November Writing

Alun Uncategorized No Comments ,

Over at the Extel­li­gence Exper­i­ment I’ve put up some plans for writ­ing a short book in Novem­ber. The aim won’t be to get some­thing per­fect done, but a work­able draft I can hack around. The daft part of the pro­ject is I plan to upload sec­tions as I go along, so if it goes wrong then it will go wrong repeatedly and embar­rass­ingly through­out November.

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Novem­ber Writ­ing
I’ve recently had more test res­ults back fol­low­ing an oper­a­tion and found out that the thing that’s kept me busy all sum­mer wasn’t can­cer, merely some­thing that could eas­ily be mis­taken for …

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More ways to date a Neanderthal?

Alun Uncategorized 2 Comments ,

This is use­ful inform­a­tion for archae­olo­gists. Car­bon Dat­ing would be fant­astic if the pro­duc­tion of Carbon-13 were con­stant. It’s not. This means that archae­olo­gists need samples of known date to cal­ib­rate their car­bon dates. That’s pos­sible when you have things like a his­tor­ical record to match mater­ial against, but not so easy when you have no con­scious record­ing of a date.

The usual answer has been to use trees. You can date tree samples from the pat­tern of yearly growth. The pat­tern of thick and thin growth rings acts a bit like a fin­ger­print for earlier peri­ods which means you know the date of a sample to a year. You then car­bon date the sample to cal­ib­rate your car­bon dates. The prob­lem is tree-ring data only goes back to the latest parts of of the Upper Palaeolithic.

This new data could push dat­ing back as far as the Middle Palaeo­lithic and allow the dat­ing of later Neander­thal material.

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Car­bon Dat­ing Gets a Reset: Sci­entific Amer­ican
Cli­mate records from a Japan­ese lake are provid­ing a more accur­ate timeline for dat­ing objects as far back as 50,000 years

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Security Two-Step

Alun Uncategorized 4 Comments ,

I’ve finally got round to set­ting up two-step veri­fic­a­tion for my Google account. I should have done it sooner after read­ing this account of hack­ing http://www.emptyage.com/post/28679875595/yes-i-was-hacked-hard but it’s taken a while because it can be a pain.

The way it works is by com­bin­ing a pass­word with a veri­fic­a­tion code sent by a text mes­sage to con­firm any major changes to your account. By itself it’s just the slight extra hassle of keep­ing your phone with you when you make changes, like adding access for a new program.

In real­ity you can’t use veri­fic­a­tion codes with a lot of pro­grams, so you also need to gen­er­ate a lot of one-shot pass­words for each applic­a­tion. My mail pro­grams on my phone and my desktop both use dif­fer­ent pass­words to my account pass­word. If I give any­thing else access like laptop or tab­let, that will need a new one-shot pass­word too. If I try to get this pass­word for my laptop while using my laptop browser for the first time, then that will need text veri­fic­a­tion to get into my account.

It is a hassle.

It’s even more hassle because I’m for­get­ful. There’s a good chance I could for­get where my phone is. Or it could break or get stolen. So I also have to get some more access codes to take account for that, print them off and store them some­where. Not any­where near a device, in case they’re stolen with the device, but access­ible enough that I can get them when I need them.

It is a pain, but even if you keep your pass­word secure you can’t be sure every­one else will keep your pass­word secure. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/ If you can get into your own account with no effort, how much effort is it going to take any­one else? You can decide for your­self if two-step veri­fic­a­tion is neces­sary for you by work­ing out how much you might lose if your Google account were hacked.

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Tentacles of Doom

Alun Uncategorized 1 Comment ,

Venus Fly Traps aren’t the only plants with fast moves when it comes to catch­ing prey. Ger­man sci­ent­ists have dis­covered a Sun­dew with tentacles that cata­pult insects into its hungry leaves. You can read the paper free, or down­load more video at http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0045735

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