Swine flu, nuclear war, changing climate, VEI-8 level eruption of a supervolcano and LHC-generated mini black holes are not the only things which threaten the existence of humanity.

An interesting paper by Mr. Jason G. Matheny, called “Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction” (last draft) notes that there is so far no analysis done of the cost-effectiveness of reducing human extinction risks. He provides a method of analyzing the cost-effectiveness of protecting against a mass-scale catastrophic event, using as an example case the threat of an asteroid impact.
(more…)

My friend came to me about a great new idea he had. I shall paraphrase our discussion:

-”Yo. Why is reality so hard?”, he asked.
-”I’ve no idea. Why is reality so hard?”, I replied.
-”It’s because there’s too many things to keep track of. I have a solution: micro-feng shui.”
-”Micro-feng shui? But isn’t micro less?”
-”Everything micro is good. For example: microchips. Very good.”
-”OK, so how does it work?”
-”Step 1: reduce spatial complexity. From now on, view the world as a planar space and ignore all height differences. That’s 30% less complexity. Then, step 2: happiness.”

Considering what’s published nowadays in various self-help books, packaging this idea into a 400-page book would probably reach New York Times bestseller list very fast. Not to mention the creation of some sort of a pseudo-religious movement, enabling my friend to be showered in non-Zimbabwean paper currency.

The server was updated, hopefully everything works now. This is also a kind of test post, so please ignore it…

Gianfranco writes:

I send you an adaption of the zenburn colour scheme for SciTE v. 1.78. To install it on a Windows machine, just copy the *.properties files into the SciTE installation folder.

(more…)

Iran is currently undergoing riots and violent demonstrations as a result of irregularities in the recent presidential vote. Thus Iran is all over the news, in good and in bad.

Recently Nokia-Siemens Networks got some (unwanted?) publicity from many sources after having sold “network snooping equipment” to Iran.

The sad thing is that while people are so pumped up by evil ayatollahs oppressing the people of Iran, they mistakenly think that spying on the citizens is something so terrible that it can only happen in some sort of backwater evil clerical dictatorship, and that such snooping is not even possible to do elsewhere.

That is false. This kind of functionality exists today in basically ALL GSM networks, in ALL countries you can think of. Yes, this means also your country.

(more…)

Abchernin has sent a step-by-step guide how to enable Zenburn colors into EasyEclipse for Python v1.3.1 – it should work with any Eclipse+pydev combination.
(more…)

We can soon start to detect potentially life-bearing planets, improving our searching for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Check this out, it’s good news.

An interesting article in the New York Times, about what we try to signal with our consumption habits, and how no-one really cares:

The grand edifice of brand-name consumerism rests on the narcissistic fantasy that everyone else cares about what we buy. (It’s no accident that narcissistic teenagers are the most brand-obsessed consumers.) But who else even notices? Can you remember what your partner or your best friend was wearing the day before yesterday? Or what kind of watch your boss has?

Wikipedia has a nice picture of the mechanism behind the evolution of Pig Flu, the so-called antigenic shift.

I needed DIMACS-format output from STP, so I hacked together a patch for it.

It works only against the SVN version of STP, but is trivial (although not automatic) to patch the latest non-SVN version also. To patch, cd to the STP folder, then use something like patch -R -p1 < stp_dimacs.patch

Then, use the "-o" switch to dump a DIMACS file to the current folder. Next, fire up your favorite SAT solver and profit...

Update: It seems the toDimacs call can create strange outputs. Be aware of bugs!