Chad's News

This year’s Ig Nobel prizes were awarded on September 30^th. Once again it was a fairly weak field, but here are some of the better ones (see the linked article for the full list):

• Management Prize: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random. [Related: The Peter Principle]
• Peace Prize: Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.
• Medicine Prize: Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Ilja van Beest of Tilburg University, The Netherlands, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride.

Link: http://improbable.com/…
(via Slashdot)

While money can’t buy happiness, lack of money can definitely cause unhappiness. Researchers Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman have determined that the cutoff point above which more money doesn’t matter for day-to-day happiness is a salary of $75,000 per year.

Link: http://blogs.wsj.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

You don’t have to be a hard-core geek to know how some websites use cookies to identify your computer and track your internet browsing habits. But it’s just too easy to disable and/or delete browser cookies, so the organizations involved have been looking for better methods. The goal is to save information across page visits and browser sessions, and there are quite a few ways to accomplish this. Flash cookies use the local storage capabilities of the Adobe Flash Player. These have given rise to zombie cookies, where a deleted browser cookie is recreated from the Flash cookie. HTML 5 has a client-side database storage capability that makes me wonder just what they were thinking when they developed the standard. And finally there’s the Evercookie, which uses every trick in the book and is quite hard to remove. My favorite is how it encodes the cookie data as an image file, which is stored in the browser’s cache to be later read back and decoded.

Update: Ars Technica tells us that it’s technically possible to kill the Evercookie.

Modern-day BIOS, the computer code allowing low-level access to your PC’s hardware, is architecturally quite similar to the original BIOS created 25 years ago for the first IBM Personal Computer. But 25 years is a long time in the technology world, and the inadequacies of BIOS are becoming significant enough that it’s time for a replacement. The heir apparent is Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). With the exception of a faster boot time, most of the benefits are technical in nature and should be invisible to the standard user. In fact, you may already have a UEFI system and not know it. Another advantage is that system administrators will find it easier to remotely manage large computer networks. I think the real benefit, however, will come in the future when new interfaces (think USB) or hardware types become available and PC designers won’t have to jump through hoops to get them to work.

Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/…
(via Kim Komando)

Knee Defenders are rubber grips that attach to the arms of an airplane tray table and prevent the person in front of you from reclining the seat, thus giving you more space to breath and move. Especially useful for big or tall people.

Link: http://www.gadgetduck.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Ars Technica reviews the Internet Explorer 9 beta in the linked article. Major changes include a streamlined interface that’s highly reminiscent of Google Chrome. The new tab page also borrows from Chrome, displaying thumbnails of your most visited pages. Microsoft has added a download manager and some HTML5 support, and has increased the security, reliability, performance, and standards compliance. All in all, IE9 looks to be a contender. One real problem, however, is that it requires Windows Vista or later. Windows XP users are out of luck.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Nerf toys have come a very long way since I was a kid. The Nerf N-Strike Stampede ECS is a fully-automatic Nerf gun that shoots Nerf darts. It comes with three 18-dart magazines and another that holds 6, for a total of 60 darts (included). It also has a riot shield and bipod. See the Hasbro website for a demonstration video showing it in action.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

For those who value their online privacy, the linked article has tips on how to delete your online presence.

Link: http://www.wikihow.com/…
(via The Consumerist)

We’ve all seen the pictures where the splash from a drop of water is caught on high-speed film. Photographer Alexander Augusteijn goes one step further and adds a bullet to the mix. Check out his gallery of high-speed photos, with water drops and more.

Link: http://www.petapixel.com/…
(via Neatorama)

One of the things I dislike about Google Reader is that it takes up a lot of space with nonessential items. Until recently, I used the “minimalistic” skin in the Better GReader Firefox extension to make the most use of my screen space. But now Google has built in a similar feature. I’ve been using it for about a month or so, and the verdict’s still out on which version I prefer.

Link: http://googlereader.blogspot.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, decided to build an environmentally friendly house. What he didn’t realize was just how difficult that would be. In the linked article, he discusses the problems he encountered as well as some of the lessons he learned.

Link: http://online.wsj.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Microsoft released a record-breaking number of security updates on Tuesday, and it sounds like it’s a good idea to run Windows Update if you haven’t already done so.

Link #1: http://www.google.com/…
(via Kim Komando)

Link #2: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/…