Archive for 2006
Wednesday, December 6th, 2006
Seeing as I am a computer science major I could not help but laugh and share this with you. I managed to find this little story of what would happen if a electrical engineer and a computer scientist ended up in the medieval times, and the king asked them for advice. Here is the link.
If you don’t know much about computer science then you probably won’t understand the story, but the world of computers can get very complicated at times. But i’ll vouch for it and say it gets complicated for good reason, the more complicated the programming of things is, the more user friendly the end product… of course, simple is best sometimes… like in the case of this poor scientist, whose fate I would not wan’t. Enjoy the story!
Friday, December 1st, 2006
These news are fresh out of the oven and I’m sure all of you have already heard of it, it’s simply outrageous. It turns out that everybody traveling into the United States has been subject (and of course this will continue on) to a special kind of profiling. Everyone coming into America by plane is being rated on how likely they are to be terrorists.
The Automated Targetting System is a score generated by a computer that rates you (well, your terrorists self), on how dangerous you are, based on… How you paid for your plane ticket, what country you are coming from, previous flights, and even the food you ate on the plane. Now how bad can it get, how can we be considered terrorists for eating a ceirtain kind of food on a plane?
This shouldn’t only worry people and Civil Liberties activists, it should worry the whole travel industry as a whole. After all “America’s share of the growing worldwide travel market dropped by 36 percent between 1992 and 2005″ [source] already, and it will keep declining. After all, who wants to travel to a country where they will be unfairly labeled as terrorists (by a computer algorithm) because of some silly things?
For further reading check out Yahoo!
Thursday, November 30th, 2006
Any age you may be, you can’t forget one important fact in life. Sleep is important, no matter how old you are. Some young adults that attend college seem to forget this very often it almost scares me. I have had people comment to me that becuase they were studying for an insignificant quiz, they stayed up until 4-5am (and the quiz was at 8am). Leaving them with what, 1 hour of sleep?
When fellow students tell me proudly that they have stayed up all night studying, I feel sorry for them. Although they have no idea why they are subject to pity, the reason is very clear. Missing sleep hours is definetly worse than not reviewing for the test. The facts are plain and simple, according to The National Sleep Research Project “Seventeen hours of sustained wakefulness leads to a decrease in performance equivalent to a blood alcohol-level of 0.05%”, although 0.05% might not be that much, these students are giving up one disadvantage (not studying properly) for another one, taking the test while a little drunk, and still not studying properly (you are supposed to study much earlier than one night before a test after all). Not to mention that even if you had 6 hours of sleep and you may feel ok, it still might not be enough for your best performance level, since even proper adults (24+) need a recommended 8 hours of sleep per day.
Nowadays, very few people manage to get the right amount of sleep. Every single one has their own excuses. Too much work, too many responsabilities, too much of everything. Well, maybe if these people started getting a little more sleep they would be able to get over everything they have to do quicker, instead of daydreaming in their job or taking naps at random times in the day. Use your time efficiently, get some sleep.
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006
I came accross this interesting article on “How mirrors can light up the world“. This is a worthy read on a energy generating technique that hopefully will be popularized soon, as it is environmentally friendly and cheap and has the potential to provide the whole world with energy.
This technique is simple and is being used in the Mojave dessert in California. It involves placing huge mirrors in the dessert (how simple is that?) in order to exploit all the solar energy we get everyday. It can also run at night by the hot water accomulated at the plants during day time.
I also found it quite amusing that supposedly, African countries that have always had the desert messing up their land, are now “blessed with hot, sunny deserts”. If any native from those countries from a thousand years back read this, they would surely die from laughter in disbelief that their unfertile land is a blessing. How things change, eh?
Monday, November 27th, 2006
Today I’m blogging about a different kind of cool site. I’ve stopped by StopIE and have reminded myself about how important this matter is. If you are still using Internet Explorer, then read up and hopefully you change your mind after this post!
The main reason you should switch today, is that Internet Explorer is prone to viruses. It automatically downloads and installs viruses if you are accessing the wrong kind of site. In firefox you are alerted before something happens, and given a choice whether to continue or not. Of course if you decide to continue, you can only blame yourself.
The reason above is the main reason you should switch, but for webmasters like me there is something that annoys me much more. Internet Explorer renders pages differently than other browsers. So everytime I am designing something I have to make sure it works for both, Internet Explorer and the rest of the browsers. This gets annoying very quickly and it is Internet Explorer that has weak code interpretations, and does not seem to follow today’s standards. Things look uglier in IE too.
There are more reasons, and i recommend you visit the website and read up more. There are many free alternatives to IE, and even though they claim their next release will be better, don’t wait, do yourself and me a favor today.
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