Cartoon of the Day...

You had me at “carcass.” Har!

There's a Lot of BS Out There, Folks...

And American Express is doing their part to maintain the high levels of bullshit in our environment.  Here's an email from American Express explaining why they only allow letters in their passwords (no numbers, punctuation, or other “special characters”).  It's the purest kind of bullshit: information that is the exact inverse of the truth.

Sheesh, Amex, get your freaking act together!

Use ECC RAM!

My colleagues often make fun of me because I shut down and restart my laptop several times a day.  There are several reasons I do this, but one of them is to avoid accumulated memory (RAM) errors due to cosmic rays.  These errors occur more frequently than most people think if your computer doesn't use error correcting (ECC) RAM (and most laptops do not).  Here's an article that explains why this is true, and also gives specific estimates about the frequency of these errors. 

Bottom line: I'm going continue the behavior that I'm mocked for...

New Record for Clock Accuracy...

This new clock is accurate to within one second in 3.7 billion years, or (equivalently) one nanosecond in 3.7 years.  When I first started working in electronics, we thought a clock that was stable to within one millisecond per day was pretty hot stuff.  This new clock is over a billion times more stable...

Rain...

We got 1.42 inches (36 mm) of rain in the Friday/Saturday storm.  More, please!

Special Delivery...

Michael Yon is back in Afghanistan, and has filed his first report of this trip.  It's all about the Air Force crews who resupply the remote outposts in Afghanistan (of which there are many) – and, typical of Yon's work, it's full of evocative photos and detailed information.  He flew with one resupply mission and documents the whole thing...