Category: Personal

A Master Equation for All Life Processes?

If you are curious about how interesting the world turns out to be, here are two great articles to add to your reading list.

A Master Equation for All Life Processes?. In “Life on the Scales,” Science News
recently wrote that some simple mathematical equations, known as
quarter-power scaling laws, can explain the metabolic rates of living
organisms. For example, “an animal's metabolic rate appears to be
proportional to mass to the 3/4 power.” And this “3/4-power law appears
to hold sway from microbes to whales, creatures of sizes ranging over a
mind-boggling 21 orders of magnitude.” The ecologists, physicists and
chemists behind this research are now successfully applying this
equation to plants, fish, full ecosystems and even biology and
genetics, by adding a new key parameter: temperature. Please read this
fascinating article for many more details and references. But save some
time to read another long article, “Ecology's Big, Hot Idea,” published by PLoS Biology,
which states that “the way life uses energy is a unifying principle for
ecology in the same way that genetics underpins evolutionary biology.”
Read more… [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]

Not so intelligent designer

Fantastic and fascinating editorial turning the purported 'logic' of
intelligent design against itself. The only drawback, of course, is
that ID is only superficially about logic, so this isn't an argument
that will carry any weight with anyone who finds ID appealing.

Intelligent Design's idiotic designer. Cory Doctorow:
A fantastic editorial in this weekend's NYT shreds the idea of
“Intelligent Design” (a pseudo-scientific,
crypto-Christian-fundamentalist way of talking about Creationism
without mentioning God) by taking apart the incompetence and
foolishness of the supposedly intelligent designer.

In mammals, for instance, the
recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the
larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead,
it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and
then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a
20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is
evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural
order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died
out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will
inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of
designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their
environments that they were doomed to extinction?

The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones.
Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by
pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain
mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to
protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases —
cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis — the signal comes too
late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is
completely useless.

And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily
designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births.
The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage.
Nature appears to be an avid abortionist…

You are an admin and you do need these lists

We're all admins today. Worthwhile stuff to know.

If you are a network or systems administrator, you’ll want these two lists from the
SilentNight Network and Systems Information Pages (their
descriptions, not mine).

The Default Password List: Here you will find a list with default usernames and passwords to Routers, Printers
etc. This list is useful for system engineers and administrators, and let them easely find security holes, and provide
unknowing customers with a little bit tighter network. If you have one of the items in this list, check it out and be
sure to change user/pass to something not known by every hacker on this planet.

Most Used Passwords: This is the list of passwords you dont wanna use, In fact you would be quite stupid using
one of these combinations cos the use is so widely spread that if anyone would try to compromise your system this will
be their first try.

Hint: If you have a broadband connection and cable/DSL router on your home network, you’re an admin (and if you
don’t, you’re vulnerable to a huge array of attacks)! If you run a WiFi access point, you’re an admin!

Online Social Networks 2005

I'm signed up for this and looking forward to interacting with an excellent group of participants.

Online Social Networks 2005. Hey folks, tomorrow is the last day for the early reg price of $35 USD. Then it's $50. Time to sign up for OSN 2005. (Disclaimer: I'm speaking on the 16th but not making any money!) Here is the promo:

“OSN2005 will be a summit for
all those interested in working with social networking processes,
tools, and media. In addition to attending many workshops, panels, and
presentations by leading experts and practitioners, attendees will have
the opportunity to be part of a community with a significant role in
defining the future direction of online social networking. If you want
to help shape this industry, come to OSN2005!

During the OSN2005 summit we will co-create and publish a manifesto
describing what we want and need from online social networking tools.
What are the key criteria for choosing and assessing OSN products and
services? What gaps exist in currently available software and related
tools? What needs to happen before it's common knowledge that OSN
products and services can deliver significant value? What are the most
promising developments in the OSN industry?

Attendees will be invited to participate in a series of focus groups to
provide feedback on current OSN technology and articulate specific
suggestions for future features and developments. A series of White
papers based on these focus groups will be shared with venture
investors who want to know where to place their bets in this industry.

Join Howard Rheingold, Lisa Kimball, Joi Ito, and a host of online social network experts to:

* Exchange ideas with experienced pioneers and leading thinkers in OSN development

* Gain insights in making better use of social capital, successful
collaboration online, and efficient creation and management of
knowledge capital

* See where social software stands today and where it's going in the future

* Make contact with leading solution providers ”

Technorati Tags: , , , By noemail@noemail.org (Nancy White). [Full Circle Associates Online Interaction & Community Blog]

Donate your unused CPU time to cancer research

Worth a few cycles of your time to decide whether you've got some resources worth sharing.

Are you one of those people who has one or more computers running all the time? Check out the story posted on
The Cancer Blog today about a new effort to use
spare CPU cycles to assist the Human Proteome Folding Project, which will bring many insights into cancer
research.

grid.org

The perfectionist definition of “good enough”

I have worked for entirely too many perfectionists in my life. That includes times when I’ve worked for myself. In a world of potentially open-ended assignments, we all need to be giving a lot more thought to how we define and recognize “good enough.”

The perfectionist definition of “good enough”.
A while back I was working with a client who had a serious
perfectionist streak. One session, as we were talking about the lack of
satisfaction with anything this client did, I said, “Do you know what I
think your… [The Occupational Adventure (sm)]