The article at The Independent shows how Homer Simpson came with the scintific discovery a decade before it was discovered.

Homer Simpson almost predicted the mass of the elementary particle, the Higgs boson, more than a decade before it was discovered, according to a new book on maths in The Simpsons.

In the episode “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace”, aired in 1998, Homer becomes an inventor and is shown in front of a blackboard with a complicated equation.

“That equation predicts the mass of the Higgs boson” Simon Singh said. “If you work it out, you get the mass of a Higgs boson that’s only a bit larger than the nano-mass of a Higgs boson actually is. It’s kind of amazing as Homer makes this prediction 14 years before it was discovered.”

 


Detroit

The NY Times Magazine got Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle, to "drive across America and write about it without talking to a single American":

I'd seen poverty before, of course, even incomprehensible poverty, as in the slums outside Maputo, in Mozambique. But I'd never seen anything like this. If what I had seen tonight - house after house after house abandoned, deserted, decaying as if there had been disaster - if this was poverty, then it must be a new kind poverty, maybe in the same way that the wealth that had amassed here in the 20th century had been a new kind of wealth. I had never really understood how a nation that so celebrated the individual could obliterate all differences the way this country did. In a system of mass production, the individual workers are replaceable and the products are identical. The identical cars are followed by identical gas stations, identical restaurants, identical motels and, as an extension of these, by identical TV screens, which hang everywhere in this country, broadcasting identical entertainment and identical dreams. Not even the Soviet Union at the height of its power had succeeded in creating such a unified, collective identity as the one Americans lived their lives within. When times got rough, a person could abandon one town in favor of another, and that new town would still represent the same thing.

Was that what home was here? Not the place, not the local, but the culture, the general?


UserpicThe Mad Man
Posted by Moxietype

George Lois created a number of iconic ad campaigns as well as dozens of fantastic Esquire covers.


Unknown Pleasures Joy Division Artwork 

Jen Christiansen tracked down for Scientific American the iconic image on the cover of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures. Designer Peter Saville found the image, a stacked graph of successive radio signals from pulsar CP 1919, in a 1977 astronomy encyclopedia but it actually originated in a 1970 Ph.D. thesis.

By now I had also combed through early discovery articles in scientific journals and every book anthology on pulsars I could get my hands on to learn more about early pulsar visualizations. The more I learned, the more this descriptor in the 1971 Ostriker caption began to feel significant; "computer-generated illustration." The charts from Bell at Mullard were output in real time, using analogue plotting tools. A transition in technology from analogue to digital seemed to have been taking place between the discovery of pulsars in 1967 to the work being conducting at Arecibo in 1968 through the early 1970's. A cohort of doctoral students from Cornell University seemed to be embracing that shift, working on the cutting edge of digital analysis and pulsar data output. One PhD thesis title from that group in particular caught my attention, "Radio Observations of the Pulse Profiles and Dispersion Measures of Twelve Pulsars," by Harold D. Craft, Jr. (September 1970).


Offbeat
UserpicKrakeling Amsterdam Paintings
Posted by Moxietype
 

Sadly, last year I couldn't find my favorite graffitis in Amsterdam. The construction wall where they were painted was removed.

Wall Paintings in Amsterdam

Krakeling Amsterdam Painting

 

Offbeat
UserpicMy Dead Rock Star
Posted by Sasha

NY Times former rock critic Mike Jahn reflects on the lifes of dead stars he used to know:

The number of dead rockers -- some of them good and talented people -- of my acquaintance stands at 44. A few are important music insiders. This year there are three additions who died in 2014. This year I’ve added expanded commentary and another yarn.

It's tempting to think that drugs were behind most of these abrupt departures. However, in many cases death came via largely unrelated medical problems -- heart attacks, strokes, or cancer, mainly. A number did die of overdoses of either drugs or alcohol, sometimes both. Others succumbed to crashes by aircraft, cars, and one by skiing into a tree. There was one fatal infection (I expected more). There also were murders and one suicide, possibly to avoid death by any of the aforementioned. 

If you're adding up and tracking deaths per band, we’re talking about three-fifths each of Canned Heat and MC5, half each of the Doors and Who, one-third of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Peter, Paul & Mary, and a quarter of the Beatles.

They were rockers who died, died. Here's the list, 2014 update.


Starling flocks, it turns out, are best described with equations of “critical transitions” — systems that are poised to tip, to be almost instantly and completely transformed, like metals becoming magnetized or liquid turning to gas. Each starling in a flock is connected to every other. When a flock turns in unison, it’s a phase transition.

Read the article at Wired


This news do not come as a surprise:

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's (BABA.N) shares fell more than 10 percent early on Thursday, wiping more than $25 billion of market value after third quarter revenue at the Chinese internet giant fell short of analysts' expectations.


Stanford's free online course for developing iOS apps has been updated for iOS 8 and Swift.

Prerequisites: C language and object-oriented programming experience exceeding Programming Abstractions level, and completion of Programming Paradigms.

Recommended: UNIX, graphics, databases.


Crowdsourced map of sledding locations in New York CIty. Enjoy.


This opinion explains my postion on removing the password reset and retrival mechanism from the system:

It is my personal opinion that all password reset mechanisms in widespread use today are insecure. If you have high security requirements, such as an encryption service would, do not let the user reset their password.

