McGee's Musings

	Monday, February 21, 2005

A Master Equation for All Life Processes?

If you are curious about how interesting the world turns out to be, here are two great articles to add to your reading list.

A Master Equation for All Life Processes?. In "Life on the Scales," Science News recently wrote that some simple mathematical equations, known as quarter-power scaling laws, can explain the metabolic rates of living organisms. For example, "an animal's metabolic rate appears to be proportional to mass to the 3/4 power." And this "3/4-power law appears to hold sway from microbes to whales, creatures of sizes ranging over a mind-boggling 21 orders of magnitude." The ecologists, physicists and chemists behind this research are now successfully applying this equation to plants, fish, full ecosystems and even biology and genetics, by adding a new key parameter: temperature. Please read this fascinating article for many more details and references. But save some time to read another long article, "Ecology's Big, Hot Idea," published by PLoS Biology, which states that "the way life uses energy is a unifying principle for ecology in the same way that genetics underpins evolutionary biology." Read more... [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]

11:13:10 PM •

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Not so intelligent designer

Fantastic and fascinating editorial turning the purported 'logic' of intelligent design against itself. The only drawback, of course, is that ID is only superficially about logic, so this isn't an argument that will carry any weight with anyone who finds ID appealing.

Intelligent Design's idiotic designer. Cory Doctorow: A fantastic editorial in this weekend's NYT shreds the idea of "Intelligent Design" (a pseudo-scientific, crypto-Christian-fundamentalist way of talking about Creationism without mentioning God) by taking apart the incompetence and foolishness of the supposedly intelligent designer.

In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.
Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?
The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones. Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases -- cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis -- the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless.
And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist...

Link

(via Kottke) [Boing Boing]

11:09:10 PM •

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You are an admin and you do need these lists

We're all admins today. Worthwhile stuff to know.

Are you an admin? You need these lists..

If you are a network or systems administrator, you’ll want these two lists from the SilentNight Network and Systems Information Pages (their descriptions, not mine).

The Default Password List: Here you will find a list with default usernames and passwords to Routers, Printers etc. This list is useful for system engineers and administrators, and let them easely find security holes, and provide unknowing customers with a little bit tighter network. If you have one of the items in this list, check it out and be sure to change user/pass to something not known by every hacker on this planet.

Most Used Passwords: This is the list of passwords you dont wanna use, In fact you would be quite stupid using one of these combinations cos the use is so widely spread that if anyone would try to compromise your system this will be their first try.

Hint: If you have a broadband connection and cable/DSL router on your home network, you’re an admin (and if you don’t, you’re vulnerable to a huge array of attacks)! If you run a WiFi access point, you’re an admin!