Ponderings of science, philosophy, history, society, and many other topics
I work in IT and often have to deal with security issues. Based on that, you'd think I'd have my act together better than average when it comes to personal online accounts. And you'd be right, to a certain extent. I've always been more careful than average with account passwords and use MFA (multi-factor authentication) … Continue reading Thoughts about online security
via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (click through for red button caption) These days, I usually share these on Twitter, but this one seemed more relevant for this venue. Despite using Twitter to share interesting articles and sites, I've never found it to be a great platform for actually sharing complex thoughts or having long conversations. … Continue reading SMBC: Fixing social media
Anyone who's frequented this blog knows I love having discussions, and can pontificate all day on subjects I'm interested in. I've actually been participating in online discussions, on and off, for decades. My earliest conversations were on dial up bulletin boards. Those were usually tightly focused discussions about technology and gaming. With the rise of … Continue reading Having productive internet conversations
Apparently, scientific papers have tended to fade away as they got older, with most papers only getting citations within the first decade or so after their publication. But a Physics arXiv entry reveals that, with digitization, that is changing. The results show a clear trend. “Our analysis indicates that, in 2013, 36% of citations were … Continue reading Digitization is increasing the accessibility of old scientific papers, and of history
Earlier today, John Zande clued me into an awesome science fiction novella by David Brin called 'Stones of Significance', which I highly recommend to anyone interested in AI, post-singularity fiction, and the nature of reality. By coincidence, the author, David Brin, tweeted this video earlier which, given the epic online fights that have happened recently, … Continue reading The Paraphrase Challenge: How to understand what your opponent is saying
I think I've mentioned before that I only recently came the realization that the scientific revolution was more a matter of increased communication than necessarily a breakthrough in method. Along the lines of this realization, I have a few thoughts about communication and its effects on human history. Humans are social animals. Communication between and among … Continue reading The ages of communication
If you haven't heard about it yet, the "Heartbleed" bug is a major security flaw that was discovered to have existed for the last couple of years on about half the servers on the web. via xkcd: Heartbleed Explanation. Most of the major services have applied patches. Today might be a good day to change your passwords.
SelfAwarePatterns 