July 2007 Archives

Andrew Sullivan in The Daily Dish on how the adoption of tea as England's national beverage in the eighteenth century may have dramatically reduced the incidence of waterborne diseases.

Conway's Game of Life is a simple computational game in which "cells" are either "alive" or "dead" based on their proximity to other cells — too few neighboring cells cause a cell to "die" from isolation and too many from overcrowding. The game is interesting on multiple levels. It was designed to show that an initial pattern could be self-replicating based on simple rules. As an analytical tool, it allows for analysis both at the cellular level and at the level of patterns, in much the same way that biological organisms can be analyzed. In another twist, Life is "Turing complete" and can function as a computer.

Hendrik Hertzberg on why Dick Cheney is one of the most evil men in America today.

The Darksider: Comment: The New Yorker

I recently applied Service Pack 2 to a Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 and received the following error message: "Setup could not verify the integrity of the file Update.inf. Make sure the Cryptographic service is running on this computer." The good news is that Microsoft has good documentation of the problem. The bad news is that it took 11 steps to fix it.