Most websites use an email loop to authenticate users who have forgotten their password. To do this, generate a random single-use token that is strongly tied to the account. Include it in a password reset link sent to the user's email address. When the user clicks a password reset link containing a valid token, prompt them for a new password. Be sure that the token is strongly tied to the user account so that an attacker can't use a token sent to his own email address to reset a different user's password.

The token must be set to expire in 15 minutes or after it is used, whichever comes first. It is also a good idea to expire any existing password tokens when the user logs in (they remembered their password) or requests another reset token. If a token doesn't expire, it can be forever used to break into the user's account. Email (SMTP) is a plain-text protocol, and there may be malicious routers on the internet recording email traffic. And, a user's email account (including the reset link) may be compromised long after their password has been changed. Making the token expire as soon as possible reduces the user's exposure to these attacks.

Attackers will be able to modify the tokens, so don't store the user account information or timeout information in them. They should be an unpredictable random binary blob used only to identify a record in a database table.

Never send the user a new password over email. Remember to pick a new random salt when the user resets their password. Don't re-use the one that was used to hash their old password.


Offbeat
UserpicGenetic Algorithm Walkers
Posted by Moxietype

Genetic Walker

This simulator evolves increasingly effective walking creatures through genetic algorithms. "The names are generated based on each creature's genome. Since the genetic algorithm tends to produce creatures with similar genes, two creatures with similar names will have similar traits.

Sometimes two creatures can have the same name by coincidence, as there are nearly infinite genome possibilities and limited numbers of letters in each name. Much like two people in real life with the same name, that doesn't mean they will behave the same."


On servers running PHP, visit any page, remove the trailing slash, and append any of the following query-strings:

?=PHPE9568F36-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42
?=PHPE9568F35-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42
?=PHPB8B5F2A0-3C92-11d3-A3A9-4C7B08C10000
?=PHPE9568F34-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42

If the vulnerability is present, requests made with these query-strings results in a variety of easter eggs and detailed PHP credits. When these easter eggs are visible, it means that expose_php is enabled on the server. And when expose_php is enabled, PHP-generated pages are sent with X-Powered-By response-headers that give PHP/version infos, such as “X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.7”. Knowing the version number of software makes it easier for bad guys to research and exploit known vulnerabilities. So let’s take a moment to “plug the leak” by disabling expose_php.

Disable expose_php via php.ini

The recommended solution is to set expose_php = Off


Offbeat
UserpicVote for The Best Cover of the Year
Posted by Moxietype

Cover Contest at Coverjunkie

Choose your 3 most favorite creative covers of 2014! Winner will be announced on Sunday, December 28th.


Stop UTIs
If you're suffering from a UTI or want a way to prevent them, lemon water can help.Battle Breath
Drinking lemon water can combat the bacteria in the mouth.

Weight Loss
There are a variety of theories as to why lemon water might cause weight loss (including feeling more full from the pectin contained within).

Freshen Your Skin
Thanks to all the vitamin C within lemons, your skin reaps the benefits of you drinking the fruit as well. According to FitDay, vitamin C assists in the production of collagen, so having more in your diet can prevent wrinkles from forming.

Pump Up The Immune System
There's a reason you're always drawn to oranges when you're sick — once again, the power of vitamin C at play.

Recover From A Workout
Lemon water provides the hydration needed.

Helps With Aches And Pains
Lemon water can help reduce uric acid in our joints, which is one of the main causes of inflammation, especially as related to arthritis.

Reduces Phlegm
It's a sad fact of our cold weather existence — phlegm happens, especially in the morning, but lemon juice can help.

Strengthens The Brain
Lemon may be known best for its vitamin C, but it also contains potassium, which helps with brain and nerve function.

Cleanses The Liver
As reported by LiverSupport.com, in Dr. Alexander F. Beddoe's Biological Ionization in Human Nutrition, he notes the liver can make more enzymes out of lemon juice than any other food.


Offbeat
UserpicRiverbed
Posted by Sasha

The central work in the first solo exhibition of Elafur Eliasson at the museum by the Danish-Icelandic artist is a huge, site specific project that reverses the relation between nature and art.

Riverbed


Install ffmeg2theora converter. Open terminal on Mac and select your file, (change video.mp4 to the name of your file to convert and Documents to the actual location)

ffmpeg2theora Documents/video.mp4

Maximum quality settings:

ffmpeg2theora Documents/video.mp4 -v 10 -a 10

Converted file is placed in the same folder as the .mp4 version.


“The best content is watched live or near-live,” said Alex Iskold, the founder and chief executive of GetGlue, a social TV application that lets users check in and inform their friends about the programs and movies they’re watching. People have become accustomed to chatting along to big television events while on Twitter and Facebook, so that social component “has to be real time,” he said.


Last week, Rdio introduced Vdio, a video version of its site that will let people stream movies and TV shows and tell friends what they are watching while they are watching it.


Read the article


Security
UserpicHow DKIM Signature Works
Posted by Sasha

The "DKIM-Signature" header field consists of a list of "tag=value" parts. Tags are short, usually only one or two letters. The most relevant ones are b for the actual digital signature of the contents (headers and body) of the mail message, bh for the body hash, d for the signing domain, and s for the selector. The default parameters for the authentication mechanism are to use SHA-256 as the cryptographic hash and RSA as the public key encryption scheme, and encode the encrypted hash using Base64.

Read more


Usage
download html5shiv (zip file)


Insert minified distribution shiv in <head> element (after or before your CSS):
<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<script src="dist/html5shiv.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

License
Dual licensed under the MIT or GPL Version 2 licenses