technology

What is the best source for accurate information?

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The TL;DR; (Too Long; Didn’t Read) answer for the question in the subject line is that Wikipedia is. When you have vast swathes of the human population interacting on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter then it tends to naturally devolve into bubbles. For example those that support Hillary will be sufficiently motivated … Read more

Protecting the privacy of cows

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This is not a serious posting, and I am not making any specific point. Instead it is something funny that caught my eye. Automated software solutions can at times results in unintended consequences and this is one such example, Google street view software takes individual privacy seriously (quick rightly) and so it will automatically blur out … Read more

“The Great Kersten Blunder”

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Phil Plait writes about the “The Great Kersten Blunder”, the story of a probe to Venus that was lost because a programmer made a stupid mistake. OK, first the actual story. The great Kersten Blunder is about the error made by Kersten (programmer) on the Vigor space probe’s converting program. He made an error in the … Read more

Breakthrough Starshot – Can we really get to Alpha Centauri in just 20 years?

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So the news is that a very ambitious interstellar space mission to get to Alpha Centauri in just 20 years has been proposed and is being jointly promoted by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Professor Stephen Hawking, and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. It sounded so far fetched that upon first hearing it I had to check the calendar and verify it … Read more

Practical Notes: Using Google to find out what is really true?

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Today I’ll try something slightly different and will instead offer a few notes on how to leverage Google to find stuff out. I should however start with one very important observation, Google search is just a tool, and like any other tool it is perhaps akin to a piece of rope that you can either climb with … Read more