It all comes down to control.

We keep focusing on doing the same thing better rather than trying something new. It is as if we are wearing blinders that let us see only one path and not the alternatives. ... There is little chance, much less financing, for the wild idea that might prove revolutionary. Organizations that give out "innovator" and "pioneer" awards claim to want to support new ideas but end up giving money to better ways of doing the same thing.

Misdiagnosis is "a window into the medical mind," revealing "why doctors fail to question their assumptions, why their thinking is sometimes closed or skewed, why they overlook the gaps in their knowledge."

Older media, with their entrenched infrastructures, are not crying out for innovation — at least not from an outsider. But that will not stop Google from trying.

There are few things in this world so stirring as a man who neither hates it nor imitates it, but in the name of what is best in it resists what is worst in it. The good man in a dark time is the unrepresentative man. He has the honor of an anomaly. He marks the distance that still has to be traveled. And how much, after all, can a single individual accomplish, all the uplift notwithstanding? Heroes are not policies.

"Unless you've been through it, you have no idea what it is like to live year-round in your second home."

Random drug tests have become routine, like pop quizzes for a student's body.

Spaniards are said to be the most enthusiastic brothel-goers — and cocaine users — in Europe.

"We call it the 'physical hyperlink.'"

There is precision in the fluff.

"Why wouldn't you want to harness that history?" Professor Bluestone said. "People going to do their work in that building would have that in the back of their min... [ Read More (2.1k in body) ]

How do the experts solve difficult problems in software development? In this unique and insightful book, leading computer scientists offer case studies that reveal how they found unusual, carefully designed solutions to high-profile projects. You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts as they work through their project's architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules.

In the space below, I've gathered some pointers you can follow to learn more about the contributors to this anthology.

Regular Expressions, by Brian Kernighan

Karl Fogel, on the Delta Editor in Subversion

Jon Bentley, author of Programming Pearls

Conversation between Tim Bray and Jim Gray

Elliotte Rusty Harold

Michael Feathers on Fit: Framework for Integrated Test; see his paper, emergent optimization in test-driven design

Alberto Savoia, one of the InfoWorld CTO 25: "We want to do for software quality what Google has done for search quality." See Testing Genes, Test Infection, and the Future of Developer Testing:

Some developers are easily test-infected - they take to unit testing like a duck to water. Others need some time and encouragement, but eventually "get it". A third group appears to have immunity to test infection. I invent a test-gene model to categorize these groups and look at its implications for the future of developer/unit testing.

Charles Petzold; here he is on Joan Didion and the play version of “The Year of Magical Thinking”.

Top Down Operator Precedence, by Douglas Crockford

Henry Warren, author of ... [ Read More (1.1k in body) ]

Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think

Bruce Sterling wants to fund the Industrial Memetics Institute.

"I'm shocked that I understood every damn thing Benkler's saying. Online experiences need to be granular, modular, and integratable. Furthermore, I didn't know about self-selection, humanization, and trust construction. I'd love to see that industrialized. Norm creation, transparency, peer review, discipline, yeah, all of that's lacking today. Internet institutions lack sustainability. They have the lifetime of my skin. They get bought out. The available platforms for self-expression are terrible. I use seven word processors, all of them terrible."

"Why are social applications businesses? Why aren't they political parties?"

"I hang out at a lot of gigs like this. Everybody's sticking it to the man; nobody's the man. What if the state of Vermont gets metal-spined ubiquitous broadband? If it leaks over state borders, are you going to sell connectivity? Will they make sure nobody in New Hampshire can 'steal' Wi-fi? What if New Hampshire becomes the next Baltic-style e-state, the next Estonia?"

What you build, you cannot contain or control. "I'm a cyberpunk. Information wants to be free. It used to be hard to find, but Google was my apotheosis. We now have this unbelievable tidal wave of information. There's no end to it. It's endlessly seductive. Suddenly, your skills at ferreting out obscure information are almost worthless. Now they don't want to pay you. I say, follow your bliss. I spend more time with Google now than with novels and magazines. I'm swimming in it. I'm marinating it."

"Follow your bliss into the abyss. That's my new bumper sticker. This is the abyss. This is where my explorations led me. You guys are the denizens of the abyss. I strap on my diver helmet and go into the internet as far as you can go. You're the guys laying the pipe. It's a cyberpunk Mariana Trench in this room. I have to cheer you. Thank you for having us here."

Freedom to Connect | Summary

A statutory rape case against a 42-year-old charged as a man took on a different look after a jail shower revealed the defendant is actually a woman.

The female victim and several prisoners at the Hamilton County Jail were among those surprised to discover that the person booked in the case as Alexander David Cross is a woman also known as Elaine Ann Cross.

Cross had been in jail awaiting a court appearance Wednesday, where she pleaded guilty to an aggravated statutory rape charge as part of a deal with prosecutors. The charge stems from a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl.

See also, Out-of-towners enjoy Murfreesboro hospitality:

"We have eaten at Chili's, Quizno's," she said. "We just didn't realize how big it was, the city and the campus."

Ball said they had been staying at the DoubleTree hotel on Old Fort Parkway, eating at places like Ruby Tuesday's and Carrabas.

"We've been all over," he said.

"Murfreesboro has grown so much," she said.

Crossed-Up Cross in Chattanooga

Both “no security through obscurity” and “loose lips sink ships” cannot simultaneously be true. Instead, it is a key research task, including for transparency advocates such as Roberts, to determine the conditions under which disclosure is likely to help or hurt security. In other writings, I have tried to contribute to that research project, especially by identifying the costs and benefits of disclosure to attackers and defenders in various settings. One key theme is that secrets work well against a first attack, when the attackers might fall for a trap. Secrets work much less well against repeated attacks, such as when a hacker can try repeatedly to find a flaw in a software program or system firewall.

