Daily Archives: December 30, 2010

Things you might want to know about

The last Kodachrome processing machine, at Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas, shut down and will be sold for scrap. This is a bummer, because I think I still have some film laying around that I’ve not gotten ’round to getting developed. They figured out why Skype crashed earlier this month, and it has to do with a bug in a Windows version of Skype that users should have updated but didn’t. But don’t blame the users. They were using Windows, and there is no automatic updating process for software on Windows, like there is in, ahem, Linux. People who use unsecured operating systems such as Windows should not be allowed on large complex and critically important networks like Skype. The Majority of Americans believe that America is on Mission from God.

Android has a virus (a Trojan Horse, technically). Click here. Spam rates are dropping. That is all for now.

Falsehood: Is it ever OK to use the term “Missing Link”?

Today’s falsehood1 is the idea of “The Missing Link.” You’ve heard about The Missing Link. You’ll hear that some palaeontologist has discovered something and they tell us it is “The Missing Link.” Often, it is a supposed “link” between some ancestor of humans (a fossil ape, a monkey, whatever) and us humans. And often, you’ll also find that when the press reports a “missing link” the science blogosphere erupts with a torrent flowing over the phrase and the concept, about how there really is no such thing as “The Missing Link,” or that this particular report of such a link is spurious, or something else bad.
Continue reading Falsehood: Is it ever OK to use the term “Missing Link”?