Check your Facebook Privacy Settings Early and Often!

The new Location feature has been turned on for you by default.  The default setting is limited to friends but you'll need to turn it off if you don't want it on at all.

Location lets any of your friends tell all the rest of your friends and family where you are, or even the whole world if you allow it.  Oh yeah, that's another brilliant idea.

Amazing View of 1999 Made in 1967

This video predicting 1999 from 1967 is amazing to watch.  It was made by Philco.  In case you didn't recognize him, the dad there is Wink Mortendale.

Here's more about the video including links to the whole thing.

(Thanks to Wayne for passing this on!).

Check your privacy settings early and often!

I log onto Yahoo this morning (yes, I still have an active Yahoo account and I only log in to keep it active), first to see this picture.  Then, second, I quickly notice that Yahoo has attempted to turn itself into sort of FaceYahoo (I guess that's what the picture is).  Finally, and most importantly, I quickly discover that I have a Yahoo profile, and they've decided to share my information with all of my “connections.”   Even better, spammers have decided to comment on my various profile entries.  I don't think they can see them because I don't actually have any connections yet, but apparently they can see that some of the particular items in my profile have changed.

So this is the latest brilliant assault on one's privacy by deciding the the thing I'd just forgotten to do myself was share as much information as possible with the world, and helping me out by doing it for me.

I'll be slightly fair.  All of the defaults that share anything are to Connections Only and there aren't any connections until I create them.  Okay, so they switched the power on but nothing happens until I actually plug something in.   I'd much rather the power be OFF, since that was my tacit assumption, until I turn it on.  I consider that a much safer and saner approach.  Maybe that's just me.

If you're a regular Yahoo user, you'll already probably know about this.  If you're an occasional or casual user, you'd better log in and carefully see what's going on.

So now we add Yahoo to the list to which this advice applies:

Check your privacy settings early and often!

Super fast spray paint artist

creates paintings in 39 seconds!  [Video] from Holy Kaw.   Wow!

HTML5 Local Storage

Building Persistent Sticky Notes with... by Andrew Burgess.  Impressive!

Learn Programming and Python

This free, PDF book looks very well done.  If you want to learn computer programming and/or the Python language (recommended for programming in general), check out Learn Python the Hard Way.

I actually set off to write something similar once upon a time and this work echoes my effort almost verbatim, as far as I went anyway.

The author has even created a proposed exercises wiki.

Even though I've only spent a few minutes looking at it, I recommend this book and the process it presents.

For many years I worried about a suitable programming language for starting off and learning to program.  It seemed like the cupboard was bare.   I've now concluded that Python fills that void quite handsomely.  I'm excited to hear that Georgia Tech and other schools are now switching to Python for their intro courses.

The Windows Shortcut Vulnerability

Be sure to update Windows XP to SP3.  If you haven't ever done this, now is the time.  The Windows shortcut vulnerability gives malware a wide open door to attack Windows systems.

Microsoft Security Advisory (2286198)

Trend Micro

Scientists Watch an Atom’s Electrons Moving in Real Time For the First Time Ever

From LBNL:  For the First Time Ever, Scientists Watch an Atom’s Electrons Moving in Real Time.

An international team of scientists led by groups from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching, Germany, and from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley has used ultrashort flashes of laser light to directly observe the movement of an atom’s outer electrons for the first time.

“With a simple system of krypton atoms, we demonstrated, for the first time, that we can measure transient absorption dynamics with attosecond pulses,” says Stephen Leone of Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division, who is also a professor of chemistry and physics at UC Berkeley. “This revealed details of a type of electronic motion – coherent superposition – that can control properties in many systems.”

MacPaint

Many of you will remember MacPaint as being one of the applications bundled with the first Macintosh computers.  Apple has made the source code available via the Computer History Museum.   It was written in beautiful Pascal (the wonderful language that I loved!) by Bill Atkinson.

Enjoy!

(If you want to read more Macintosh history and anecdotes, check out Folklore.org by Andy Herzfeld).

