lock picking

Lock picking is cool, but a brute force safe cracking robot that can crack a “manipulation proof” lock in a few hours, is way cooler!

Ben Goldacre on the Placebo Effect

Dr. Ben Goldacre, who does the column Bad Science in the UK paper The Guardian, has a stand-up about "science and it will be funny"

Fake Steve Jobs to Religious Right

I’m too dumb not to post this. Hate-spewing “Christians” need to listen up

"It’s bad enough that you’re hateful bigots. But to dress up your hate and bigotry as an expression of Christianity? That, my friends, is pure evil. If you want to go around hating people, fine. Go for it. It’s stupid, and pointless, but whatever. Go hate people. Just don’t go around saying Jesus told you to do it."

How Facebook Ships Code

yeeguy has an interesting writeup of how facebook writes and deploys code. Wish I had written this up at some of the large companies I had worked for....

"surprise at lack of QA or automated unit tests — “most engineers are capable of writing bug-free code. it’s just that they don’t have an incentive to do so at most companies. when there’s a QA department, it’s easy to just throw it over to them to find the errors.” [EDIT: please note that this was subjective opinion, I chose to include it in this post because of the stark contrast that this draws with standard development practice at other companies]"

Space Shuttle Porn

As a nod to all the folks who love anything big that makes a lot of noise...

"Photographic documentation of a Space Shuttle launch plays a critical role in the engineering analysis and evaluation process that takes place during each and every mission. Motion and Still images enable Shuttle engineers to visually identify off-nominal events and conditions requiring corrective action to ensure mission safety and success. This imagery also provides highly inspirational and educational insight to those outside the NASA family. This compilation of film and video presents the best of the best ground-based Shuttle motion imagery from STS-114, STS-117, and STS-124 missions. Rendered in the highest definition possible, this production is a tribute to the dozens of men and women of the Shuttle imaging team and the 30yrs of achievement of the Space Shuttle Program."

and on the "cool space" related topics, check out this guys' photo of a partial eclipse or the moon and the ISS.

"Mr. Privacy" Is an Alternative to Facebook

Christer Mims posts about a social networking app called "socialbar". (abstract) that works from a firefox plugin. (see 1min video demo)

Choice quote: "by leveraging federated systems, no one is left out of the social web" - wrldsuksgo2mars

(exactly what I hate most about facebook)