Apparently I live with Nemi

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 11-22-2008

• It's confirmed: Matter is merely vacuum fluctuations
  Matter is built on flaky foundations. Physicists have now confirmed that the apparently substantial stuff is actually no more than fluctuations in the quantum vacuum.
  (tags: physics matter energy)
• Spiders get their space legs
  I, for one, do not welcome our new eight-legged orbital masters
  (tags: science cool spiders)
• Those cotton-picking maps
  Comparing maps of Obama-voters to maps of cotton production in the 1860s. Nice parallell
  (tags: maps politics history USA)

"Evil does not wear a bonnet"

Julie's putting together a Sims2 version of the flat, where apparently I'm about to burn to death because she forgot to install a fire alarm. Which just goes to show something - I'm just not sure what.

Today's been a nice quiet one - breakfast at midday, wandering into town to pick up some paper for our new laser printer (first major joint purchase - a HL5250DN), picking up some A6 laminate pouches for DnD power cards, and played some GH3. I've nearly finished medium, although I clearly need to play more in order to actually be any good at it. In a minute I may even turn off the TV and play some...

Geek question

I have a file on a web server. I'd like to back it up automatically every few days. What's the easiest way of doing it?

There are two possible problems here:
1) It's on a different port (almost certainly not a dramatic problem)
2) It's passworded - so that when you try to get to it a standard password popup pops up. I'd like to hope that most software would be able to cope with this too.

Any suggestions?

(Note - I run windows. Anything requiring me to set up a new OS in order to back up a file is not going to be simple/easy.)

ETA: Done! I downloaded wget, got it working on my home box, and then set up a cron job on one of the the domains I have hosted, to backup a database file from the other hosted domain. Turns out I can manage a _little_ complexity, particularly if it means I don't have to keep an eye on things :->

"It never did me any harm"

Subjects were recruited to play the role of a teacher trying to make a child arrive on time for school at 8.30am. They sat at a computer, on which it appeared that each day, for 15 consecutive days, a child would arrive at some time between 8.20 and 8.40.

Since this was a psychology experiment, the subjects were lied to: they did not know that the arrival times were entirely random, and predetermined before the experiment began.

Nevertheless, participants thoughtfully deployed punishments for lateness, and rewards for punctuality.

When they were asked at the end to rate their strategy, 70% concluded that reprimand was more effective than reward in producing punctuality from the child. It's a touching testament to their own beliefs about the world.

Via the ever-reliable Ben Goldacre.

It was, of course, only a matter of time...

The things you learn

I just did a geek test on Faceook:
Your Score: 65/100
You are geekier than:
64% of your Friends
91% of everyone on Facebook
Which I think tells you something about how geeky my friends are...