Odd Lots
- Here’s a longish and intriguing article about how our meal schedules affect bodily health. There’s some evidence that morning people eat healthier than night people simply by eating meals earlier. Carol and I jump out of bed a little after 6, and often start dinner at 4:15 PM. Here’s another piece on the topic.
- My friend Pete sent a link to a solid piece on how Internet search worked before Google. I used Alta Vista a lot back then, and had a Usenet login until my ISP stopped carrying it in the late oughts.
- And if you’ve never had a Usenet login and know little or nothing about it, here’s a quick summary.
- An aspirin a day may keep colon cancer from coming back after surgery. They’re still not sure precisely how this works, but as long as it does work, I’m all for it.
- An American PBS affiliate in Denver stored its data in a cloud server. When the cloud server company (not the server hardware company) went under, the PBS affiliate still can’t get its terabytes of TV shows back from the server hardware outfit. I have never liked (nor used) cloud storage, and this is just another instance of why.
- I wasn’t expecting this: Beamforming feedback information (BFI) sent to a router from connected wireless devices like phones, laptops and tablets can be used to generate high-quality images of people within the microwave field used by the local Wi-Fi WLAN installations. The tech is hard to describe, but it generate images of human users detailed enough to identify. Think Flock cameras are bad?
- Some clever scoundrel used a tiny white font displayed on a white background to inject “invisible” (to humans) prompts into an AI working for a court of law in Connecticut. He got caught, but once this trick gets around, it could become a very serious problem.
- Protons are not as simple as they used to be; long ago they were, well, bohring. These days they’re full of valence quarks, baryons, and gluons. Thankfully for us, there’s more matter than antimatter in the cosmos, and scientists hope that this new view of proton anatomy may explain the reason for that precious imbalance.
Posted in: None Of The Above.
I spent the best years of my career working for AltaVista, at first as a consultant, and then as an employee on a team in their Calgary operation. They did a lot that I am still proud of. The worst mistake they ever made was telling Larry Page and Sergey Brin that they weren’t interested in their algorithm.
“Small world” – I also was working for a branch of Digital/DEC in probably a similar time, in Vancouver – via their OAO (“MSP/outsourcing”) division – nothing fancy – “dirty-work”, supporting custom-built line-of-business applications written by the end-customer in a horrific myriad of differing client-server tools, technologies and platforms. (Ever hear of “Omnis 7”? shudders…)
A professor in Mississippi used embedded AI prompts to catch students using AI to write their papers.
Ha! Got a link for that? I’d like to read more about it.
Losing cloud storage data is scary. Hopefully Nine PBS will get their data back. I use big-tech cloud storage because my storage needs are modest and it’s packaged with the office suite I use. Next year I will reconsider my storage option since I will likely switch to LibreOffice.
“The cloud” – I have to admit, I am always tickled by another long-time internet persona when he refers to it as “the clown”… (jwz – of Netscape, Mozilla and the “DNA Lounge”).
While I personally don’t mind having quick access to my files via a cloud sync service everywhere – I ALSO have everything backed-up to a live NAS device with alot of RAID5 storage (Synology), but – ALSO then physical/removable drives when it is critical info. Turns out that my collection of HD’s has outlasted my 20-year old writable CD/DVD backups, which have begun to succumb to bitrot.
I don’t use the cloud for backup either. The most I’ve used it is for sharing writing projects with author friends using DropBox. Jim Strickland and I used it during our furious double-novel project back in 2011: Drumlin Circus and On Gossamer Wings. (I wrote 55,000 words of Drumlin Circus in…five weeks. I was younger then and doubt I will ever beat that record.)
We created an Ace Double-style paperback flip-book, but Amazon will not publish flip-books. No reason given. I may have to take it to Lulu, though given how few paperbacks I sell vis-a-vis ebooks, it might not be worth the trouble.