Feb 12, 2010
If you want to feel lucky in life, make sure you are born to well-off parents and don’t worry about whether your birthday is in the summer or winter.
In 2005, well-known psychologist Richard Wiseman and his colleagues surveyed 30,000 people via the internet to see if there is a relationship between the season in which one is born and whether or not one considers oneself lucky. They found that for …
Feb 10, 2010
UPDATE: 2011-01-20 Version 3.0 now released, much reduced filesize, added OpenOffice fork, add lots of user-suggested words.
Chemist Adam Azman contacted me more than two years ago to ask if I knew of a free or open source chemistry spellchecker custom dictionary for Word or OpenOffice. Searches had revealed only paid-for dictionaries. We both agreed that a free chemical spellchecker would be very useful to all scientists working with chemicals, so Adam set …
Feb 9, 2010
WARNING: Do not simply use the formula of a common chemical without obfuscating it in some way. It could be dictionary cracked very easily if you do. A serious recommendation is to use a strong password generator rather than this technique and to store passwords in a digital safe itself locked with a strong password.
Coming up with a secure password that cannot be bruteforce or dictionary attacked but that is easy to remember is quite …
Feb 5, 2010
Do you lie at wake at night worrying that you might have missed the latest words of wisdom on Sciencebase? Are you concerned that a new post might have published that you desperately wanted to comment on and now it’s too late? Well…fear not. There are so many ways to connect with Sciencebase and sibling sites Sciencetext Tech Talk and the SciScoop Science Forum that you really can rest easy….
Feb 4, 2010
My SpectroscopyNOW column is now live. This week self-perception, trapping and using carbon dioxide, cosmic coronene, mopping up radioactive caesium, photosynthesis and magic spectral lines:
Red lenses – US scientists have used MRI to show that apparently the less you use your brain’s frontal lobes, the more you perceive your behaviour through rose-tinted spectacles. They publish details in the February issue of the journal NeuroImage.
Carbon dioxide trap and drop – …
Feb 3, 2010
Ask people why the enter the lottery and they will usually tell you that “you’ve got to be in it to win it”. As far as it goes that’s true, but it still doesn’t get around the odds of you picking the right numbers being vanishingly (although not quite homeopathically) small at 14 million to 1 against for 6 numbers from a 1-49 selection.
Compare their feelings about their chances of winning the …
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