Tschew's centre of mass frame (without imported items)

An illustration depicting the state of affairs in our current understanding o...

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 19:11:35 GMT

An illustration depicting the state of affairs in our current understanding of particle physics. Time to explore the exotic lands!

A zoom from the Himalayas to the microwave background and back compiled by th...

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:30:00 GMT

A zoom from the Himalayas to the microwave background and back compiled by the American Museum of Natural History from current data. It shows our place in the part of the universe we can see and the many galaxies in the neighbourhood that have been mapped. (note: the black cones are not due to some weird geometry, we simply haven't looked that way yet.)

Thanks to http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2009/12/from-distance.html for the tip.

(Image)

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:36:22 GMT

A selection of mathematics quotes

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:12:56 GMT

thinkexist.com offers a very comprehensive collection of quotes on just about any topic imaginable. The quotes on Mathematics are especially amusing. My current favourite is by F. Klein: "Everyone knows what a curve is, until he has studied enough mathematics to become confused through the countless number of possible exceptions." Well, back to unraveling the mysteries of the universe ;)

Oops, that was a typo. It's operating system and thunderbird version dependen...

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:58:51 GMT

[Reposted from tschew]

Oops, that was a typo. It's operating system and thunderbird version dependent actually. (but not distribution dependent)

Thunderbird thread view trick

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 07:16:01 GMT

As many others I subscribe to a substantial number of mailing lists and often follow mail threads with hundreds of messages. The standard Thunderbird thread view has the problem that threads with new messages can be hidden "400 mails down", making one miss them. By using Tools->Options->Advanced->Config Editor and then changing the value of mailnews.thread_pane_column_unthreads to FALSE, threads with new messages are resorted by date and hence appear at the front of the list of messages. Very useful.

A high resolution arrangement of a 360° view of the night sky, pasted togethe...

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:27:10 GMT

A high resolution arrangement of a 360° view of the night sky, pasted together from hundreds of photographs made at different times. The mapping distorts the sizes at the top and bottom (as on a world map) The author is a photographer called Brunier. More details on the image here: http://eso.org/gallery/v/ESOPIA/Galaxies/phot-32a-09-fullres.tif.html

A higher resolution 4000x2000 version here.

An interactive, very high-resolution version here. (coral cache, still slow)

Another talk by Hans Rosling shows how our mindset about the "developing" wor...

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:14:25 GMT

Another talk by Hans Rosling shows how our mindset about the "developing" world is stuck in the past.

Belege, Hintergründe, Erklärungen und "Beweise" zu den einzelnen Szenen gibt es auf:

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:13:57 GMT

Belege, Hintergründe, Erklärungen und "Beweise" zu den einzelnen Szenen gibt es auf:

http://www.RetteDeineFreiheit.de

Neuigkeiten: http://RetteDeineFreiheit.wordpress.com

It's really easy to identify you from "anonymized" data. Here's how.

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:17:26 GMT

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/09/your-secrets-live-online-in-databases-of-ruin.ars

Storing all of our culture with perpetual access for everyone.

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 23:10:49 GMT

To store 720p AND 1080p copies of every movie and tv-show listed on IMDB would probably take something like 10 PB. That would likely cover dubbed soundtracks and subtitles as well.

And at Sun's prices, that'd be about 10 million dollars for a single copy (not including data center costs) stored in 21 racks.

Add in all the books ever written, music and news papers published, what are we looking at? 50 PB for a full copy? Obviously you'd need redundant storage placed on various continents, and you'd expect to replace the hardware every once in a while, but what is our entire cultural history worth to us as a civilization? A billion dollars a year? Two? Keep in mind, it shouldn't just be the US or the EU funding this, it should be everyone.

Make it a requirement for companies that if they want copyrights on their works, they have to submit it unencumbered to the storage facility. That way there can be no excuses from the companies, that they don't have $work in production any more, as it'd be easy to sell access to a particular work. And if they can't submit it for whatever reason? Copyright expires on that particular work. That'd certainly get their asses in gear to get their entire back catalogue digitized.

via MartinShou @ slashdot
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1360387&cid=29343037

Linux vulnerable to null pointer dereference exploits.

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 13:16:02 GMT

And yet another reminder that you should always check pointers for NULL before dereferencing them. Also, did you know that gcc disables "unnecessary" null pointer checks with -O2? Use -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks to prevent this from happening. To quote man gcc: "The compiler assumes that dereferencing a null pointer would have halted the program. If a pointer is checked after it has already been dereferenced, it cannot be null. In some environments, this assumption is not true, and programs can safely dereference null pointers." It is sometimes possible to have 0x00000000 mapped to userspace (in this case by way of a kernel module and a setuid pulseaudio), thus preventing the segmentation fault that would usually occur when remapping 0x00000000 to your own code.

More details here (in German, but very informative): http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Root-Exploit-fuer-Linux-Kernel-veroeffentlicht--/meldung/142171 and here for the exploit itself: http://lists.grok.org.uk/pipermail/full-disclosure/2009-July/069714.html and more explanation here: http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=6820

http://threatpost.com/blogs/researcher-uses-new-linux-kernel-flaw-bypass-selinux-other-protections

"Hacker spaces" are giving geek tinkerers a place to gather, create and colla...

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 14:13:34 GMT

"Hacker spaces" are giving geek tinkerers a place to gather, create and collaborate

[Reposted from syn2cat]

Intellectual property donor card :)

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:22:14 GMT

http://fffff.at/fuckflickr/pd_donor/

L.A.S.E.R. Tag Linux port

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 19:25:18 GMT

syn2cat is proud to present the linux version of the L.A.S.E.R. Tag software by Teodore Watson (http://www.muonics.net) and Zachary Lieberman (http://www.thesystemis.com/).

The software can be downloaded on the syn2cat wiki https://www.hackerspace.lu/wiki/Lasertag_linux .

[Reposted from grl-lu]

via http://www.martin-perscheid.de/content/aktuelles.html

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:41:19 GMT

via http://www.martin-perscheid.de/content/aktuelles.html

[Reposted from sternchen-b via codec]

government sponsored fraud

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 10:19:52 GMT

Bloody hell: Two psychics have been given government funding to teach people how to "communicate with the dead". http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_3256361.html

Twouble with Twitters

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:37:45 GMT

Twouble with Twitters

[Reposted from silsha]

Hide from your own fear for it may destroy you.

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:19:55 GMT

[Reposted from grl-lu]

Hide from your own fear for it may destroy you.