When appliances run amuck

I am not an early adopter of technology, having to be pretty much driven by a strong need to acquire them. Hence I do not have a ‘smart’ home in which all manner of appliances are connected to the internet. Wi-fi and a ‘smart’ TV (i.e., one connected to the internet) are about it. When I see things like the Amazon Echo and Alexa that people have in their homes that they talk into to make purchases and run their devices, I wonder about the advisability of having a device that listens to everything you say and transmits it into the cloud. It is true that our phones can be hacked and turned into listening devices too but that takes some targeted effort on the part of some entity to do so. With smart homes, we are the ones enabling it.
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Surprising twist in the dark matter search

In science, we often give provisional existence status to entities that serve as explanatory concepts to explain phenomena, even though they have not been directly detected as yet. Of course, that state of provisional existence does not last forever and strenuous efforts are undertaken to obtain direct measurements of existence and sometimes these can take a long time. That seems to be the case with dark matter which is thought to be about five times as abundant as normal matter and to exist in large spheres in which all galaxies are immersed but whose direct detection has proven elusive.
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The incredible double life of Clarence King

Clarence King (1842-1901) was the first director of the US Geological Survey and played an instrumental role during the major controversy at the end of the nineteenth century over the age of the Earth. Biologists who were convinced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution knew that for the unguided process of natural selection to work required long times and the absolute minimum age that they needed was 100 million years, though even that was stretching things. But physicists, led by Lord Kelvin, were pushing for a younger age based on their models of the Earth as a once-hot cooling body. (The discovery by Pierre Curie that the decay of radium produced prodigious amounts of heat and thus invalidated all the cooling models did not occur until 1903.) Geologists were in the middle since their models based on geological processes had parameters that were hugely variable and thus could not be the arbiter. But King pushed them over to the physicists’ side.
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Why aren’t backups the solution to ransomware?

Ransomware is where hackers gain access to a computer system and then prevent its legitimate users from accessing the data until they pay a ransom. Hospitals have often been targeted. The city government of Atlanta is the latest victim of this practice, having been locked out of its computers since last Thursday.

I presume all these institutions do backups of their systems pretty much all the time. So why, when attacked like this, can they not do a complete wipe of their systems and then reload using the backup? It may take some time, of course, but that can’t be why they don’t do it since the Atlanta lockout has gone on for almost a week.

I know that there are computer experts who read this blog. Can anyone explain this?

From evolution wars to climate wars in the classroom

The war over teaching evolution in the classroom, that was such a huge issue in the last century and even prompted me to write a book about it, seems to have subsided after the latest incarnation known as intelligence design getting severely smacked down in a Pennsylvania courtroom in 2005. But Katie Worth writes that now there is a new war in the classroom, this time involving climate change. Wealthy people who oppose any action to combat climate change, like the Koch brothers and the Heartland Institute, are trying to influence teachers in schools by mailing them free packets of misinformation. But once the pro-science community got wind of this move, they fought back with mailings of their own, a project headed by the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI).
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The moon continues to create a sense of wonder

Galileo used the newly invented telescope to persuade people that the moon was not a perfectly smooth sphere, as all celestial objects were believed to be at that time, but had mountains and valleys and craters that made it seem just like the Earth. This caused considerable consternation at that time with some denying what they saw, saying that it was the telescope that was creating those blemishes.
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Stephen Hawking

I have not written anything about the death of iconic physicist Stephen Hawking because there did not seem much that I could add to the massive coverage it received. But throughout his life, there has been one thing that troubled me about the way he was covered and that was how the media dealt with his motor neurone disease. I could not quite put my finger on what bothered me but Ellis Palmer, who also identifies himself as disabled and is a wheelchair user, explains his own unease with how people like him are seen and portrayed.
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