Exhibit A: Facebook was letting friends spy on each others’ chats

Facebook chat is now down as the social network races to close a security hole that let people see their friends’ live chats. The security bug was exploited, ironically enough, by fiddling one’s privacy settings, as this TechCrunch video demonstrates.

Exhibit B: Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed.

What I really dislike about Facebook is that you can’t export your own posts to your hard drive or another site. Facebook doesn’t respect our rights to our own content, so we get the worst of both worlds: neither privacy nor ownership. I’m still there because that is where friends are, but if there was a popular open alternative I would jump ship in a second.

“It’s tough being called a heartless Pluto-hater, particularly by a dismayed eight-year-old.”

SolarBeat
Musical Solar System – based on real orbital frequencies

Via Inky Circus.

“”if one is trying to harvest a truffle wood discreetly without alerting the locals, it’s generally a mistake to show up walking a pig on a leash”

Unearthing the Sex Secrets of the Périgord Black Truffle – NYTimes.com
The cynosure of every foodie’s dreams is about to yield its most intimate secrets to a team of French and Italian researchers who have decoded its genome.

Scientists supersize quantum mechanics : Nature News
A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.

Really interesting article that goes beyond the familiar storyline of man vs. machine. We can build computers with ever greater processing power, but we are just scratching the surface at understanding how humans and computers can collaborate using different but complementary ways of thinking.

This is a bit of (okay, a lot of) a rant, but Idyllopus is right.  If being “properly socialized” means attacking a 13-year-old genius who did nothing worse than be a little awkward on TV, then I’d rather not be.

Tags: Uncategorized

Check out this wonderful video of Evan O’Dorney, the recent national spelling bee champ, on CNN. The spelling bee is one of the few, if not the only, popular national competitions that rewards something besides looks and made-for-TV social skills, and it is priceless seeing the anchorwoman try to handle this brilliant, yet hopelessly awkward, kid.  He can’t spell the word if you don’t say it right, lady!

Tags: Uncategorized