A Mind @ Play

Recent springs and bounds in technology have opened the floodgates to a wealth of information that once required millions of man-hours to collect, collate, evaluate and assess, if indeed it ever happened at all. Now all of that can be handled, stored and processed by computers, constantly being fed by millions of users who are often happy to give up snippets of their information for the tiniest of benefits. But what hidden potentials lie waiting among those mountains of bits and bytes? And who are the people forging the algorithms to find those golden nuggets?

Yet another victim, killed on the roads yesterday.

Just had a maddening time trying to work out why a Kindle 4 , which was to replace a Kindle 3, refused to connect to the family wireless. After trying all of the obvious – resetting devices, checking passwords – it was off to scour the web for a solution. All kinds of suggestions cropped up, relating to passwords or SSIDs with special characters, or wireless networks using channel 13, but none of them applied to our situation. Finally I hit upon a post which hinted that the Kindle 4, unlike its predecessor, doesn’t support WPA2 with AES encryption. Switching the router over to accept WPA/TKIP and WPA2/AES together didn’t make a difference, but the device finally logged in when I turned AES connections off altogether!

In recent years the media enjoyed regaling us with the search for the Higgs boson, but I’m sure many people wondered what was so special about Mr Higg’s boson that we should all be so interested in him finding it again, let alone curious about how he lost it in the first place. Postulate a new thesis or make a new discovery and you’re liable to have your name enter the vernacular. Found a company associated with a new invention, and the name may even become standard for the innovation. Yet at what point does it all stop being yours? We all learn about Newton’s laws of gravitation in the classroom, whilst some go on to read up on Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Archimedes’ buoyancy principle, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion – it all seems so predictable, until it comes unstuck with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Not the laws of physics, the laws of English.

Argh, you’re kidding me. Did the Realtek HD Audio Drivers 6.0.1.7245 really just copy everything it found in the folder with the setup file over to the Program Files directory? Not the files in the executable .zip file, not the files in a list, no, everything it could get its grubby digital hands on. So a quick driver update ended up copying 40 GB of crud between two hard drives. Reminder to self: clean out the TEMP folder more often!

Sometimes a little punctuation goes a long way.

I am a child, and the world is my crib, and everything within it is a toy, to be twisted and pulled, played with and tasted, and bitten, before finally being thrown out of the cot.