ideonexus

interweaving ideas

  • This is What Happens When You Leave a Port Open on a DHS System

    I know from previous experience that I need to be careful about what I put in the root directory on my development box at work, but I recently discovered it’s probably best not to have any open ports on my box at all, when a coworker showed me this in my Apache server log: Retina…

  • Why the State Should Get into Prediction Markets (or Get Out of the Way So We Can Try Them)

    In 2003 DARPA was researching the potential of a prediction market to guide policy in defense against terrorism. Called FutureMAP, the program was abandoned under heavy criticism from Congress, which percieved the program as people gambling on the odds of a terror attack. There were many policies to criticize in the War on Terror, but…

  • NEMO Science Center: The Playful Mind

    Facial Expression Reader Vicky 85% Happy, 3% Disgust, 2% Fear, 1% Sad It’s amazing that the organ most responsible for the success of our species is the one we know the least about. While we have come a long way, abandoning the cartesian duality and stepping out of the false dichotomy of the nature versus…

  • Why You Should Watch Battlestar Gallactica

    Note: If you watch BSG, but haven’t seen the last episode (aired on 20090213), skip this post as a spoiler. If you don’t watch BSG, take this post as an example of what you are missing (the quote’s edited so as not to reveal anything). If you saw the episode, enjoy the blockquote. Now that…

  • Windows Calculator, Say What?

    Why didn’t somebody tell me the Windows Calculator, found under Start->Accessories, has a “Scientific” mode, found under View->Scientific??? Windows Calculator, Scientific Mode This is like waking up one morning and noticing there’s another room in your house that you just didn’t know was there before. This functionality is fairly frakin’ sweet. It’s got Hexadecimal, Octal,…

  • The Wall Street Journal Doesn’t Understand New Media

    Iridium Communications Satellite Credit: Moi Last week, I got a late message from the Wall Street Journal that they wanted to use my flickr photo of an Iridium satellite for their coverage of the satellite collision in space. Very exciting! It would have been awesome bragging rights to have my (pretty unremarkable) photo appear in…

  • How Much Does Time Dilate for the ISS Astronauts?

    One of those nifty facts Einstein discovered in his Theory of Relativity is that the force of gravity affects time. The more gravity, the slower time progresses until time appears to a stop in a black hole from the perspective of an outside observer. This natural phenomenon is known as Gravitational time dilation. Spacetime Curvature…

  • NEMO Science Center: Teen Facts

    I could not imagine the reaction, if an American Science museum were to have a section that dealt with sex as honestly and explicitly as the NEMO science center. From French Kissing displays, to novelty condoms, to pictures of insect genitalia, to dolls in a wide variety of sexual positions… there was plenty of heart-attack…

  • Flash Fiction: The Peacock’s Tail

    Is up at 365 Tomorrows. “Watch this,” Alea smirked at Trin and turned to the four-legged creature dumbly munching on some flamegrass nearby. “Oti,” Alea chirped to the thing, and a few dozen eyes opened to look at her. “Oti, what is pi?” A half-dozen orifices sprinkled amidst the eyes opened to emit a flurry…

  • Charles Darwin on the Shoulders of Giants

    There is grandeur in this view of life… from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. – Charles Darwin I firmly reject the idea of The Great Man theory that history is punctuated by the occurrence of elite heroes, and I don’t think Darwin would…

  • The Power of JavaScript

    I’ve been out of the loop when it comes to all the web development advances that have occurred in the last five years, and am now just getting up to speed on them for a project to modernize our Asset Logistics Systems at work. The area most changed since I went into my ASP cave…

  • Science Stimulus

    Science Debate Allow me to be upfront in my support for much of the Government Spending portion of the 2009 stimulus plan working its way through the fed presently. $125 billion in education spending, a $3 billion increase in NSF funding, $100 billion for energy infrastructure, and $10 billion for basic science research are just…