And Slaters Go Plop

Why do we buy them? We hand over $50 that could otherwise be used anywhere you like in exchange for a voucher worth $50 that can only be used at certain shops.

On a purely logical level $50 in cash is a far greater gift to give simply because it can be redeemed anywhere you like. The problem is that giving cash as a present is about as lazy as can be. When you buy someone a voucher you are saying that at least you made an effort.

You would think that shops would give you slightly more incentive to buy vouchers because at least then they’ve got a guaranteed customer (and maybe even a few unredeemed vouchers too, if they are lucky). Why don’t they sell $50 vouchers for $45? Surely they could find some way around people buying vouchers and immediately using them? How about a month’s delay before being able to redeem them to keep this in check?

Anyway. Happy Christmas and bah humbug.

Ever accidentally hit ‘send’ when composing an email before you’ve attached whatever file you were intending to send? And then you have to send a quick “DOH!” follow-up email with the forgotten attachment.

I do this all the time and it makes me look like a flaming eejit.

Well, a couple of weeks ago I upgraded from Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10 and with it came an updated version of Evolution (the Linux equivalent of Outlook). They’ve added a feature that detects if you’ve typed the word ‘attached’ but not attached any files and gives you a warning. Brilliant!

After a recent conversation with a friend who has been quite taken by a couple of the many water-powered car / free energy concepts I decided to research the topics properly.

Common traits amongst people who make free energy claims are:

• There is a grand conspiracy – the CIA has been making people ‘disappear’ or some such
• Scientists are too set in their ways to accept revolutionary ideas
• Big industry is suppressing the technologies

Something else all of the free energy people have in common is that they are not willing to release their discoveries to the general public for verification.

Here’s my advice to any would-be free energy proponent: Make your discovery public.

It’s that simple. If you reveal your secrets all your problems with the CIA will go away, scientists will be put to shame for being so hard-headed and the big petro-chemical corporations will be brought to their knees.

You’ll win eternal fame. Your name will be held in higher esteem than Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. You will change the planet (for the good) for all time.

I guess what I’m saying here is “Put up or shut up”.

Most of us know that a good password is one that is longer than eight characters and contains upper- and lower-case letters as well as numbers. We also know that we shouldn’t use the same password on too many different sites or applications. If you use the same password in Hotmail as well as your bank account it makes it a lot easier for someone who has hacked your Hotmail account to get into your bank.

The problem with this is that keeping track of lots of jumbly passwords is a nightmare. So we generally end up going for the easiest, but least secure, option.

Well, I’ve got a solution that I’ve been using for a few months now and, in the interests of better security, I’m going to share it with you:

• First, pick a couple of weird words that you’ll remember. For example SlatersPlop is nice and weird.
• Now turn a couple of letters into numbers: Slater5Pl0p.
• This is now a pretty strong password in its own right. It’s got numbers and upper- and lower-case letters and it’s eleven characters long.
• Now you need to make the password relate somehow to the site or application you are using. In this case if we were using the password to log in to Hotmail I’d put an “h” (for “hotmail”) into it somewhere: Slater5hPl0p. If I wanted to use it to log into Windows I might use Slater5wPl0p
• As long as you use a consistent location to insert your contextual letter it becomes a breeze to remember which password you used for which site.
• Now the only thing to do is to change it from time to time. I’ve decided to do it on a yearly basis which would probably horrify some security people.

Oh, and a few years ago I thought it would be cool if there were another habitable planet directly opposite us on the other side of the sun. It could be a similar size and distance from the sun as the earth.

Don’t you just hate that? A month or so ago I had an of idea for a sci-fi storyline but today, as I was continuing my massive 100-hour catchup of all the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast episodes, I discover that people have already been thinking about it for some time. This kind of thing happens to me a lot and I’m beginning to wonder if I’m inadvertently reading or hearing of ideas that I promptly forget and later “come up with”.

