Not enough to warrant a full blog article, but here are a few things that have caught my attention of late:
- The Register reports that researchers have used a laser to inscribe the human genome in a 5D memory crystal – something that’s apparently designed to last billions of years. As a backup person, this sort of longevity of storage appeals to me. (And as someone sitting on a planet plagued with demagogues who’d make Alcibiades cringe in horror, watching climate change march to its inevitable conclusion I say: make thousands of copies of these and blast them into space. We’re gonna need that backup.)
- While by no means the universal authority on all things IT, NIST has recently published guidelines that throw out a lot of inane password rules that make things unnecessarily complex for people. I’m keen on this: forcing people to change their passwords frequently results in most people choosing the shortest possible password, and using minimalist rotation methods. I for one look forward to hearing about passwords like “Frozen weasels taste kind of funny if you don’t thaw them first”.
- NSW police have blocked a number of social media and encrypted communications apps on their corporate issued devices. With all stories we see in the media about undesirable group chats amongst law enforcement folk, I have to say I support this sort of directive. (Far better than other directives we’ve seen in Australia in law enforcement, like discriminatory beard policies, which thankfully were eventually dropped.)
- The very public disagreement between AT&T and Broadcom continues and I can’t help but think of what happened to Solaris after Oracle purchased Sun.
- Apparently physicists have discovered Negative Time. (To be honest I’m kind of surprised it’s taken them this long to discover negative time. I distinctly recall discovering it in September 2000 when I was 11 hours into a 12 hour change window in a datacentre only to be told that the paperwork wasn’t correct and we had four hours to roll everything back.)
- And finally, having (relatively) recently discovered I have aphantasia, I’ve been reading up on it quite a bit. It’s been interesting to map some of my behaviours to aphantasia now I understand it better – and this article about people with aphantasia experiencing less grief was an absolute relief to me. It turns out I wasn’t the only person with aphantasia who secretly worried that they may have been a bit of a sociopath based on alternate emotional experiences. Nope, it turns out it’s all about mental imagery (or a lack thereof).