Science Etcetera, Jupiterday 20090219

Posted on 19th February 2009 by ideonexus in Science Etcetera

Humpback whales prefer BBWs.

Humpback Whales Feeding Credit: Peat Bakke

Bit of synchronicity with my article on ISS time and this one about building clocks accurate to a second over the lifetime of the Cosmos.

Dr. Alan Boss, of the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC, argues that there are one hundred billion trillion Earths in the Universe.

Behavioral Scientists receive a treasure-trove of information, 60 Terabytes of Everquest game logs, which detail every action ever performed in the game. Which opens up a huge privacy can of worms to my mind, but I leave that to the Boing Boingers to decide.

Not only did humans probably catch HIV from bushmeat, we may have got pubic lice from it too.

The drug ecstasy is still toxic, but studies of long-term use find it’s less toxic than formerly believed.

The fact that US citizens are still among the world’s most scientifically literate is due, in large part, to our general education requirements in college and willingness to fund general science.

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1. edit: Everquest 2.

   Everquest rocked, EQ2 is lame!

   Ok that aside, the pervasive EULA wins again on the data. You sign into their server, talk on their server, your data is their data, just like on youtube, facebook, etc…

   It doesn’t so much creep me out the idea of researchers using data of me or others to … do research (they have some interesting findings)

   What bothers me is that others had access to that data before who were likely not qualified to do any real research so basically had open access to a bunch of (no longer) private personal data.

   I know when I ran an ISP, one of my managers frequently tracked router logs and got laughs from seeing what sites our users went to, sometimes using their passwords to get porn. The best part was he was a devout christian… yeah :)

   I never got into customers information, as an admin I considered it just plain wrong, though I did release login data to the FBI by request since a user was allegedly posting insider trading information to devalue a company that fired him, but I suppose even that to some might have been considered a breach of trust.

   I guess what I am getting at here, is that there are lots of admins who take privacy seriously, but I am willing to bet there are a whole lot more who consider your information their personal entertainment, which is why many aspects of the internet continue to freak me out.

   Comment by John — February 19, 2009 @ 4:39 am

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