Anyway, I still think it’s a great concept for a story:

I was thinking about how impossible it is to travel to other potentially habitable solar systems (as you do) and considering how absolutely vulnerable we would be if we were to detect a super-large asteroid approaching us. We don’t have the technology yet to safely freeze ourselves for a long-haul flight through space. We don’t know how to produce food in space to sustain a group of people for any length of time. If a sizeable asteroid were to hit we’d have next to no chance of surviving the weeks or months following the impact regardless of where we were located on the planet.

I got to thinking about how we are able to freeze embryos indefinitely and figured that if we had a year or two’s notice of impending doom it might be possible to scramble together as much technology as possible to create thousands of identical small pods containing frozen embryos and fire them in all different directions out into space. I wasn’t sure whether it would be feasible to have the pods contain artificial ‘wombs’ and the materials for a biosphere that are activated upon contact with an alien planet.

Perhaps nurturing humans from frozen embryos is the most feasible option we have at our disposal for human survival across journeys that would take millions of years.

This basic premise gives you a lot of room to play with the psychology of children bought up without human parents, the sheer enormity of discovering that their biological parents have been dead for millions of years, the challenges of seeding life in a new environment, the mechanics of a life support system capable of ‘growing’ and supporting infants, the possibility of regaining contact with other pods.

It would be quite fun to be drawn along with the story only knowing as much as the children know about how they got there and what happened to earth.

Unfortunately I don’t have the skills or inclination to go ahead and turn this into a story but I implore anyone reading this who is a writer of sci-fi to take this concept and turn it into a novel. And please tell me about it! I’d love to read it.

A couple of weeks ago I saw a Robert Winston documentary on the human mind. In it he talked about how we form memories by strengthening neural pathways. He mentioned that having multiple pathways will create more enduring memories i.e. if you meet a person who’s name is John you’ll have a better chance of remembering his name if you associate it to a person you already know well who’s called John.

I’d always been impressed by people who could memorise things and so I decided to give it a go and set myself the goal of being able to memorise a shuffled deck of 52 cards. It took me eight days but I can now have someone shuffle a deck of cards, spend five minutes or so looking at them and be able to recite them in order (forwards or backwards) and also be able to say what card is at a specific position in the pack (i.e. card # 34) .

I’ve since learnt that there are different ways to do this and that mine might not be the best way but here’s how I did it:

1. Separate a pack of cards into suits and gradually associate each card with an object. Preferably an object that makes you feel something (like a puppy or vomit or a mousetrap).
2. Once you have strong object/card associations for the whole pack try mixing them up and make sure you’ve still got those associations.
3. Starting from somewhere in your house (I chose my bed) go on a linear mental journey through each room and outside to the letterbox. Break this up into 52 memorable places (cupboards, sinks, tables, etc) and try to flag the locations at 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 as important (i.e. I have 10, 20 and 30 as sinks).
4. Once you have a strong picture of these locations try taking, say, 10 random cards and put the objects associated with them into the first 10 locations. Try to feel something for the object/card/location association – for example, if you have a puppy in the hallway you could feel nervous that it’s going to pee on the carpet.
5. Repeat until you are able to fill up all 52 locations with object/card associations.
6. Now you should be able to recite a shuffled deck of cards backward and forwards and be able to easily say what card is at a given location (i.e. at position 23 for me would be three locations on from the laundry sink).

The science behind this is fairly simple: most of our evolutionary ancestors have benefited in some way by being good at remembering objects and locations. We’ve inherited their genes. Only (relatively) recently has there been abstract things like numbers and we’re not really all that good at it because it’s never really been a survival issue. If you forge a relationship between abstract numbers and recognisable objects and imagine them in familiar locations it makes it easier to remember them.

In the event of a large-scale civil emergency a good policy to adopt would be to have house #1 of each street be the go-to place for information and supplies. The people from #1 houses can meet at the nearest school hall or church and easily spread information throughout the community. This should help to cut down on the mass confusion that would be caused if, say, everything electronic was to be destroyed.

The key is to be able to instantly build a decentralised network of support units that don’t rely on technology more advanced than walking and talking.

They must, must, must provide magazines and a chair or two for uncomfortable spouses.