If critical thinking is your cup of tea then this podcast is just for you. The Skeptics Guide to the Universe is a free weekly podcast sponsored by the New England Skeptical Society that is dedicated to the examination of paranormal, fringe science, and controversial claims with science and reason. Scientific process and peer review are the watch words of the day on this site! Even better, once in a while the famous James Randi makes a guest appearance on the show.
Author: John
Can a Rootkit Be Certified for Vista?
You just know that this can’t be a good thing…
Forget what Microsoft says about Vista being the most secure version of Windows yet. More to the point, what do the hackers think of it. In a nutshell, they think it’s an improvement, but at the end of the day, it’s just like everything else they dissect—that is, breakable. "Not all bugs are being detected by Vista," pointed out famed hacker H.D. Moore. "Look at how a hacker gets access to the driver: Right now I’m working on Microsoft’s automated process to get Metasploit-certified. It [only] costs $500.
Boiling Hot Ice created in Nanoseconds by Sandia’s Z machine
Icy hot!
“The three phases of water as we know them — cold ice, room temperature liquid, and hot vapor — are actually only a small part of water’s repertory of states,” says Sandia researcher Daniel Dolan. “Compressing water customarily heats it. But under extreme compression, it is easier for dense water to enter its solid phase [ice] than maintain the more energetic liquid phase [water].”
In the Z experiment, the volume of water shrank abruptly and discontinuously, consistent with the formation of almost every known form of ice except the ordinary kind, which expands.
(One might wonder why this ice shrank instead of expanding, given the common experience of frozen water expanding to wreck garden hoses left out over winter. The answer is that only “ordinary” ice expands when water freezes. There are at least 11 other known forms of ice occurring at a variety of temperatures and pressures.)
Grand Canyon Skywalk Stirs Up The Dust
I saw on CNN this morning that the Hualapai Indian tribe(wiki) is getting ready to open what they hope will be their ticket out of reservation poverty. The Skywalk is a massive steel and glass horizontal arch that lets people walk out over the edge of the Grand Canyon and look down some 4,000 feet to the canyon floor. The tribe has bet the proverbial farm on this in hopes that the tourist draw from near by Las Vegas will give them a much needed boost to their economy. The fees from the Skywalk(wiki) attraction ($25US) and a tribal heritage center ($50US) will give the 2,200 members of the tribe a better standard of living.
However, this have been met with criticism from some environmentalists stating that the increased traffic will put an undo burden on the local environment. Also some members of the tribe have voiced concerns that near by burial sites will be damaged.
One mans cultural awareness center is another mans tourist trap. It all depends on what side of the dollar you’re on. I wish them the best of luck with this endeavor and I hope that the entire tribe and the other people involved will not over develop the land around Skywalk and degrade the attraction to the point that no one wants to see it any more.
Alice: Free, Easy, Interactive 3D Graphics for Kids
I was reading my eWeek today and say this cool article talking about a way to teach programming to kids. The idea is that you have this rich visual 3D world that you program the objects in it to move and interact. I took a look at it and discovered just that, it talks about methods, objects, and other tenants of modern programming . Man, I wished I would have had this when I was a kid. It would have made learning BASIC a lot simpler.
Once the students get comfortable with the interface they will be producing animated movies in no time at all. They can draw from a library rich in 3D models like dragons, faeries, spaceships, buildings. There is also a way to import models from 3D Studio Max using a third party utility. There is also a collaboration with the popular game ‘The Sims‘ to add a much more fluid look and feel to the character animations. I hope that when this happens Alice will stay free to anyone that wants to download it. My kids are both fans of the Sims and I know that this would at least give them a clue as to what computer programming is like. Even if you don’t have kids but would like to know more of how all this software stuff works you should download it and give it a try. It’s written in Java so it will work on both PC and Mac.
NASA Finds Sun-Climate Connection in Old Nile Records
This kind of thing is just flat out cool.
The researchers found some clear links between the sun’s activity and climate variations. The Nile water levels and aurora records had two somewhat regularly occurring variations in common – one with a period of about 88 years and the second with a period of about 200 years.
In a nutshell:
When solar activity is high, conditions are drier, and when it is low, conditions are wetter.