computers
pontiff | March 4, 2010Today Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spoke at the University of Washington in the Microsoft Atrium of the Computer Science & Engineering department's Paul Allen Center. As you can tell from that first sentence UW and Microsoft have long had very tight connections. Indeed, perhaps the smartest thing the UW has ever done was, when they caught two kids using their computers they didn't call the police, but instead ended up giving them access to those computers. I like to think that all the benefit$ that UW has gotten from Microsoft are a great big karmic kickback for the enlightened sense of…
mikethemadbiologist | March 1, 2010I came across this post, "10 Ways Social Media Will Transform Events in 2010", and, after reading it, I was reminded of Ray Bradbury's quote, "I don't try to predict the future, I try to prevent it." Anyway, the post is about how social media and other technologies will change meetings. First, some fisking. Consider this:
Attendees will not wait for microphones to ask questions. They will text or tweet those questions as they think of them. Attendees will not wait until the end of a session to ask questions that came up in the first five minutes of the presentation. This does not mean…
revere | February 27, 2010Fifteen years isn't a long time. Most of us can remember what we were doing 15 years ago. Often it's the same thing we are doing now, job-wise. Sure our kids were just kids, not adults. But 15 years isn't a historical epoch. At least not when you are living through it. But the fact is we have gone through a revolution in that period that will seem as profound as the 50 years from 1450 to 1500, the half century after Gutenberg and the invention of moveable type.
It's hard to remember what the cyberworld was like a short 15 years ago, but thanks to the internet we can retrieve -- instantly --…
revere | February 10, 2010I'm a scientist and my research is supported by NIH, i.e., by American taxpayers. More importantly, the science I do is for anyone to use. I claim no proprietary rights. That's what science is all about. We make our computer code publicly available, not just by request, but posted on the internet, and it is usable code: commented and documented. We ask the scientists in our program to do the same with the reagents they develop. Reagents are things like genetic probes or antibodies directed against specific targets mentioned in the articles they publish. There is an list of the reagents on the…
mikethemadbiologist | February 1, 2010I keep reading stories about how the iPad will revolutionize everything--or not (here's one example). There are also lots of complaints about how the iPad is betwixt and between an iPhone (or similar device) and a laptop. But these posts are missing the point: the iPad is an attempt to sell computers to the approximately forty percent of households that don't own one. Not only is this an opportunity to sell something to a consumer sector that otherwise wouldn't buy any computers, but it also might ultimately, by serving as an introduction to the web, email, and basic computer operation,…
oracknows | January 28, 2010You knew it was coming. You knew from many previous incidents that it was inevitable:
Who knew Hitler was such a Mac geek?
Personally, although I think the iPad looks like a really cool device, I'm really not sure where it would fit into my life. I already have an iPhone, which I love, and I already have a MacBook Pro, which I also love. Given that, I just don't see the need for the iPad, at least not for me. However, I also know that I'm not the sort of person for whom the iPad was designed.
oracknows | January 23, 2010Oh, yes, my brothers and sisters, we have done it!
My pharma paymasters are very, very pleased indeed with me and all of their other blogging and Twittering minions. Very, very pleased indeed. In fact, they are cackling with glee over the discomfiture of one of their greatest enemies, Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger! This brave rebel's plan to attack the conspiracy by winning a Shorty Award in Health has been thwarted, thanks to the efforts of you and me, oh my brothers and sisters, and The Health Ranger has gone completely mental about it:
I was set to take the top prize, and Dr.…
oracknows | January 20, 2010Although I have a Twitter account, I really don't use it all that often, other than having set up an automatic feed to Tweet all my new posts for the blog. True, I do from time to time have flurries of activity (usually when I'm trapped in a particularly boring conference) or am inspired to tweak J.B. Handley or other anti-vaccine kooks when they start Tweeting nonsense, but for the most part I remain a blogging kind of a guy. One could argue whether it's my tendency towards logorrhea on the blog rendering me incapable of hewing to the 140 character limit for Twitter, but whatever the reason…
revere | December 3, 2009Frequent readers here know we are fascinated with the similarities between computer viruses and real viruses. Both use their unwittingly infected hosts (computers or host cells) to make copies of themselves and in the process can cause varying degrees of sickness. It's hard to give any solid criteria which will differentiate one as qualitatively different than the other (except perhaps one is purely carbon based). But now you don't have to choose. You can have both at once:
A new malware campaign uses faked e-mails that appear to inform of H1N1 vaccination programs from the Centers from…
oracknows | November 15, 2009Since I seem to have attracted several truly idiotic Holocaust deniers in the comments after this post, including, believe it or not, Eric Hunt, the anti-Semite who attacked Elie Wiesel at a San Francisco hotel in 2007 and who now runs a blog full of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism where he recently bragged about attending an appearance by arch-Holocaust denier David Irving and bleating about a vacuous legal suit he's bringing against Steven Spielberg and Irene Weisberg Zisblatt over what he considers to be a "defamatory" documentary.
