Smart Energy

The U.S. military manufactures weapons using chips made in China. And there’s evidence that the Chinese are building trap doors in the chips that enable hackers to override locks on the chips, reprogram them, and otherwise undermine the security on the weapons. Here’s from a post on Boing Boing, quoting Sergei Skorobogatov, a postdoc in the Security Group at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge:

We chose an American military chip that is highly secure with sophisticated encryption standard, manufactured in China. We scanned the silicon chip in an affordable time and found a previously unknown backdoor inserted by the manufacturer. This backdoor has a key, which we were able to extract. If you use this key you can disable the chip or reprogram it at will, even if locked by the user with their own key. This particular chip is prevalent in many systems from weapons, nuclear power plants to public transport. In other words, this backdoor access could be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon to attack potentially millions of systems. The scale and range of possible attacks has huge implications for National Security and public infrastructure.

I sit here gob-smacked, pondering the implications of incorporating chips made by, if not an enemy than certainly a fierce competitor into key systems that “defend” millions of people.

Update 2012-05-29: Scientific American has picked up this story here.

It turns out a group of psychics believe Apollo 16 might have found an alien ship on the moon. Plus, the sun is spitting giant magnetic bubbles of radiation at the Earth like we talked about its sister! Enjoy This Week in Discovery News.

via Psychics on the Moon and Incoming Sun Spit : Discovery News.

Discoverer of Higgs-Boson particle invents perpetual toothpaste machine.

A man in Pullman, Wash. today admitted to having discovered the Higgs-Boson particle several weeks ago. The man, who asked not to be identified, has been using beams of the elusive “God” particles in quantumly questionable ways.

“My wife was pestering me about the toothpaste and why it never seemed to run out,” the man said. “It’s been in the same, almost-gone state for several weeks now.”

The man explained that he had bombarded the nearly spent tube of toothpaste with a beam of Higgs-Boson particles. “This created a quantum wormhole connecting the tube with the universal toothpaste supply,” the man explained. “Toothpaste lurches across the universe through the wormhole, constantly refilling the tube with paste quanta.” The tube of toothpaste never seems to fill more than it was when bombarded. “But there is always just enough to brush our teeth,” the man said.

The man declined to explain how he had discovered the Higgs-Boson, which has been the object of a multi-year, multi-billion dollar search by the world’s smartest physicists. But he did say that his high-energy physics experiments are fueled by his desktop cold-fusion system.

Wingnut and former president Baby Bush used to say that we needed to go back to the moon and build a base there in order to go to Mars. Huh? That’s like saying you need to go around the world in order to visit your next door neighbor. Even for a certified moron, that’s quite a remarkably dumb idea. But, in fact, Baby Bush was practicing the ancient art of misdirection.

What nobody wants you to know (and which I’ve been telling you for years), is that there is in fact a secret U.S. military base on the moon. Now, for the first time anywhere, we get a picture of it, hidden in a cave. This photo was taken by an Indian space probe.

The secret U.S. moon base is in the hole. Really.

Here’s from a clueless post by Dvice:

Discovered by the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, this chamber is more than one mile long and 393 feet wide. There would be lots of benefits of building a moon base in there, mainly for protection from the nastiness of the surface of the moon. It’d provide a nearly constant temperature of -4 degrees Fahrenheit, unlike the surface, which fluctuates between 266 degrees and -292 degrees. And it would provide protection from radiation, micro-meteor impacts and dust.

So, what’s the holdup? Let’s get building! I want to visit a hotel in a moon base sometime in the next 20 years, please!

Hello, Earth to Dvice (make that, Moon to Dvice): the base is in there. Really. I should know. I was abdicated by the lunar kings and banally probed without mercy until I let go my own top-secret knowledge of just about everything worth knowing.

Escherichia coli, one of the many species of bacteria present in the human gut

You think you’re a person, but you’re really a spaceship for bacteria:

A team of scientists from around the globe have found that gut bacteria may influence mammalian brain development and adult behavior.

