Bag of Beans

This site did a little investigation into those software awards that are given out by download sites.

The obvious explanation is that some download sites give an award to every piece of software submitted to them. In return they hope that the author will display the award with a link back to them. The back link then potentially increases traffic to their site directly (through clicks on the award link) and indirectly (through improved page rank from the incoming links). The author gets some awards to impress their potential clients and the download site gets additional traffic.

• Link (via Slashdot)

This is a useful tip on those rare occasions when you absolutely need to get into a remote server and all of the connections are tied up.

While I’m sure we all agree that this is an awesome feature, sometimes in an emergency you need to log into a server and all of its connections are already in use. There are a couple of really useful and mostly unknown command line utilities that will allow you to remotely find and kill other remote desktop sessions, whether they are in a connected or disconnected state.

• Link

Scientists have discovered lifelike inorganic particles. Implications of this discovery include non-carbon-based life, and an extraterrestrial origin for life on earth from inorganic interstellar dust.

Quite bizarrely, not only do these helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers. They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma.

So, could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow alive? “These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter,” says Tsytovich, “they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve”.

• Press Release
• New Journal of Physics paper
• (via Boing Boing)

Karl Schroeder has written an interesting article arguing that we should look at colonizing our own planet the same way we would colonize Mars and other planets so that we can reduce our impact on its ecosystem.

Look at the difference between what we do when we settle a new area on Earth, compared to what we’d do on a planet like Mars. On Earth we’d take advantage of the free air and water, ready-made soils provided by local fauna, pollination provided by the local bees, all to minimize the costs of building and maintaining our colonies. This process is documented expertly by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel; he points out that the conquest of the Americas was really the invasion of one ecosystem by another, rather than a simple matter of moving human populations. North America is the greatest success story of European expansionism because its ecology was most similar to that of Europe, more than for any political or social factors.

• Link (via Boing Boing)

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories came up with a great idea for making coasters: photolithographic masks.

Photolithographic masks, or photomasks are clear templates used in semiconductor manufacturing. Typically, they are made of UV-grade fused silica and have a highly intricate chrome metal film pattern on one side. These remarkable objects are exactly the sort of wonderful thing that occasionally pops up at good electronics surplus stores. We recently found a few, took some pictures (see below) and, in the spirit of re-use, made them into some classy coasters.

• Link