Jon’s Network

In 1981, Richard Feynman gave an interview to Horizon. Be sure to check out the excerpt about doubt and uncertainty.

Weirder than science fiction, but it’s real. Check out this animation that visualizes magnetic fields based on actual measurements.

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

From Feynman’s The Value of Science:

When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.

Some distrust science because it seems to overturn itself and prove itself wrong. This is really a manifestation of its strength. Science is a free market of ideas and observations. Anything that doesn’t reflect reality is eliminated while the real stuff gets refined and improved (moving toward the center of this diagram) but never becomes dogma. There is always room for doubt.

Richard Feynman gave this talk on the value of science over 50 years ago. It’s full of wisdom from a brilliant man.

If we take everything into account — not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn’t know — then I think we must frankly admit that we do not know.

All scientific progress came as a result of doubting existing “knowledge”. To make progress, we have to “recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt”.

via Big Contrarian

Well worth the 40 minutes to watch this intro to critical thinking by Brian Dunning.

Here’s his recommended reading list from the end:

• The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan
• Flim Flam by James Randi
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Skeptoid by Brian Dunning

Apple just launched K-12 on iTunes U(opens iTunes) that allows schools to use iTunes as a platform to distribute educational content. Not quite sure why a school would find this easier than just posting the stuff on the web, but I do know Apple would love to get all those students spending even more time in iTunes.

Some interesting new research out of ETH Zürich showed that Firefox’s Auto-Update mechanism works the best at keeping users updated with the latest and safest version compared to all other major browsers. The report, Understanding the web browser threat, used Google’s browser data from the last 18 months to figure out a lower bound on the amount of users that surf the internet using an outdated browser. It turns out that at least 45.2%, or 637 million users, were not using the most secure Web browser version on any working day from January 2007 to June 2008.

To improve this number, the paper suggests the following:

• browser vendors follow Mozilla’s lead and implement an auto-update mechanism that checks for updates each time the browser is used
• consumers implement URL filtering to reduce odds of visiting an infected website
• implement a “best by” dating system for software similar to what consumers are familiar with when they shop for groceries. This is supposed to increase awareness of the risk of outdated browsers and motivate users to update.
• someone implement an authentic, open repository of plugin version information that can be queried by vendors to make sure browser plugins are updated regularly

I don’t like the “best by” idea. A little red notice that states “145 days expired, 3 patches missed” isn’t much different from the existing software update schemes. Trying to raise awareness for the sake of awareness is futile. Outdated software alone doesn’t cause loss and discomfort like spoiled produce does so consumers won’t be motivated to pay attention to the “best by” date.

Check out this video and ask yourself why we let our governments kill everyone.

via Daniel Miessler

Funny IBM typo typo. Can’t remember what page I saw this on but it was last week.

Someone told me once that they didn’t like using a Mac because it doesn’t have enough keyboard shortcuts built in. For example, how do you access the menu bar without using your mouse? On Windows, you use the alt key to access any menu item. In OS X, you just need to turn on full keyboard access in system preferences (see image) and use ctrl-F2 to do the same thing.