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rePost::Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck? (Part Five) – NYTimes.com

Origins of Computer Science!

ERROL MORRIS: My brother was getting a degree in electrical engineering because there was no degree in computer science.
ROBERT FANO: I know. I started it.
ERROL MORRIS: You started it?
MIT Museum
Robert Fano
ROBERT FANO: That’s right. When I started Project MAC, I wanted at the same time to build up computer science as part of the electrical engineering department. It was a double mission. First, that’s where the money was. Second, that’s where the future was. And eventually, the higher-ups understood that computer science was going to stay. And over the years, the curriculum in computer science kept developing. So much so that in 1971, after I stopped being director of Project MAC, I was asked to be the first associate department head for computer science in the electrical engineering department. A little later, a new department head changed the name of the department from electrical engineering to electrical engineering and computer science. And shortly thereafter, Project Mac became LCS, the Laboratory for Computer Science.
via Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck? (Part Five) – NYTimes.com.

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rePost::DEF CON: The event that scares hackers – CNN.com

He said mischievous hackers can install their own cell phone towers to intercept your calls before passing them on to the real mobile carrier. These “man-in-the-middle attacks,” he said, let hackers eavesdrop, but they can also alter the conversation you’re having, without your knowledge.
“You send a text saying ‘I love you,’ and he (the hacker) says, ‘I want to break up with you.'” Or worse than that, Markus said, you could be doing business — maybe the hacker would change “sell it all” to “buy it all,” with potentially huge ramifications.
The hackers who attend DEF CON — now in their thirties instead of their teens as they were at the start of the hacker movement — hope, in a strange way, that by teaching people about hacking they will make the tech world safer.
via DEF CON: The event that scares hackers – CNN.com.

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rePost::Any journey is a pilgrimage « Paulo Coelho's Blog

Emphasis mine

What is the appeal of traveling and what do you receive from traveling? Are they reflected to your work? Please let us know what does traveling means to you (Eduard, Twitter)
I’m a pilgrim writer and that inevitably appears in the way my characters deals with space.
I’m in constant movement and very often I find that my characters need to equally find themselves in a journey.
I believe that we are constantly experiencing transformation and that’s why we need to let life guide us.
Every day is different, every day can have a magic moment, but we don’t see the opportunity, because we think: ‘Oh this is boring I’m just commuting to work.’
How many interesting people you are missing, just because our parents told us “don’t talk to strangers”?
You must get as much as you can from any journey, because – in the end – the journey is all you have. It doesn’t matter what you accumulate in terms of material wealth, because you are going to die anyway, so why not live?
You have to look at life itself is a pilgrimage. Therefore, start moving, start talking to strangers!
via Any journey is a pilgrimage « Paulo Coelho’s Blog.

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rePost::AICN::Nordling Reviews RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

In a way, RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES plays out like a story handed down in a world where the apes are already the dominant species.  Much of the film feels like a bedtime story an ape parent would share with their child.  I held off writing this review because after I saw it I was so completely satisfied and happy with the film that I thought I was just overly gushing.  The film couldn’t be that good, could it?  But as the next couple of days passed, the film still stands tall in my mind.  It’s not that the expectations were low enough to be pleasantly surprised – no, this is a genuinely great science fiction film, and I think the filmmakers, and WETA, especially, deserve the benefit of the doubt.  20th Century Fox has nothing to worry about.  I should have seen it coming – RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES stands tall and proud with the rest of the summer releases, and while many of those will be forgotten, RISE will be looked back fondly for years to come.  Yes, it’s just that good.
Nordling, out.
via Ain’t It Cool News: The best in movie, TV, DVD, and comic book news..

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rePost::Matt Damon explains non-financial motivations and the education sector – Boing Boing

Go to the link to see the video!!

In this brief video, Matt Damon is quizzed by a reporter who claims that he’s a good actor because he knows he’d be fired if he did a bad job, while teachers, with job security, have no such incentive. He persuasively lambastes the reporter, arguing that the reasons people do things — especially “shitty salary” jobs like teaching (but also arts careers, which have a very low chance of succeeding) — are much more nuanced than a mere job-security-incentive “MBA” model would suggest.
It’s a very illuminating example of a clash of ideologies. Damon, after all, had no “rational” business becoming an actor, since he was almost entirely certain to fail. Now that he is a multi-millionaire, he has no “rational” reason to continue acting, because he’s assured of financial security forever. Clearly, Damon is someone whose lifelong incentives are not about “job security.” Rather, his motivations are vocational — he does this because it fulfills him.
via Matt Damon explains non-financial motivations and the education sector – Boing Boing.

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rePost::Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck? Part Four – NYTimes.com

Wished EEE had a more expansive view of research.

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: — which we did. That was our goal. And to form a nucleus of computer science at MIT. Until then, computer specialists had been sprinkled around in various groups and places.
ERROL MORRIS: And still no computer science department —
FERNANDO CORBATÓ: Most of the key leaders came out of the electrical engineering department. But electrical engineering at MIT was a peculiar department. It had a very, very broad view of what its charter was. It had everything, from biologists to material scientists — a rich tradition of being very spread out in its research directions. And so, most of the people that joined us, Project MAC, were part of electrical engineering, but not all. And Fano asked everyone to make their principal office in the same building where the computer was. This is turning into a longer story than I expected.
via Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck? Part Four – NYTimes.com.

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Science::Why diets don't work? Starved brain cells eat themselves

Science please advance enough before I eat myself to death. I need a miracle drug. wink wink!!

Why Diets Don’t Work? Starved Brain Cells Eat Themselves
ScienceDaily (Aug. 2, 2011) — A report in the August issue of the Cell Press journal Cell Metabolism might help to explain why it’s so frustratingly difficult to stick to a diet. When we don’t eat, hunger-inducing neurons in the brain start eating bits of themselves. That act of self-cannibalism turns up a hunger signal to prompt eating.
“A pathway that is really important for every cell to turn over components in a kind of housekeeping process is also required to regulate appetite,” said Rajat Singh of Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
The cellular process uncovered in neurons of the brain’s hypothalamus is known as autophagy (literally self-eating.) Singh says the new findings in mice suggest that treatments aimed at blocking autophagy may prove useful as hunger-fighting weapons in the war against obesity.
The new evidence shows that lipids within the so-called agouti-related peptide (AgRP) neurons are mobilized following autophagy, generating free fatty acids. Those fatty acids in turn boost levels of AgRP, itself a hunger signal.
via Why diets don’t work? Starved brain cells eat themselves.