Category Archives: Technology, science, and math

I knew that the Poincare Conjecture had to be in the news recently because I was getting a bunch of search engine referrals for it, and here it is: Via Slashdot, a Reuters story that doesn’t really tell us anything … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Later this week, the Internet moves to a higher age bracket. Stephen Crocker and Vinton Cerf were among the graduate students who joined UCLA professor Len Kleinrock in an engineering lab on Sept. 2, 1969, as bits of meaningless test … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Gary Farber points to this Wired article about something called “Vedic math” – what that is, they never really tell us – which has some practical application if you’re interested in quickly solving some arithmetic problems. Since the example given … Continue reading → Continue reading →

The dreaded fire ant may have finally met its match. B lamed for everything from starting fires to ravaging crops, delivering painful multiple bites and decimating wildlife, imported red fire ants — Solenopsis invicta — are the ants from hell. … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I’m sure you’ve seen the story of Florida’s latest voting woes by now. A computer crash erased detailed records from Miami-Dade County’s first widespread use of touchscreen voting machines, raising again the specter of elections troubles in Florida, where the … Continue reading → Continue reading →

The MIT Technology Review Blog points to these two discussions of electronic voting by David Pogue that are worth reading. In the second piece, he prints an email from my buddy Dan Wallach that ought to curl a few hairs … Continue reading → Continue reading →

This is pretty cool: digital video recorders in police cars. The systems cost from $7,000 to $10,000 per car, about the same as traditional analog video systems. With analog, however, there’s the added expense of storing hundreds or thousands of … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Too bad I can’t make it to this. All Your Texts Are Belong To Us – Hacking Literature With Perl In 1996, Don Foster correctly identified Joe Klein as the author of the bestselling political novel “Primary Colors,” bringing instant … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Holy cow. Computer trade show Comdex, once the biggest event on the tech calendar, has been canceled this year, a victim of the growing interest in shows emphasizing consumer electronics and specialist IT gear. Eric Faurot, vice president of Comdex … Continue reading → Continue reading →

And here we have the dark side of Wi-Fi everywhere: It’s damn tough to monetize. Small companies, some publicly traded, are burning cash trying to turn WiFi into viable business. Some have already shut down. Faster than you can say … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Fed up with denial-of-service attacks? Well, how about fighting fire with fire? Symbiot Security, based in Austin, says its new Intelligent Security Infrastructure Management Systems not only defends networks but lets them fight back, too. Symbiot says the product is … Continue reading → Continue reading →

This was bound to happen sooner or later. The first ever computer virus spread by mobile phones has been sent to anti-virus firms. No infections have been reported and the worm is harmless but it is proof that mobiles are … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Everywhere I look I’m seeing more and more articles about Wi-Fi and the places it’s popping up. Here’s one about Richard MacKinnon, the guru of free wireless Internet access in Austin. One thing that this article doesn’t really touch on … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Well, we may not get Wi-Fi parks, but according to Dwight Silverman, the city of Houston is looking at Wi-Fi everywhere. While it’s still at the “what if we did this” stage, the plan under consideration borrows from a successful … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Via Tom Kirkland, a team at the University of Texas is working on a prototype computer chip that can change its function according to the task at hand and in doing so achieve incredible speed. If the chip works as … Continue reading → Continue reading →

The History Channel has run and will run again a documentary called Breaking Vegas, based on a book called Bringing Down the House about a group of MIT students who learned card-counting techniques and won a ton of money at … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Kevin Drum and Nick Confessore discuss paper receipts for electronic voting machines. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: I think that the various e-voting machines should be the interface, and the paper receipts should be the actual … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Still fighting with your VCR? Get ready to fall even farther behind on the technology curve. The DVD stands out as one of the most rapidly adopted consumer technologies ever, but in the electronics industry it’s akin to an aging … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Via Seeing the Forest comes this analysis of the cost of stealing an election. It doesn’t go into any technical details, but it does show that it wouldn’t take that much of an investment to have a sizeable impact. Check … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I’ll second Ginger‘s recommendation of this Chron article on spyware. There’s some nasty stuff out there, and you probably don’t know about it – if you are seeing messages popping up on your screen for no apparent reason, it’s almost … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Anyone remember DotComGuy? Would you believe he’s been DotComGuy for five years now? But not for much longer. Mitch Maddox, who legally changed his name to DotComGuy in 1999 and got lots of media attention because of a yearlong Internet … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I skip over the “BC” comic strip in the Chron, as it ceased being funny to me awhile back. (It really was pretty damn funny before it became so didactic. Find an old collection from the 60s or early 70s … Continue reading → Continue reading →

All right, enough with all this gay marriage stuff. Let’s look at something of real importance. Princeton physicist Paul Chaikin’s passion for M&M candies was so well known that his students played a sweet practical joke on him by leaving … Continue reading → Continue reading →

This is downright cool – it’s a project to bring Internet access to remote locations by means of solar power, wireless access points, and data transmissions via buses or motorcycles. Here’s a press release from one of their projects in … Continue reading → Continue reading →

As a dog owner and daddy-to-be, this sounds like good news. It’s been accepted dogma for years that house pets were not good for children with asthma and allergies. But a newer theory, strengthened by the latest study, suggests otherwise. … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I’m a big fan of MIT’s Technology Review magazine, and I was thrilled to see in this month’s issue that they have a blog. Turns out they’ve been writing it since October, so either I’ve missed previous announcements or they’ve … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Linkmeister points to a couple of articles about the flu, both of the 1918 and modern varieties. The first article, about how the deadly Spanish influenza pandemic took hold in humans, does not specifically mention if it used samples of … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Hold on to your hats, everyone. Experts are telling us that spam may have a bad effect on business and stuff. The exponential growth of unsolicited junk e-mail — spam — is shaking consumer confidence in the Internet and may … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I don’t quite get this technology you hate but can’t live without thing. An annual Massachusetts Institute of Technology survey, known as the Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, found that among adults asked what invention they hate most but can’t live without, … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Mark Kleiman recently asked about the status of the Poincare conjecture, which a Russian mathematician named Perelman claims to have solved. This Boston Globe article, sent to me by my buddy Matt, would seem to indicate that Perelman’s work is … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Larry points to this article in which Jim Louderback predicts the Tech Flops of the Future. I’ve got a simple rule I apply to suss out success for a new product (modestly, I call it Louderback’s Rule). It states that … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Michael emailed me a link to this article, which was also noted by Teresa, about a breakthrough in understanding an obscure work by Archimedes in the field of combinatorics. Both the NYT article and Teresa’s observations are interesting, though I … Continue reading → Continue reading →

For the math geeks in my audience (and you know who you are), there’s some followup to this post about Elin Oxenheilm and her claimed solution to the sixteenth Hilbert problem. Gustav Holmberg has several posts (here, here, here, and … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I love stories about big prime numbers. More than 200,000 computers spent years looking for the largest known prime number. It turned up on Michigan State University graduate student Michael Shafer’s off-the-shelf PC. “It was just a matter of time,” … Continue reading → Continue reading →