It was hurricane week. Anyone can get such good weather data now, it takes all the fun (and profit) out of commodity speculation. Here a head-to-head comparison of Gustav and Katrina from the Weather Underground.
Here’s Gustav leaving N’Orleans behind, with Hanna hot behind but headed up the Atlantic coast.
China and India were half of world [...]
In the continuing spirit of clearing my snippet file, here are a few tech items that caught my eye this week.
If you haven’t seen this video of the computer generated human character “Emily”, you should. She’s a little weird if you ask me, but no weirder than many girls I used to know.
Kevin [...]
Notes on a presentation (pdf) (via Slashdot) by Renee James; VP, Software and Solutions from the Intel developer conference…
By 2010 all Intel CPU’s will be multi-core. Previews Far Cry 2 – multiplayer immersive environment with real-time generation of 3D entities eg. gazelle.
Shows 3D model of a heart generated from real-time data. Introducing new parallel programming [...]
Danny O’Brien talks about developments in customer owned fibre – the ultimate telco disenfranchisement. Households band together to buy the link back to the nearest peering center and then have free, unlimited bandwidth for ever after.
A study of the blood of older people who survived the 1918 influenza pandemic reveals that antibodies to the strain [...]
De-clutterising my in-tray with a snippet dump. Lots of short notes in case you missed them… the Economist 14 Aug 08 sets the scene:
The [US national] debt has since swollen to $9.5 trillion, with the value of unfunded public promises (if you include entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare) nudging $53 trillion — or [...]
Still a few holes to plug. This is a very scary chart from Zillow, one of the two largest online real-estate sites. I’m not sure the ‘05-07 tranches of MBS can withstand 30% default rates. I suppose that it’s good news that only 20% of recent (2008!) purchasers are underwater.
The annual Black Hat and DefCon conferences are winding up in Vegas with several interesting developments on the security front. Long awaited was the presentation by Kaminsky of how the DNS vulnerability he discovered could actually be used now that patches have been released and presumably installed.
Speaking before a packed audience, researcher Dan Kaminsky explained [...]
Close observers will have noticed a suspicious blue square being projected onto the stadium roof during the finale of the opening ceremony later identified as the infamous “Blue Screen of Death” of Windows renown.
Organisers were also apparently forced to resort to digitally inserted computer-enhanced images of some of the firework displays for broadcasts of the [...]
I’ve been watching and reading about events in Georgia and Ossetia with some interest.
Earnings season is tapering off with no real shocks, just a bunch of financial write-downs and a sense of general foreboding in all but the export sectors. Macro seems to have found a level for the time being, with the pressure on [...]
The US FDA has approved a new batch of flu vaccine for the coming Northern winter:
This year’s approved vaccines and their manufacturers include Afluria by CSL Limited, Fluarix by GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals, FluLaval by ID Biomedical Corp. of Quebec, FluMist by MedImmune Vaccines Inc., Fluvirin by Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics Limited, and Fluzone by Sanofi Pasteur [...]