Bag of Beans

A Damn Interesting article that explains where the term “cargo cult” came from.

One day in the early 1940s, the relatively isolated group of islands was descended upon by hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who arrived by sea and by air. The world was at war, and America had plans to build bases on the Pacific islands. The newcomers recruited the locals’ assistance in constructing hospitals, airstrips, jetties, roads, bridges, and corrugated-steel Quonset huts, all of which were strange and wondrous to the natives. But it was the prodigious amounts of war materiel that were airdropped for the US bases that drastically changed the lifestyle of the islanders. They observed as aircraft descended from the sky and delivered crates full of clothing, tents, weapons, tools, canned foods, and other goods to the island’s new residents, a diversity of riches the likes of which the islanders had never seen. The natives learned that this bounty from the sky was known to the American servicemen as “cargo.”

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Some useful tips for making your Ubuntu experience even better.

In this article i describe some of the things to do immediately after installing ubuntu on your machine . Since most of the people reading this would be shifting from Windows to Linux with a system dual booting so i would focus more on making transition easy from Windows to Linux.

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• Link [xkcd.com]

This is a handy tip from Lifehacker:

You accidentally typed liefehacker.com into Firefox’s address bar, and now it suggests that whenever you enter “li.” Remove mistyped URLs from the fox’s suggestions by selecting the entry in the list and hitting Shift-Delete. Works for fat-fingered usernames and other form entries, too.

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This is a great song by Jonathan Coulton.

Check out the video by spiffworld on YouTube:

• Thing a Week 29 - Code Monkey (via net@nite podcast)
• YouTube video

We have a new record for the world’s hottest chile pepper.

In fall of 2006, the Guinness Book of Records confirmed that New Mexico State University Regent’s Professor Paul Bosland had indeed discovered the world’s hottest chile pepper, Bhut Jolokia.

Bhut Jolokia, at 1,001,304 Scoville Heat Units (SHU), is nearly twice as hot as Red Savina, the chile pepper variety it replaces as the world’s hottest. A New Mexico green chile contains about 1,500 SHUs and an average jalapeno measures at about 10,000 SHUs.

• Link (via Boing Boing)

Related:

• The Hottest Sauces in the World

It turns out that the version numbers in Microsoft Office products are more than just simple build numbers.

The 4-digit build number is actually an encoded date which allows you tell when a build was born. The algorithm works like this:

• Take the year in which a project started. For Office “12″, that was 2003.
• Call January of that year “Month 1.”
• The first two digits of the build number are the number of months since “Month 1.”
• The last two digits are the day of that month.

So, if you have build 3417, you would do the following math: “Month 1″ was January 2003. “Month 13″ was January 2004. “Month 25″ was January 2005. Therefore, “Month 34″ would be October 2005.

3417 = October 17, 2005, which was the date on which Office 12 build 3417 started.

• Link (via Coding Horror)

Here’s a thoroughly engaging profile of Google cofounder Sergey Brin.

The co-presidents share management duties with Eric Schmidt, a seasoned software executive whom they hired as chief executive officer in 2001 to oversee the day-to-day aspects of Google’s business—in short, to be the “adult” in the playroom. But they have no intention of ceding control. Since day one, they have resisted outside meddling, preferring to do everything their own way, from opting to piece together computers on the cheap (and build a computer casing out of Lego blocks) to flouting Wall Street in an unconventional initial public offering.
Blazing one’s own trail comes naturally to Sergey. The Moscow-born entrepreneur and his parents have been doing it their entire lives.

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This article explains why some hypothermia victims undress themselves even as they freeze to death.

Shunting blood to your core and away from your extremities is accomplished through vasoconstriction of your peripheral circulation. This allows the outer portions of your body to become better at insulating your core, since it is losing less heat to the outside world.

And now the key to what causes paradoxical undressing. Vasoconstriction occurs when the smooth muscles within the vasculature contract. This effort requires a steady input of energy in the form of glucose from the body’s energy stores. However, due to a lack of blood now traveling to these muscles, they eventually tire. As the muscles of the constricted blood vessels run out of energy, they fatigue, relax, and open up. This is known as vasodilation.

With vasodilation of the blood vessels, an infusion of warm blood from the core of the body rushes into the peripheral extremities. This causes the hypothermia victim to feel overly warm and to start shedding layers of clothing, contrary to the reality that their body temperature is continuing to drop.

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Related:

• James Kim found deceased

Ars Technica has a short article on the recent debate about Wikipedia’s funding model and whether they should resort to advertising on their site.

