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Physicists tell us that only a small percentage of the universe can be seen directly. In fact, the vast majority of the universe is what they call "dark" -- composed of matter and energy that we know is there but that we can't observe, identify or analyze directly. The concept of "dark matter," firs...
Ever heard of Themistocles? In case you haven't, it's a tragic story. Themistocles was an Athenian statesman and general who lived around 500 B.C. He was one of the leading political minds of his time, and perhaps one of the most brilliant military strategists of his -- or any -- time as well. As...
Physicists tell us that time is not constant. Interesting as that may be for physicists, it's also a concept that the rest of us can get behind once we put a little bit of a different spin on it. I'm not suggesting that we should all get out our lab coats and play make-believe cosmologist. Instead, ...
Want to try an experiment? Part 1: Get yourself a crowd of willing co-experimenters -- about 20 to 30 -- and tell them that you're going to ask them a trivia question. Tell them you're going to read the question to them and when you count to three, everyone should shout out their answer at the same ...
Nobody likes it when people renege on a promise. You don't have to look very far to see how we as a society view people who lie, break promises or misrepresent themselves. In movies, the bad guy is always dishonest. In books, liars invariably get clobbered: Iago gets tortured, Claggart gets wallop...
Ever heard that story about the mother who lifted the car off of her son? I thought it was an urban legend until I looked it up. But apparently it's true: In 1982, Angela Cavallo saw her son being crushed by a 1964 Impala. Seeing that happen brought Angela to a state of panic so severe that she temp...
Have you seen that movie "Groundhog Day?" You probably have, but on the off chance that you missed it, it's the movie where Bill Murray's character -- who's kind of a jerk -- wakes up every morning to find that it's the same day over and over again. He's forced to relive the same day repeatedly, an...
"Do you remember where you were on Y2k?" Ask that of most IT professionals and you're almost sure to get a conversation started. While the non-IT crowd was off partying like it's 1999, many of us spent the new year in the office, on call or tied to our pager. Even those of us who weren't directly in...
Ever heard of a tarpan? In case you haven't, the tarpan is the ancestor of the modern domesticated horse. They roamed the forests and steppes of Europe and Asia for thousands of years -- all the way from southern France to central Russia. Over time, everything around them changed -- their habitat di...
It sounds tremendously obvious to say it this way, but applications are everywhere. Think about it. Your office suite, your e-mail reader, even the software you're using right now to read this -- these are just a fraction of the thousands -- if not hundreds of thousands -- of applications you use d...
It goes without saying that most IT shops operate in a high-stress, high-workload environment. As technologists, we have limited budgets, limited staff, and dozens of projects on our plate -- it often feels like there aren't enough hours in the day just to keep up with today's workload, never mind p...
The personal information of 100 million Americans has been compromised, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. There are a few ways to avoid joining that number or to get out of the club. In the case of financial data, you will want to monitor the account in question to make sure that no pur...
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