Friday, October 7th, 2005
I've been watching the whole intelligent design (ID) controversy from the sidelines for some time with mixed feelings. My focus in university was evolutionary biology. I spent quite some time working in a laboratory for experimental evolution (working with microbes with no artificial genetic modifications - strictly natural processes were ...
Posted in news | No Comments »
Thursday, September 1st, 2005
While I don't want to distract the reality and immediacy of the disaster in the New Orleans area, a friend pointed out this October 2001 article to me and it is hard not to reflect on our prescience of this event:
"A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet ...
Posted in news | 1 Comment »
Monday, May 30th, 2005
Just a suggestion...
Check out the simultaneously useful and distracting Google Suggest: as you type the search field expands into a drop down list providing anticipatory or alternative searches and allowing you to see the difference in the size of the result sets for each of them. A great way of ...
Posted in news | 1 Comment »
Monday, November 15th, 2004
Anyone who uses a personal computer (or who reads the paper) is aware that PCs are highly susceptible to a raft of problems that fall into the domain of "computer security". Even my parents know that computers need to be patched frequently and are aware (first hand!) that these patches ...
Posted in news | No Comments »
Sunday, November 7th, 2004
I recently read The Human Factor by engineering professor Kim Vincente. This is an eye-opening book about the importance of "adapting technology to people" instead of "forcing people to adapt to technology." The field of Human Factor Engineering has apparently been around for awhile, but never has society been in ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 26th, 2004
Why does "information want to be free"?
I think the phrase is a good way of explaining to most people that information is really hard to treat like property. The cost of reproduction and transportation is absurdly low, thus it is trivial to distribute freely, in the sense of "free as ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 14th, 2004
Technology Advances Sports Coverage
Some of you may have noticed the innovative technology provided by the US Open coverage. Watching a few matches I was impressed by the computerized slow motion rendering of close calls that redrew the ball and the lines and eliminated everything else. Apparently they also had a ...
Posted in news | No Comments »
Sunday, September 12th, 2004
Wired News: Better Science Through Gaming: Enormous quantities of data generated by automated techniques in genetics and proteomics have led to an unprecedented requirement for tedious data mining. Here is an interesting product, Genesifter, that makes the task more manageable and fun too! Cool, would love to hear from ...
Posted in news | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 7th, 2004
So I was inspired by a article by a friend of mine in thinking about his post: Science is easier from the outside. Given my background in experimental evolutionary biology I thought maybe I would throw a few comments his way, then my few comments combined to form something which ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, August 30th, 2004
Peer to peer software ruled NOT LIABLE in the USA for copyright infringement activities of their users. Thank goodness some sense can be found here. Any useful tool can be used to ill purposes, we have been through the same issue with photocopiers and last I checked those companies ...
Posted in news | No Comments »
Thursday, August 5th, 2004
This site answers the age old question: "How Does One Obtain the Ability to 'See' in Four Spatial Dimensions?"
Also in the do it yourself category, make your own posters with the Rasterbator: "Welcome to the Rasterbator - NOW IN COLOR!The Rasterbator is a web service which creates huge rasterized pictures ...
Posted in news | 2 Comments »
Monday, June 14th, 2004
NudeCybot hits the Radar...Google returns this domain as the sole result. Now I need to work on showing up for "nude+cybot" searches.
As I write this post I notice that I still type TWO SPACES after a period. I was taught this in grade 9 by Dr. Byron Harker ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
