Riemann hypothesis; NRAM; stem cells; no speed record; heavy Higgs; more

[unixronin]

Riemann hypothesis proved?  Purdue University mathematician Louis de Branges de Bourcia, the mathematician who proved the Bieberbach Conjecture, claims to have a proof, according to a press release from Purdue.  The claim is regarded with some skepticism, as apparently many people consider him a bit of a crank.  You can find his proof here.  (Capsule summary of the Riemann hypothesis:  All non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function, a function on the complex plane, lie on the line 0.5+bi.  Trivial zeros are those at even negative integers: -2, -4, -6 etc.)

A nanotube never forgets:  Nantero has announced a partnership with LSI Logic to develop manufacturing technologies for NRAM, its carbon-nanotube-based non-volatile RAM.  NRAM can already switch in half a nanosecond, 20 times faster than the fastest silicon-based RAM, and could offer storage densities as high as terabits per square centimeter within the next few years, a thousand times the density of conventional RAM.  Being non-volatile, NRAM will need no refreshing, and should have low power consumption.  Nantero predicts that NRAM will eventually replace not only all current forms of RAM, but hard disks too, and in fact it's possible to foresee it replacing all existing rewriteable storage media if it succeeds.  (I wonder if it's EMP-hard?)  Links about NRAM here; Nantero homepage here.

Ronald Reagan's death has apparently spurred Congress to re-examine stem-cell research.  A majority of senators now urge liberalization of George W. Bush's policy.  Bush, however, says "Forget it, it ain't happening."  Congress is not expected to challenge Bush on the issue in an election year.  Much of the debate still seems to be centered on the Religious Reich-fostered misconception that all stem cell research is based upon killing human embryos, whereas more and more, research seems to indicate that stem cells are everywhere if you know how to look for them.

Meanwhile in Tunisia, a British attempt to set a world speed record for electric cars at the Chott-el-Jerid salt flats failed due to humps caused by groundwater.  No other suitable track long enough and smooth enough for the ABB e-motion vehicle to reach its top speed could be found, so they say.

The elusive Higgs boson continues to elude physicists, but at least now they think they know why.  A search at the Large Electron Positron Collider at CERN, searching from the Higgs boson's predicted mass of 88GeV up to the LEP's 114GeV limit, was abandoned in 2001 after it failed to find the Higgs.  Now a new study based upon the D0 experiment at Fermilab indicates that the most probable mass of the Higgs boson is 117GeV, and it could be as high as 251GeV.  This almost certainly puts Fermilab's Tevatron out of the running to find it, with the new best contender (after the cancellation of the SSC) being the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, due to start up in 2007.

Towards the other end of the size scale, Philip Kaaret of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has discovered a middleweight black hole of 25 to 40 solar masses, a class hypothesized but not previously known to exist.  The discovery was made using observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the XMM-Newton spacecraft.

Closer to home, the Cassini probe is scheduled to make a flyby within 2000km of Phoebe, the outermost of Saturn's major moons (and Saturn's only retrograde moon) at 1930GMT tomorrow (1430 EST, 1130 PST).  Cassini should be able to resolve surface features of Phoebe as small as 15 meters.

A 3km-long ice core drilled from Antarctica has allowed climatologists to compile a complete record of Antarctic temperatures stretching back 740,000 years.  On the basis of this core, they predict that the Earth's climate will remain fair for the next 15,000 years.  However, I humbly venture to suggest that their 740,000-year ice core is not going to take into account the impact of human industrialization.

The Register reports that 80% of spam now emanates from zombie networks of trojanned Windows PCs, according to a new study by Sandvine.  Gee, I'll bet that came as a shock, huh?  ZDNet also chips in on the subject, reporting that 76% of email MessageLabs scanned in May were spam, and claiming that Russia and China are responsible for much of the current wave of spam.  Steve Linford of Spamhaus predicts that spam will soon be 90% of email, but ZDnet seems to have garbled when he predicted it to happen.

"While the UK and US put the concerns of the direct marketing industry ahead of the interests of citizens, this problem will continue to get worse. Unless things change drastically, we predict that 80 percent of email will be spam by December this year, and it's very likely to go to 90 percent by this summer," Linford warned.

