Sapere Aude
Month: March 2011
studying long-term effects of extreme confinement
The purpose of the Mars500 study is to gather data, knowledge and experience to help prepare one day for a real mission to Mars. Obviously there will be no effect of weightlessness, but the study will help determine key psychological and physiological effects of being in such an enclosed environment for such an extended period of time.
So should browsers be stricter about revocation checking? Maybe, but it does mean that a CA outage would disable large parts of the web. Imagine if Verisign corrupted their revocation database and were down for 6 hours while they rebuilt it. A global outage of large parts of the HTTPS web like that would seriously damage the image of web security to the point where sites would think twice about using HTTPS at all.
instead certs should just expire after a few days.
i love british tv. available on netflix, starring the main characters from peep show.
Japan now faces simultaneous threats to its infrastructure, its economy and its society. We have to ask seriously if Japan, as a nation, has the reserves of will necessary to weather this crisis.
Planet hunters may be missing a trick. White dwarfs could be good targets for exoplanet searches. They are as common as Sun-like stars, the most common ones have a surface temperature of 5000 K and this should produce a habitable zone at distances of 0.01 AU for periods in excess of 3 ga. That’s long enough for something interesting to have emerged on these bodies.
my drake equation estimate just went up
EFTA, schengen, EU, EZ visualized in a venn diagram.
Japan is exceptionally well-prepared to deal with natural disasters: it has spent more on the problem than any other nation, largely as a result of frequently experiencing them. (Have you ever wondered why you use Japanese for “tsunamis” and “typhoons”?) All levels of the government, from the Self Defense Forces to technical translators working at prefectural technology incubators in places you’ve never heard of, spend quite a bit of time writing and drilling on what to do in the event of a disaster.
a great example what our imminent mylifebits future enables.
MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language — so he wired up his house with video cameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son’s life, then parsed 90K hours of home video to watch “gaaaa” slowly turn into “water.” Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.
faster progress than moore’s law. and here’s a bit more background:
The technology that enables reading DNA is changing very quickly. I’ve chronicled how price and productivity are each improving in a previous post; here I want to try to get at how the diversity of companies and technologies is contributing to that improvement.
2015 world capacity of dna sequencing means it would take > 4000 years to sequence all living humans. we still have a long way to go.
most of prehistory might have been bands of humans running prey to death, without weapons.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 
