Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, January 31, 2003

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Babies' mental delay tied to moms' vegan diet: "The breast-fed infants of two mothers who did not eat any animal products, including milk and eggs, developed brain abnormalities as a result of a vitamin-B12 deficiency, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported Thursday." [Reuters Health eLine]

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Parents tend to doubt girls' math, science ability: "Parents tend to believe that science is less compelling and more challenging for daughters than for sons, and even appear to use different language when discussing science with girls than with boys, according to new research. [...] These differences existed despite the fact that the girls and boys included in the study said they were equally interested in science and confident about their abilities, and both genders earned the same grades in the subject." [Reuters Health eLine]

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Women offered taste of tech: "A course to provide women with a basic understanding of computers is the latest scheme to try to lure more women to tech jobs." [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

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Text messages prove a life-saver: "A scheme using text messages to remind patients to take their medicine is proving a hit in South Africa." [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

Endless requirements for disk space -- Comment()
Ars Technica writes about the new hard drives: "250 GB ought to be enough for anybody."

There is always a need for more disk space. Consider, for example, recording all the sounds you hear in your life in digital format. A minute of mp3 audio requires about 1 MB of disk space. One day requires about 1.5 GB, and one year takes 550 GB. Finally, 70 years of audio requires 38 500 GB, or 38.5 TB of disk space. Thus there is a factor of 150 still missing in hard disk capacity. And if you want to record high-quality video, the factor is about 1000. If you estimate that the disk capacity will double each year (I doubt this), increasing the disk space by a factor of 1000 will take 10 years. And then you might find you have new needs -- browsing through the recordings of your parents, friends, ...

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Special Gel Helps Sharks Sense Cold: "It seems that sharks follow their noses to find prey, but not in a conventional way. A report published today in the journal Nature describes a remarkable gel found in the beasts' snouts that allows them to detect minute temperature changes. Sensitivity to such differences could help lead sharks to thermal fronts in the ocean that are teeming with quarry." [Scientific American]

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Pleasing Words: "Have you ever found yourself, rather than trying to write well, trying to please Microsoft Word's spell checker and grammar checker." [DonnaM]

Nanopublishing? -- Comment()
Megnut writes: 'A Guardian article, New biz on the blog, looks at the ways in which people (people being Nick, with whom I'm working) are using weblogs to create new "thin media" or "nanopublishing" sites. The key with these new ventures is cost: because it's low, revenue requirements remain in a reasonable realm (oy, alliteration overload, honestly that wasn't intentional). By which I mean, it's easy to get into the black and stay there.'

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Parasite's Plant Genes Could Be Achilles' Heel: "The sleeping sickness parasite kills nearly 66,000 people annually and silently infects almost 450,000 more, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. Current drug treatments are wanting because they work best in the disease's initial stages, when diagnosis is often difficult. New research published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may help identify alternate pharmaceutical strategies. The study results suggest that the parasite contains algae genes, and thus could succumb to drugs based on herbicides." [Scientific American]

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Robert L. Read has published a guide titled How to be a Programmer: "This long essay attempts to summarize the non-technical things that I wish someone had explained to me at the beginning of my career as a professional programmer. It is primarily concerned with social situations and team relationships that occur in typical software development. I try to cover what I consider the essential, often non-techncial, skills of the beginning, intermediate and advanced programmer." (via visakopu.net)