In breve: no, non è stata trovata vita extraterrestre nell’alta atmosfera della Terra su un pallone di ricerca. È il solito Chandra Wickramasinghe, che vede vita aliena dappertutto e che pubblica il solito articolo sul Journal of Cosmology, che non è una rivista scientifica ma fa finta di esserlo. Dettagli su Slate (in inglese) grazie a Phil Plait.
Queste sono le macchie solari di oggi
E questa pallina azzurra è la Terra. In scala, secondo l’astronomo Phil Plait.
La scienza sa essere più affascinante della fantasia. Il resto della storia è su Bad Astronomy. Se vi piacciono le immagini del Sole in tempo (quasi) reale da varie fonti, comprese le sonde spaziali, non perdetevi Helioviewer.org.
Ne parla LiberoTV qui, con un video. “Nessuno sa come faccia, quel che è certo è che Steven Frayne cammina sulle acque, senza trucchi né inganni.” Balle. È un prestigiatore: usare trucchi è il suo mestiere.
Persino il Daily Mail, che di solito non brilla per acume, spiega che la “polizia” che interviene nel video era in realtà un gruppo di attori. E non è vero che ha “attraversato” il Tamigi, come dice il Guardian; basta guardare il video per notare che rimane sempre abbastanza vicino alla riva (anche se la distanza viene esagerata con un uso attento delle inquadrature e degli obiettivi) e non arriva mai dall’altra parte, perché provvidenzialmente arriva la “polizia” a fermarlo.
La spiegazione più probabile è il piazzamento di una passerella sotto il pelo dell’acqua. Si nota che la turbolenza dell’acqua dietro di lui è differente da quella nelle zone circostanti: un effetto tipico di un ostacolo leggermente sommerso. L’aspetto improvvisato della scena, con Frayne che scavalca la barriera, fa parte della messinscena, e le imbarcazioni non passano mai fra Frayne e la riva (le canoe sembrano farlo, ma è un gioco di montaggio). L’effetto è stato girato per promuovere il nuovo programma televisivo dell’illusionista.
Da 4g-portal.com:
The 4G pilot project, which has been running since December 2011 in seven tourist regions and 11 Swisscom Shops, is a total success […] Swisscom is now in an optimum position to equip the network with cutting-edge 4G technology and provide an ultra-high-speed mobile customer experience as early as the end of 2012 not only in these tourist areas, but also in twelve towns and cities. Swisscom will begin to roll out the technology across the country in 2013.
[…] the project is to be extended by the addition of parts of Berne and Zurich, continued until the end of the year and then flow seamlessly into the introduction of 4G on the Swisscom mobile network. Customers gain access to the ultra-high-speed network as a pilot offer for CHF 19 per week or CHF 60 per month. The offer is available in the Swisscom Shops.
[…] Swisscom will provide 4G in twelve Swiss towns and cities from December 2012, with the nationwide rollout getting under way as early as 2013 […] UL: max. 50 Mbps and DL: max. 150 Mbps.
Swisscom demonstrates 4G mobile communications technology LTE in Grenchen (ottobre 2010) ha altre info. Niente LTE 4G per iPad nuovo in Svizzera, secondo Ibigspace.com, con elenco delle offerte degli operatori (marzo 2012).
Faccio fatica a crederci, ma stando a TwBirthday e Twopcharts sono su Twitter dal 26 giugno 2007, ossia da più tempo del 98,85% di tutti gli utenti e per il 79,82% dell’esistenza di Twitter, con quasi 81.000 follower. Mi sento vecchio, ma in buona compagnia 🙂
Da Unraveling the tale behind the Apple logo (CNN, 2011):
[Alan Turing] bit into an apple he had laced with cyanide […] And so, the story goes, when two Stanford entrepreneurs were looking for a logo for their brand new computer company, they remembered Turing and his contribution to their field. They chose an apple — not a complete apple, but one with a bite taken out of it. […The] evidence now points in a more prosaic direction. In a 2009 interview with CreativeBits, Rob Janoff, the man who drew the logo […]
“I’m afraid it [the Turing story] didn’t have a thing to do with it,” he said. “It’s a wonderful urban legend.”
BBC: Alan Turing: Inquest’s suicide verdict ‘not supportable’
At a conference in Oxford on Saturday, Turing expert Prof Jack Copeland will argue that the evidence presented at the 1954 inquest would not be accepted nowadays as sufficient to establish that Turing had taken his own life deliberately. […] the police never tested the apple for the presence of cyanide […] nothing in the accounts of Turing’s last days suggest he was in anything but a cheerful mood. He had left a note on his office desk, as was his practice, the previous Friday to remind himself of the tasks to be done on his return after the Bank Holiday weekend.
[…] It is often repeated that the chemicals caused him to grow breasts, though Turing is only known to have mentioned this once. […] Turing had tolerated the year-long hormone treatment and the terms of his probation (“my shining virtue was terrific”) with amused fortitude, and another year had since passed seemingly without incident.
[…] Prof Copeland believes the alternative explanation made at the time by Turing’s mother is equally likely. Turing had cyanide in his house for chemical experiments he conducted in his tiny spare room […]
Perhaps he had accidentally put his apple into a puddle of cyanide. Or perhaps, more likely, he had accidentally inhaled cyanide vapours from the bubbling liquid. Prof Copeland notes that the nightmare room had a “strong smell” of cyanide after Turing’s death; that inhalation leads to a slower death than ingestion; and that the distribution of the poison in Turing’s organs was more consistent with inhalation than with ingestion.
Da Vincos: “Facebook in Italia: 22 milioni utenti, 14 ogni giorno, 10 da mobile al mese (dati ufficiali) #sotn12”
So how does malware evade detection when starting new rogue processes? Easy—it directly attacks the operating system’s kernel […] The Windows OS internally maintains an array of callback objects with the starting address of PspCreateProcessNotifyRoutine. […] Unsurprisingly, we have discovered malware that uses this implementation by accessing the PspCreateProcessNotifyRoutine (internal pointer) in order to remove all registered callbacks. Once the malware has removed the AV security suite callbacks, it is free to create and terminate processes at will without any pesky security software interference […] And that’s it. The rest of this exploit is trivial. Just walk the PspCreateProcessNotifyRoutine pointer and NULL out all callback objects… Any enterprise or consumer security suite that uses this technique for monitoring process activity can be easily circumvented—a big win for the malware authors.
– da How Advanced Malware Bypasses Process Monitoring, Fireeye.com.
L’ha scattata Babak Tafreshi dalla Norvegia durante il sole di mezzanotte. Per questa foto composita s’è meritato l’APOD di oggi. L’originale è qui.
Il Disinformatico mini 