Though Wikimedia has less than ten full-time employees, it has real expenses. Bandwidth in 2007 is expected to cost up to $100,000 a month, and the group now runs more than 350 servers. Will the necessary money continue to flow in from donations when so many ‘Net users have grown used to getting content for “free”?

Not everyone thinks so. While Wales wants to keep Wikipedia free of ads and corporate influence, others say that this is exactly what the site needs to grow and ensure its financial stability. Weblogs Inc. CEO Jason Calacanis has been harping on Wikipedia for months, arguing that the encyclopedia could rake in as much as $100 million a year with only minimal advertising.

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Gizmodo has posted a great rant on people with more money than sense.

And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket to impress your friends and make you forget for just a few minutes, blood coursing as you tremblingly cut through the blister pack, that your life is utterly void of any lasting purpose.

Then you had the audacity to complain about broken phones, half-assed firmware that bricked your gear, and winner-takes-nothing arms races between the companies whose gear your bought and the hackers who had nothing better to do than try to fix it. Do you realize how ridiculous that is? Programmers with free time did more to help you get quality products than you ever did by buying the broken gear in the first place.

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You can now download all of the Sysinternals utilities as a single package.

The Sysinternals Troubleshooting Utilities have been rolled up into a single Suite of tools. This file contains the individual troubleshooting tools and help files. It does not contain non-troubleshooting tools like the BSOD Screen Saver or NotMyFault.

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Vanity Fair has profiled the popular torrent tracker site, The Pirate Bay.

Pirate Bay has now taken careful steps to ensure that any future raids will inflict minimal disruption to the service. “We have divided the servers up geographically—they are hidden,” explains Svartholm. “If they come after us again they will only find our front end. A single metal box with a short message stuck on the front: ‘You forgot to take my label writer.’”

In reality Svartholm does not expect another raid: “At this point it would be political suicide,” he says. Shortly after the raid more than 1,000 citizens attended Pirate Bay rallies in central Stockholm and Sweden’s second-largest city, Gothenburg, events which were captured by the quickie documentary Steal This Film. The recently formed Pirate Party doubled its membership, and even mainstream politicians—mindful of Sweden’s million or so file-sharing voters—weighed in on the Pirates’ behalf.

• Link (via Slashdot)

This is a pretty slick Windows version of the Mac OS X application dock. Freeware.

• Link (via Lifehacker)

Not really surprising, but playing action games can help improve your visual processing abilities.

In an article to be published in Psychological Science, they have shown that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved by about 20 percent in their ability to identify letters presented in clutter—a visual acuity test similar to ones used in regular ophthalmology clinics.

In essence, playing video game improves your bottom line on a standard eye chart.

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This looks like an impressive screenshot utility. It appears to support some advanced features if used in Vista.

• Link (via Lifehacker)

Wired has published an intriguing series of articles on cybercrime. Definitely worth a read.

With so many fake IDs in play it was unclear to police exactly who they had in custody. Then as they read Thomas his rights, he told them: “Get me some federal agents and I’ll give you a case involving the Russians and millions of dollars.”

Thus was the beginning of Thomas’ turn to the other side. For 18 months beginning in April 2003, Thomas worked as a “paid asset” for the FBI running a website for identity and credit card thieves from a government-supplied apartment in the tony Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle.

From bedrise to bedrest, seven days a week, he rode the boards and forums of his and other carding sites using the online nickname El Mariachi. He recorded private messages and IRC chats for the FBI as “carders” schemed to, among other things, sell stolen credit and debit card numbers, defraud the George Bush and John Kerry campaign sites, drain hundreds of thousands of dollars from bank and investment accounts, sell access to Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile account and run phishing scams against U.S. Bank and the FDIC. He did it all while battling denial-of-service attacks against his site and dodging attempts by his old partner Taylor and other carders to track his whereabouts and out him as a fed.

Just as his enemies were closing in on him in September 2004, the FBI pulled the plug on his work and cut him loose. But not before Thomas had given authorities a valuable look at the internet’s underworld, even though the strain of leading a double life nearly broke him.

• Part 1: I Was a Cybercrook for the FBI
• Part 2: Tightening the Net on Cybercrime
• Part 3: Tracking the Russian Scammers
• Part 4: Crime Boards Come Crashing Down

This is a humorous text-adventure version of Pong.

Excellent, the left paddle has needed a leader like you for a long time. With your help, we may just be able to destroy the evil enemy that is the left paddle.

• Link (via Neatorama)