How do I deserve such "honors"?
In any case, while I'm…
oracknows | September 3, 2009As wrong and illegal as "smash and grab" theft is, I have to admit to a grudging respect for the skill and precision with which these thieves managed to despoil a sanctum sanctorum of computing, an Apple Store in New Jersey:
Yikes. All in all, they took they took 23 Macbook Pros, 14 iPhones and nine iPod Touches, all in 31 seconds flat.
If only these thieves hadn't put their ambition and skills to such an illegal and immoral use...
oracknows | August 15, 2009It's amazing where anti-vaccine nuttery will metastasize to when you're not looking.
This time around, Tom Chick (who, I'm told but don't know for sure, is actually Jack Chick's son) warns us about a new Wii game by Ubisoft called Your Shape. It sounds as though it's nothing more than another of "personalized" exercise guides, but what it does have that other such exercise guides lack is a certifiably loony anti-vaccine wingnut as one of its "health experts." Indeed, as Tom points out, this is what Ubisoft says in its press release:
In addition to being the face of Your Shape featuring Jenny…
pontiff | July 29, 2009Rod Van Meter is in search of some summer reading:I'm feeling the need to recharge my store of ideas, and I have the
nagging feeling that my lack of currency in a bunch of fields is
causing me to miss some connections I could use in my own research.
So, I'm looking for a reading list of, say, the one hundred most
important papers of the decade. It doesn't have to be an even
hundred, but I'm looking for a good summer's reading. (Given that
it's mid-2009, now would be a good time to start composing such a list
anyway, depending on where you want to place the "decade" boundary.)
I want these…
cevans | July 6, 2009
One of Buckminster Fuller's most interesting conceits was his dislike of specialization, which he likened to a kind of intellectual prison, restraining "bright" people from truly understanding the complex, and general, systems of which they were a part. After all, he argued, what causes extinction in the animal kingdom? Overspecialization. Of course, it's logical, and it's s problem we see over and over again in human history, from the Industrial Revolution displacing specialized factory workers to the often daunting gap of comprehension between the social and "hard" sciences. As soon as we…
oracknows | June 25, 2009Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the reason for Apple CEO Steve Job's five month medical leave of absence from Apple is that he needed a liver transplant, which, according to the story, he underwent a couple of months ago in Memphis. In my discussion, I assumed, for the most part, the most likely clinical scenario, namely that Steve Jobs' insulinoma had metastasized to his liver and that the liver transplant had been done for that indication, but, as some pointed out, it was possible that Jobs had somehow fried his liver without his tumor having metastasized. Unlikely,…
oracknows | June 22, 2009It's no secret that, when it comes to computers, my preferred axe has been the Apple Macintosh. Indeed, back in the 1983-1984 school year I was in college living in a house with five other guys, and one of my roommates was a a total Apple geek. He had, as one might expect, an Apple IIe, and I immediately decided that, when it came to computers, I definitely liked the Apple product better than the IBM PC that my other roommate had. Of course, at the time I was nowhere well off enough to be able to afford either, but these two roommates were both computer science majors. They had to have a…
revere | June 16, 2009No swine flu again today. At least no swine flu on this blog. There's a shit house full of swine flu in the world. But we are otherwise occupied and there is a bevy of terrific flu bloggers out there. And I was away from the keyboard all day yesterday, which causes serious withdrawal symptoms: anxiety and palpitations when I think of the email piling up and the posts not written. It could be worse. I could be around my computer and seriously injured:
According to data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System database, more than 78,000 cases of acute computer-related injuries…
oracknows | May 27, 2009I'm a bit envious of Dawn Crawford. Why am I envious? She has a badge of honor I have yet to obtain.
Jenny McCarthy has blocked her on Twitter.
Darn. I'm going to have to see if I can get Jenny to block me too.
revere | May 12, 2009Trying to figure out where the incipient swine flu pandemic is heading and how fast it is heading there is shooting at a moving target, and this one is moving pretty fast. The best we can do at this point is use whatever information we have to make some educated guesses about different scenarios along with how likely various scenarios are. We used to do this on the back of an envelope, Now we use computer programs. I'm not sure we are doing much better (or much worse), but we can make use of more information and the answer looks prettier when displayed.
Expedited publication of such an…
oracknows | May 8, 2009I know, I know it seems like the proverbial shooting fish in a barrel, but some creature that I can't identify is having a fight somewhere in the neighborhood, freaking out my dog, and now I can't go back to sleep; so why not blog? In any case, I found out last week that Jenny McCarthy is on Twitter as JennyfromMTV.
Now, when I first saw it, I thought it had to be a spoof, someone pretending to be Jenny. No one could be as inane as to Tweet things like:
Im inside a hyperbaric chamber. This thing makes me feel amazing.
About to fly to jersey. Security stole my sugar free jelly out of my purse…