Weird Links

Could the DNA molecule actually be a miraculous 'computer chip' of sorts?

Is DNA a hyper-advanced technology, put right in front of our faces by a vast super-intelligence?

Has it been sitting there this whole time, just waiting for us to decode it — and develop unimaginably wonderful new technologies?

Type in band or song and this site will find and play it for you. Seems to work very well and could be fun

The last quarter century has seen the explosion of a profession, financial engineering, that has provided innumerable lucrative opportunities for otherwise indigent mathematicians... Nevertheless the turbulence in the bond markets in the last couple of months, at a time when the world economy's prospects seemed set fair, have exposed a guilty secret of the financial engineering profession: its methods don't work.

A huge offshore oil discovery could raise Brazil's petroleum reserves by a whopping 40 percent and boost this country into the ranks of the world's major exporters..

The government-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA, or Petrobras, said the new "ultra-deep" Tupi field could hold as much as 8 billion barrels of recoverable light crude, sending Petrobras shares soaring and prompting predictions that Brazil could join the world's "top 10" oil producers.

The AT&T technician who stumbled across a secret room in the company's San Francisco facility which was sending copies of all telephone and Internet communications to the NSA, is on Capitol Hill this week, urging Congress not to give immunity to the telecommunications companies for their illegal cooperation with the Administration's domestic surveillance program.

It's his fuking dog. But also, HOW DID IT KNOW TO LOOK RIGHT IN THE CAMERA???

When it comes to Iran's nuclear capabilities, whose word would you rather take: that of a Nobel prize-winning head of an international agency specializing in nuclear issues who was proved triumphantly right about Iraq, or that of a bunch of belligerent neocons who make no secret of their desire to whack Iran at the earliest opportunity and who made such a pigs ear of Iraq?

That is the stark choice facing the sane people of the world, given the smearing of IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei for not joining the hysterical lynch mob building up against Iran. Criticised by Condoleezza Rice and others in the Bush administration, it is uncannily reminiscent of the slurs against him and UN weapons inspector Hans Blix in the run up to the invasion of Iraq...

..I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never "proof") and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.

There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don't find the alarmist theory matching observations.

The Firefox browser may not be as independent as previously thought. Mozilla essentially owns Firefox, and it proved so when it flexed its muscles last year in forcing Debian to rename its browser IceWeasel.

However, the open secret in the tech sector is that at the end of the day, Google calls the shots. As this blog post will explain, when a pro-user security feature in the browser threatens Google's business model, it is the feature that is made to compromise--not the search engine.

The sad, awful truth is that we fete these people, we fawn on them, we supply them with fighter jets, whisky and whores. No, of course, there will be no visas for this reporter because Saudi Arabia is no democracy. Yet how many times have we been encouraged to think otherwise about a state that will not even allow its women to drive? Kim Howells, the Foreign Office minister, was telling us again yesterday that we should work more closely with the Saudis, because we "share values" with them. And what values precisely would they be, I might ask?