Category: Uncategorized
Many Things Can Be Enzymes
Proteins can clearly do a terrific job, but is that because they’re clearly the best choice, or just the one that evolutionary biochemistry landed on? Can enzyme-like catalysts be made from chemically more robust scaffolds? Maybe. The authors describe several new “synthetic generic polymers”, with new and completely unnatural carbohydrate backbones, and show that these, too, can fold into catalytic species.
Merkel is wrong about the Internet
Consistently clueless about the Internet, that Merkel lady.
Merkel said that some key services for the digital economy would require reliable transmission quality and should therefore be treated differently than other data.
NK messes with Sony
To be clear, the real act of terrorism is that sony pictures still employs Adam Sandler.
The new message made demands regarding the distribution of the controversial comedy film The Interview—which has been the target of the North Korean regime’s ire since it was first announced earlier this year. The Interview was “a film abetting a terrorist act while hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership of the DPRK by taking advantage of the hostile policy of the US administration towards the DPRK.”
500 ka art
a long time before modern humans
A zigzag engraving on a shell from Indonesia is the oldest abstract marking ever found. But what is most surprising about the 500 ka doodle is its likely creator — the human ancestor Homo erectus.
Peak hipster?
A new luxury development called 15 Renwick in New York is giving built form to steampunk. That’s right, steampunk: that dark, Victoriana-obsessed cousin of Renaissance festivals and Star Trek conventions is now a theme for condos. I’m sorry to report that it gets worse: Steampunk is the entire pitch for the building.
Subway Tips
learn, or regret.
Web standards overview
For example, it’s long been held that when you define an extension point in a standard, you generally need some way to coordinate it. The IETF does this with registries; the W3C had a fashion for using URIs as namespaces for a time (and then vendor prefixes — but that’s another rant). If browsers themselves become that lynchpin, you don’t need registries or namespaces; you just edit the spec — provided that the spec is faithfully reflecting what the browsers implement. The argument goes that in a browser-ruled Web, other software using the specification doesn’t want to diverge from the behavior of a Web browser, because doing so would cause interoperability problems and thereby reduce that software’s value. So, just make sure the browsers are walking in lockstep and document what they do in the specs; you don’t need no stinking registry.
Nice overview how Web standards work these days
Spam Nation
Fascinating writeup
But Krebs’s access to the inner workings of the spam underground was massively expanded when the 2 largest spam-bosses went to war against one another, paying corrupt Russian cops to investigate and incarcerate one another. Part of this war involved rival hackers breaking into one another’s internal networks and grabbing enormous troves of emails, chat-logs, and message-board databases that were fired off to law enforcement — and Krebs. From these insider resources, Krebs pieces together a gripping — and even, at times, thrilling — story about the strange business of pharmaceutical spam, an industry that is bizarre, sprawling, dysfunctional and contradictory. Fueled by world-beatingly high price of pharmaceuticals in the USA, the pharma-spam business uses millions of hacked PCs to send out come-ons advertising all manner of drugs, from anti-depression meds to fertility meds to powerful, controlled painkillers — and, of course, erectile dysfunction medication.
Reconstruction failed
This Confederacy nonsense should have been snuffed out when the civil war was won. Instead it was allowed to fester into the 21th century. Absurd.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 