alpha pup's blog

There is a new virus in the wild and it is bad.
The average user is put at risk through USB ports.
Do NOT trust any thumb drives or any other storage device.  It is best not to let anyone plug anything into your computer until you know that Microsoft and / or your anti-virus vendor have caught up with this one with updates to protect you.
Article here.

BBC article on the ESA Goce satellite project.

Imagine flooding the earth so no land would show.  If the earth were a sphere of uniformly distributed mass (or for your sticklers or mathematicians, mass distributed with spherical symmetry) then the water's surface would also be a sphere.

But, change the mass distribution so that it is lumpy and the water would re-distribute itself so that the lines of gravity passing through it will be normal to the surface (perpendicular to a tangent line drawn at the surface at that point)

The Earth is very lumpy.  We knew that for some time.  Now we have an accurate map of that virtual surface that would be...

Thanks ESA and CERN for keeping science going on the other side of the pond!

The Economist recently ran a great tribute to a great thinker of our time.

Norman Macrae took a disciiplined approach to subjects his contemporaries approached emotionally or with absolute faith in popular doctrine.

He was not influenced by ideas that were popular but untested.  Click here or on image for article.

In his own quiet way he advanced modern thought beyond orthodoxy.

I am amazed by the power of home computing these days.  In the early 1990's I worked in an industry that struggled to deliver speech recognition and text to speech to the home computing market.  Now there is more processing power in the average mobile phone.

And what do we do with that incredible power?  99% of the time, the answer is, "Nothing."  For the most part, we just sit next to unused potential.

So when you're not using your Ferrari to drive down the congested lanes of Facebook, wouldn't you like it cure cancer or something?  Well it can, thanks to the World Community Grid.

Let's put good intentions to work on our machines to counterbalance the malicious botnets  under the control of cyber-mobs that are conscripting machines to steal credit cards and sell counterfeit pharmaceuticals.

It's safe, secure, and to quote Ken Kesey, it puts your good where it does the most.

click on image for BBC article -- you may

want to let the early adopters have all the

fun with this one...