Better understanding of the relationship between secrecy and security will be crucial in coming years as the nation seeks to build a society that is both open and secure. By so ably documenting the current trends toward both openness and secrecy, Roberts has provided a crucial underpinning for that debate.

Transparency in jeopardy

The new science of metagenomics, where the DNA of entire communities of microbes -- most of them previously unknown -- is studied simultaneously, promises to revolutionize understanding of the microbial world, says a new National Research Council report. It calls for a Global Metagenomics Initiative to drive advances in the field.

See a Scientific American-level article, Metagonemics: The Science of Biological Diversity.

Also: Focus on Metagenomics from Nature:

Metagenomics has emerged as a powerful tool that can be used to analyze microbial communities regardless of the ability of member organisms to be cultured in the laboratory. Metagenomics is based on the genomic analysis of microbial DNA that is extracted directly from communities in environmental samples. This technology — genomics on a huge scale — enables a survey of the different microorganisms present in a specific environment, such as water or soil, to be carried out. By integrating the information gleaned with information about biological functions within the community, the structure of microbial communities can potentially be probed. Metagenomics could also unlock the massive uncultured microbial diversity present in the environment to provide new molecules for therapeutic and biotechnological applications.

See also this conference, Metagenomics 2006, for a selection of presentations (with video) on the subject. For example, see "Cyber metagenomics":

The explosion of both genomic and environmental data requires that their union in environmental metagenomics utilize the latest in emerging capabilities of cyberinfrastructure. Recent developments such as the emergence of the National LambdaRail, service-oriented software architectures, and commodity clusters for scalable computing, storage, and visualization have made a new approach to these data-intensive science projects possible. The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) has been building teams in these areas for the last six years.

Earlier this year, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funded Calit2 to bring into being a Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA). This project is a partnership with J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, MD, UCSD’s Center for Earth Observations and Applications (centered at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography), the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and a number of key UCSD centers. This talk will explore the cyberinfrastructure underpinnings at Calit2 that enable and extend the implementation of the vision behind CAMERA and other metagenomics cyberinfrastructure.

Metagenomics Will Transform Modern Microbiology

The mysterious origins of a Windows desktop image.

This was an entertaining piece.

Nick Tosches: Autumn and the Plot Against Me

"Look, this is a democracy," said one woman there who refused to be identified.

"... there would be more male members of Congress in that category than people would think."

"Oh, my God. It looks like a haystack," he said.

The swag in the bag was just the beginning.

"In a silent way, the people have spoken and said, ‘This cannot continue. This one-man show cannot continue.’"

"If it’s this bad at Microsoft, it has to be bad at other companies, too."

Should we really be expending so much emotion crying over one spilled secret?

Some 17,000 people died in fires last year, according the Emergency Ministry -- a rate several times higher than seen in Western countries.

It would be wrong to stereotype, to say that Russians are fatalistic or heartless. They are, however, not only resigned to tragedy but inured to it in a way that to many raises alarms about the country’s future. They’re not just helpless in the face of disaster; they could be called complicit, ever beckoning the next one by their actions or lack of. Disasters, natural and man-made, occur everywhere, but unnatural death occurs in Russia with unnatural frequency and in unnatural quantity.

An Italian journalist who was held hostage for 15 days by the Taliban in lawless southern Afghanistan was ransomed for five Taliban prisoners. It appears to be the first time prisoners have been openly exchanged for a hostage in the wars that the United States and its allies are fighting there and in Iraq, and the move drew immediate criticism from Washington and London, and from other European capitals. ... [ Read More (1.2k in body) ]

A security researcher at ShmooCon on Saturday demonstrated, but did not release, a tool that turns the PCs of unknowing Web surfers into hacker help.

As expected, SPI Dynamics researcher Billy Hoffman demonstrated a Web application vulnerability scanner written in JavaScript. The tool, called Jikto, can make an unsuspecting Web user's PC silently crawl and audit public Web sites, and send the results to a third party, Hoffman said.

"The whole point was to show how scary cross-site scripting has become."

"Once one person has talked about the ability to do it, it doesn't take that long for somebody else to come up with it," said one ShmooCon attendee who asked to remain anonymous. "It will come out."

There are already 50k hits for a Google search on "Jitko". A few comments from around the web: Jeremiah Grossman, of Whitehat Security, and "Pascal". Anurag Agarwal offered a Reflection on Billy Hoffman, along with a photo:

This week on Reflection we have a very young guy from the webappsec field.

Billy’s knowledge on Ajax is tremendous ... his ability to think differently has helped him achieve so much in such a short time.

I got a chance to meet with him in the WASC meetup at RSA. He is a very lively character. Let me put it this way, if billy is a part of a conversation, you won’t get bored even if you just stand there and listen.

JavaScript bug hunting tool demonstrated

I went looking for slides, or a transcript, but I found something else instead.

How We Might Have Gone to Mars in 1965

SUN and MON, MAR 4 and 5 @ 7:30 PM

Professor Freeman Dyson of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study contributed to the unification of three versions of quantum electro-dynamics. Dyson illustrates a conversation about Project Orion [2] — a plan to build a large manned spaceship for interplanetary exploration with the intention to land on Mars -- with original photographs of the people, experiments, and documents.

Made possible by The Leon Levy Foundation.

Tip of the hat to Carlos.

From Freeman Dyson to Dave Chapelle