( Read more... )

The next instalment in this exciting saga of family feuds and cyberwarfare. Tybalt has sent an invitation email to Romeo, impersonating Juliet in order to tempt Romeo to reveal himself.

Romeo opens his mail and finds this message waiting for him:

From: “Juliet” juliet@capulet.net
To: “Romeo” romeo@montague.net
Subject: secret ( Read more... )

Forging an email is the easiest thing in the world. Once you see how easy it is then I think you’ll understand why you should never trust the From header in an email.

A while ago I used the Montagues and Capulets to explain how the domain name system worked I’ll do the same again to show how easy it is for anyone to ( Read more... )

Some more on information theory. Last time I covered issues to do with the reliability of the ‘channel’, the medium used to transfer the data between sender and receiver. To summarise what was in the last post:

• Information is data transferred between sender and receiver, so that the receiver then learns something that they didn’t know before.
• All ( Read more... )

In my last post I introduced information theory as one of those obscure ideas which creationists love to misrepresent for their own purposes. Well, I can’t stand to see good science have its name besmirched like that, so let’s rebalance things by looking at the good stuff in information theory and what we use it for.

Information theory was ( Read more... )

According to Darrell Huff, it’s easy to lie with statistics. But it’s just as easy to lie with any kind of science, for the same reason - there’s a lot of knowledge out there and most people aren’t familiar with the basics. So people can come up with intuitively plausible ideas like homeopathy using some quantum-theoretic means of healing, and many ( Read more... )

The field of epidemiology studies the health of populations with any eye to detection and prevention of illness.

Disease is fascinating in any light, and as our world shrinks due to global travel we’re likely to see a lot more of it in new guises. Single cases of disease in exotic places are a potent threat to major population centres, because ( Read more... )

All software of sufficient complexity to do something useful (and even some that don’t do anything interesting at all) will contain bugs. This is a fact of life.

It’s the job of the programmer to find and remove these bugs. There are many ways of going about this but the most interesting, I think, is using a tool called a debugger.

If you’re a ( Read more... )

Artificial intelligence as a subject of stories goes back a long way. The Jewish story of the golem, the tin man in The Wizard of Oz, Pinocchio, Pygmalion - they are all tales of artificial people looking for some element of humanity.

This is what a lot of the old stories focussed on. I suppose it was after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that ( Read more... )

Programmers in the movies get a pretty raw deal, I think. For a start, it’s very rare for them to use any real programming languages. Most of what they seem to do falls into two categories:

1. Typing at very high speeds while screeds of random alphanumeric characters fly up the screen. See The Matrix for examples of such silliness.
2. Manipulate 3D ( Read more... )