This is why we still have many disputes and conflicts in…
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Jill Bolte Taylor – Neuroanatomist On Her Own Stroke Experience
Lots of people have been saying how impressed they were by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED Talk at this year’s conference. None, however, have summed it up better than Vaughan: It’s a bit poetic in places. You can almost hear the sound of a thousand cognitive scientists gritting their teeth as she describes the supposed…
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Deep Brain Stimulation and ‘Conscious’ Brain Surgery
Wired Science have got a great short film that follows two people who have deep brain stimulation devices implanted in their brains to treat tremors.While most people assume brain surgery is all pre-planned beforehand, for many treatments for cognitive or behavioural functions, the surgeons need to wake up the patient after they’ve open their skull…
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Stocks and Shares ISAs
There are a lot of very good US-based personal finance blogs around, but sometimes the information given is difficult for a UK reader to understand as the terms used are completely alien to us. One of the newer additions to my RSS reader is Plonkee Money – a site I found when searching for a…