“The data suggests that there is a critical period early in life when gut microorganisms affect the brain and change the behavior in later life,” says Dr. Rochellys Diaz Heijtz, first author of the study.

The research team compared behavior and gene expression in two groups of mice — those raised with normal microorganisms, and those raised in the absence of microorganisms (or germ-free mice). The scientists observed that adult germ-free mice displayed different behavior from mice with normal microbiota, suggesting that gut bacteria may have a significant effect on the development of the brain in mammals.

The adult germ-free mice were observed to be more active and engaged in more ‘risky’ behavior than mice raised with normal microorganisms. When germ-free mice were exposed to normal microorganisms very early in life, as adults they developed the behavioral characteristics of those exposed to microorganisms from birth. In contrast, colonizing adult germ-free mice with bacteria did not influence their behavior.

Subsequent gene profiling in the brain identified genes and signaling pathways involved in learning, memory and motor control that were affected by the absence of gut bacteria, highlighting the profound changes in the mice that developed in the absence of microorganisms. This suggests that, over the course of evolution, colonization of the gut by microorganisms (in total 1.5 kilograms) in early infancy became integrated into early brain development.

via Bacteria in the gut may influence brain development.

Get ready to take another clickin' from Facebook -- the "social" network that beats you silly and keeps coming back for more.

The only time you make an announcement on Friday night is when you want it to get lost in the weekend shuffle. The professionals are off, and sports and recipe-fillers are top of the hour and top of the page.  In the PR and news business, this is called “putting out the trash.” Witness Facebook’s latest piece of trash:

On Friday, Facebook made yet another change to its privacy policy, enabling third-party application developers to access your street address and cell phone number. This information was made public Friday night on the Facebook Developer Blog.

You really have to dig to delete your cell number, or whatever else of your personal info you don’t want shared. And, note, you have to DELETE the info — you can’t simply say, No, don’t share it with those guys. You must delete it, a process that requires at least four clicks (see the link below if you need step-by-step).

IMHO, you’re better off deleting Facebook from your life. But, hey, you wanna be a click farmer, a digital peasant, then go right on ahead. Just remember, every click you make on Facebook is making those guys money. And what, really, is it doing for you?

via How to delete address, cell number from Facebook | Safe and Secure – CNET News.

These girls ain’t messing around:

In a finding that upends decades of scientific theory on reptile reproduction, researchers at North Carolina State University have discovered that female boa constrictors can squeeze out babies without mating.

More strikingly, the finding shows that the babies produced from this asexual reproduction have attributes previously believed to be impossible.

via Boa constrictors can have babies without mating, new evidence shows.

The universe, why does she purr and growl and spit and coo the way she does? “Like the eye,” Leonard Susskind writes in The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, “the special properties of the physical universe are so surprisingly fine-tuned that they demand explanation.”

The eye, of course, was supposed to be the trump card of the cadre of crypto-creationists known as the intelligent design underground. The plan, as outlined in the infamous Wedge document, was to stealthily sow doubt and infiltrate key positions in order to get creationism taught in schools, along with morning prayers and the Ten Commandments mowed into the lawns of every courtroom in the U.S. Alas, the trial in Dover, Pennsylvania (a case fondly, if very unofficially, remembered as A Couple Dumb Cluck School Board Members and Their Discovery Institute Allies vs. Common Sense), put the kybosh on intelligent design.

Which might mean that Susskind’s 2006 book is passé and no longer useful. The influential and admired theoretical physicist wrote it, he says in his introduction, because he thinks the universe – quirky, special, and weirdly tuned as she is – can be explained without recourse to “supernatural agents.”

In fact, though, and except in the introduction, Susskind has way too much fun ogling the universe’s sexy features to really spend much time bashing creationists. He’s got “branes” on the brain while luxuriating in “a bubble bath universe,” washing off the mud (or whatever that stuff is) being slung in “the black hole wars.” Creationism be damned, let’s do math!