The Big Bang One More Time

I heard the question:  “What came before the Big Bang?  What exploded?”

Here's an attempt at a brief explanation.

Einstein's general relativity explains gravity in terms of geometry.  Instead of a force, objects move they way they move because mass changes the geometry of spacetime.

Taking the earth as an analogy, we understand the geometry of a ball.  By studying the geometry of the surface of the earth we can easily conclude that we live on a sphere.  Along with that comes the inescapable conclusion that the earth has a center.  We can't go to the center of the earth, but we know its there.

When we we try to determine the geometry of the universe, we find that it's space-time  “shape” implies a center, but one that is in the past.  At this center in the past, the scale of space goes to zero.

We can also use the earth as a different analogy.  If people set out from the equator in the Americas, in Europe and Asia, all travelling north, they will arrive at the north pole.  It doesn't make sense to ask what is beyond the north pole, if you are travelling north on the surface of the earth.

In the same way, the question of what comes before the big bang doesn't make sense in light of the implied geometry of the universe.

There's not an explosion in the they way most people think of.   If you go back in time in the above model, space is smaller and densities are higher.   The temperature and energy density are necessarily higher and, mathematically, go to infinity at the “center.”

That high-temperature past serves a useful purpose for physicists.  It provides another way to answer questions about high energy states of matter and its structure in addition to the large accelerators we've built.

From the point of view of creation, there's nothing that says God couldn't create a full-grown universe as described here just like he created full-grown people.

Perpetual Calendar

I had a subscription to Popular Science around 1970 for a few years and, I think, as part of that had this little perpetual calendar on a card that I carried in my wallet for decades.  It was only recently that I removed it and today I found a photocopy I'd made of it.

Here's the same calendar as part of an on-line auction.  It's good through 2059.

Facebook Friend Suggestions

Arg!  Facebook strikes again, i.e., it's just another day.  I thought I was accepting friend requests when, in fact, I  was clicking on friend suggestions and ended up sending out  friend requests.

It's not a huge deal since they were people I know.  My usual practice is to just receive requests.  Then, if they are from folks I know, I'll usually accept them.  However, I rarely send them out.

The moral is, always pay attention to the labels.  Yes, they are clearly marked, actually.

Jupiter's South Equatorial Belt is Gone!

I was looking at some of the amazing images on Brian Combs' web site and noticed that Jupiter's South Equatorial Belt is gone!  The article in Sky and Telescope mentions that this has happened recently, to a lesser degree.   I know that Jupiter's clouds change over the years, but didn't remember an equatorial belt completely disappearing.

One nice side effect is that the Great Red Spot is now easier to see, maybe for the first time since the 70s (when it was very red).

Article at Astronomy.com

Image linked to at Sky and Telescope

Froyo's Color Trackball LED

Heh, when I received Google Voice mail yesterday, my track ball flashed green!  That's the first time I've ever seen it any color other than white.  That's another small but neat feature of Froyo.

Blogs to Facebook (Update)

Removing and re-adding the import seems to have fixed it.  What a pain.

Let's see if this one appears.

(Update) Yep, it worked.  I suspect they wanted me to click the policy/agreement acceptance check box and click the Confirm button again, but I don't recall ever receiving a request to do that.  It just quit.  Ah, well.

Blog Gateway to Facebook

It seems that my blog posts are not being picked up by Facebook again.  I wonder why.  Let's see if this one works.  Maybe it eschews the shortened links I include sometimes.

Stellarium

Amazing starry sky, planetarium in your computer software!

It seems I've never mentioned Stellariium here.  This free, open source software is amazing!  It's as nice, and as nice looking, as any planetarium program I've tried.

TWiT Cottage Studio Rewired

Here's a neat time-lapse video of the TWiT cottage studio being rewired.

SSH in Chrome!

[VIDEO]  http://goo.gl/aBIu

Those Annoying Horns

Didn't we have these horns, years ago in high school, at football games and such?  It seems like they were sort of red and plastic.  Of course we didn't suffer everyone blowing them incessantly.