More pandas:  A new, more accurate census has shown a 45% rise in giant panda numbers, from 1100 to 1590.  The WWF cautions that the improved numbers indicate inclusion or previously unknown panda populations higher and deeper into panda habitat, and do not necessarily mean the panda is out of danger.

Last but not least, researchers at the University of Liverpool have discovered a gene (called E2F3) which appears to be key to identifying aggressive prostate cancers.

Comments

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Of course the WWF warns that, they are just like the NAACP. If they run out of victims, their funding goes away.

</bitter>

I would like to say that Microsoft should be held accountable for the spam problem, but it feels like blaming gun manufacturers for gun deaths.

Then again, I suppose this is due to flaws in the product, whereas with guns, it's people complaining that the worked.

-Ogre

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think it's more people complaining that they worked for the wrong people, or that they exist at all, and anyway, that creepy guy down at the end of the street with the artificial leg who always flies the US flag and has "LT CMDR" plates on his car has one. What does that LT CMDR mean, anyway? It's got to be some kind of nutball religious cult or something. He has scary eyes.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

My boss hangs out on one of the major anti-spam lists, and when somebody posted the Register article, the head anti-spam dude at AOL (who has really gotten zealous about it; I haven't gotten AOL spam in YEARS) said, "That's bogus, our figures indicate 89%." My own figures don't reflect ZDnet's findings; the amount of Chinese spam, while still significant, has gone down; a goodly percentage, though, is still coming from Korea, and from Windows zombies scattered around the globe, principally France, Poland, Brazil, and Japan. (No, I don't have precise figures, this is just me having watched /var/log/mail like a hungry vulture with OCD for the last month. :)

You're a rabid anti-spammer, what're you showing? Do you bother with stats?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Truth to tell, I don't bother trying to track down where every last spam comes from. I'm much more interested in seeing that none of it comes through. The less I have to actually look at it to accomplish that, the happier I am.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

What're you running for an MTA these days? I've got a fairly simple set of checks for Postfix that nabs, oh, 90-95% of it before it ever hits Bogofilter... I'm VERY happy about that. I get the occasional false positive, which is why I watch the logs the way I do, but it only gets that if some doofus doesn't have their DNS set up right...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Postfix with a carefully selected set of RBLs and filter rules, backed up by SpamAssassin and DSpam. The RBLs take out 90% or more of my spam right at the SMTP port, and I get a report on those every night summarizing what was blocked from where to what address for what reason, then DSpam takes out around 90% of what's left. I'm dropping SpamAssassin, though; it hasn't caught a single spam in probably six months or more.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

So you're seeing the same things I'm seeing.

Which tells me something I already knew empirically for myself but didn't have outside proof:

Spammers are STUPID. And, happily, predictable.

[juuro.livejournal.com]

I haven't done the header backtracing. Simply by monitoring the fluctuation of rate of incoming spam, I would say that the American continent still has strong representation. On weekdays, a major wave arrives hour or two after I'd expect computers to be started in the Americas.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I don't think the claim was that all the originating machines are in Russia and China. I had the impression that what was meant was that hackers in Russia are building up zombie networks of trojanned PCs, many of which are undoubtedly in the US, and then selling or renting their zombie nets to spammers. Thank you Bill Gates.

Microsoft delenda est.

We have periodic problems in our department

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

Some ignoramus will find out that we do (gasp) stem cell transplants, but not know where we get the things (from the patients, from their family members, or from unrelated, volunteer, adult donors). They'll call up and grouse. I fielded one of these calls once, and after I'd explained these things to the woman and left her with nothing to legitimately grouse about, she hung up, in a serious huff. Grrrrrrrrrr........

Re: We have periodic problems in our department

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Why, I'm ashamed of you. Robbing that poor woman of her anticipated righteous rant. Rantus interruptus is a serious condition -- why, she could have burst a blood vessel!

Seriously, yeah, sometimes you get people who get themselves just so worked up at the opportunity to vent their righteous wrath at someone, then they discover that they don't actually have anything to rant about after all because what they wanted to rant about wasn't actually happening at all, just like yours.
And instead of thinking "Oh, good!", they think "Humph. Grumph. Rotten cheats. That's not fair!"