Or, since there aren’t any actual equations in The Cosmic Landscape, let’s do the diagram rumba and follow the squiggly lines that compose a Feynman diagram – but watch out! The dance floor is folding according to the weird rules of its own private geometry. And: energy is mass with no clothes on so, parents, shield your children from the wonders of the universe.

But that, ultimately, is Susskind’s point: you don’t need to bring in supernatural intelligence to explain the weird goings on in the universe; you don’t need “intelligent design” or, as brainy physicists with a metaphysical bent like to call it, the “anthropic principle.” The anthropic principle is the idea that the universe is designed just so, so that – guess who – humans can thrive in it. Things are neither too hot nor too cold; neither too inflationary nor too contractionary. It is kind of spooky. Better, though, Susskind says, to take a look at what he called “the physicist’s Darwinism.”

Survival of the fittest, that is, only as it applies to the laws of physics. Just as with biology, where you get highly adapted and complex things like eyes and duck-billed platypuses, the universe has strings, and branes and black holes. The laws that work, continue to work. The ones that don’t, stop being laws, either dying out or changing. There is, Susskind claims, a “landscape of possibilities” Out There – and The Cosmic Landscape is his delightful tour of it.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

the thief of all your labors....

Doing a semi-decadal book purge recently, I found an old letter tucked inside a book. The letter was sent to Permeable Press some time in the mid-90s. There’s no return address on the envelope, and the letter itself lacks either a salutation or a sign off. It’s completely anonymous, in other words. The postmark lacks any means of identifying where it came from, too, as it’s just a red ink-stamp circle indicating that “52 cents” was paid to get the letter moving–meaning it didn’t come from the U.S. So perhaps it came from Australia or South Africa? This impression is compounded by the author’s spelling of the word “labours,” in the British manner. In any case, the letter is quite odd. It’s gardening advice, sort of, so I thought I’d share it as the time to till is fast upon us.

The letter is addressed to Permeable Press. Note that I, as Permeable Press, never published anything about gardening, so this letter is doubly odd to me, which is why I saved it all these years.

Here’s the letter in total:

Do not be jealous or in anyway envious of your neighbors flower or vegetable gardens. What they have may be a sign of a problem. A flower garden may be a sign of depression and a sign of a severe drinking problem. A vegetable garden may be a sign of a cry baby, a person who whines about everything. Any attempt by you to have such a garden, may not work out as you planned.

Growing a garden (this is very hard work for some people) may lead to the theft of all your labours. Very little produce comes of it.

Growing fruits and vegetables indoors is not a good idea because they don’t taste right.

But, if you want to try, here are some tips. The seeds you buy may not grow properly at all. Water is much better to start plants in (if you have to).

Seeds come from the plants themselves. Examples: Cut up potatoes are the seed for this vegetable. The dried leaves from the carrots are the seeds for this vegetable.

“Old maids” are the best at growing gardens. They don’t mind digging in the dirt or doing hard physical labour.

Fruit trees are best left in orchards.

Good luck with your project.

Daphne Gray-Grant has a great piece on Ragan, a site for professional communicators (read: PR hacks), about the kinds of things writers do to get the job done. I especially like #6, as procrastination is the hurdle I’ve had to deal with most often as a writing instructor and coach:

Write in small bursts. Creative work doesn’t require oodles of time. That first draft you need to write? It’s best done in dribs and drabs, a little bit at a time. Instead of procrastinating, effective writers persuade themselves to write a little each day, no matter how frazzled and frantic they feel. (Editing, on the other hand, usually needs space, time and quiet.)

About a dozen years ago, when I was writing a novel amidst three more-or-less full time jobs (including a technical writing gig for Broderbund software that bored me to tears), I adopted the motto “a sentence a day, even if it kills me.” The novel–and the software manuals–got done.

She also suggests separating writing from editing (great advice that I have a hard time following, a bad habit I freely admit slows me down), doing research before writing (again, great advice, though I’ve seen this abusued, as doing research sometimes becomes the excuse for not writing), and “dissecting” great writing “like a scientist” to see how it’s done.