Maybe the Kessel run in twelve parsecs is actually correct…

I hate doing expenses – the mindless tedium of it all just kills me. So, I was procrastinating by catching up on Twitter, and found this little gem courtesy of Mark Hamill – Batman if created by Dr Suess at http://www.bitrebels.com/design/batman-the-joker-if-dr-seuss-created-them/. It's great, check it out.

That article links to another Dr Suess mashup, this time Star Wars: http://www.bitrebels.com/design/star-wars-if-dr-seuss-had-created-it/. Also great and worth checking out.

Anyway, the Star Wars one includes a reference to the (in)famous line from Han Solo about making the Kessel run in under twelve parsecs. As all good geeks know a parsec is a measure of distance, not time. (It's defined as the distance from the sun to an astronomical object which has a parallax angle of one arcsecond. Or about 3.26 light years, if that helps. Totally irrelevent to this discussion, but I'm a geek and have an uncontrollable urge to impart information.)

This line in the movie has caused a great deal of angst among geeks, because Han is talking like, "Check out my ship, it's so fast, less than twelve parsecs!" but we all know that it's not a measure of time at all, and so doesn't really make any sense.

Or does it?

The Star Wars universe makes good use of hyperspace as a way of travelling vast distances. Most people just assume it's some way of moving very quickly, an assumption that is aided by the streaky star visual effects.

But what if hyperspace means bending space to reduce the distance you need to actually travel?

Let's assume that the Kessel run is an actual distance of 100 light years. The Millennium Falcon can do it in less than 12 parsecs, or 39.12 light years. Maybe that's the new way to show how fast you are; you take a known distance and show what you can reduce it to. 

Enough of my rambling. Go check out those links.

Posted via email from Richii

Lost In Space’s Tufeld Dies

The actor who voiced The Robot from classic 1960s TV show Lost In Space has died at the age of 85.

Character actor Dick Tufeld passed away at a Los Angeles hospital on Sunday after a battle with Parkinson’s disease.

Very sad; I grew up on re-runs of Lost In Space, and always held out hope they’d try another movie, only this time one that didn’t suck.

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NASA close to approving first sci-fi flick shot in space • The Register

Millionaire game developer Garriott – aka Lord British in Ultima and General British in Tabula Rasa – shot the film during his 10-day tourist jaunt up to the ISS, while performing his other orbital duties. Without giving too much of the plot away, it involves a mysterious passenger who sneaks aboard the ISS for their own reasons, and it contains knowing nods to many of the greats of the science fiction genre. An audience’s-heads-in-frame bootleg can be seen here.

Pure awesome.

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Alcohol DOUBLES LIFESPAN, helps resist stress

Moderate levels of alcohol delivered an increase in longevity among test subjects in a recent study that Steven Clarke, UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry and senior author on a study published yesterday in the journal PLoS One, described as “shocking”.

After the conference I was at last weekend, I think I’m going to live forever.

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NASA shuts off Voyager 1′s central heating

NASA has switched off a heater on a part of the Voyager 1 probe, plunging the temperature of its one functioning instrument to below minus 110° Fahrenheit (minus 79°C) – well below the minimum temps of minus 31° Fahrenheit (minus 35° C) at which it was designed to operate.

And now the countdown until the events of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” come to pass. Be on the look out for V’Ger.

Posted via email from Richii

Careless care charity loses unencrypted patient data stick

A care provider with offices in the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland has committed to improving its data protection standards after losing a memory stick containing unencrypted patient data.

The charity, Praxis Care, lost the memory stick in August 2011.

The device held personal information relating to 107 Isle of Man residents and 53 individuals from Northern Ireland, which in some cases related to their mental health and care. It has not been recovered, according to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

It’s amazing that this kind of thing continues to happen. Encryption guys – it’s not difficult or expensive (especially compared to the cost of losing it!).

More interestingly, why was this data walking around on a USB stick in the first place? As well as encrypting data, people need to start looking at containing it. Why is someone trying to copy patient data? Are they authorised to do so? Is the device an authorised destination? DLP doesn’t have to be difficult or onerous to implement.

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NHS fined £375k after stolen patient data flogged on eBay

Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust told Out-Law.com that hard drives containing patient data had been sold on the auction website by a contractor it employed to destroy them. A spokesperson for the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said the watchdog had proposed fining the Trust £375,000 over the incident. The Trust has challenged the suggested penalty. “We were the victims of a crime,” Duncan Selbie, chief executive of Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust said in a statement. “We subcontracted the destruction of these hard drives to a registered contractor who subsequently sold them on eBay.

If you want something done right, do it yourself.

Sure, securely erasing hard drives can be time consuming… but it’s a lot better than a 375k fine and the loss of reputation and good will.

Posted via email from Richii

New delete option when using Google Sync on iOS devices

With Google Sync for iOS, the default setting when you delete email in your iOS Mail app is that Gmail will archive the message and not delete it.

A new option “Delete Email As Trash” is now available. When you Enable “Delete Email As Trash” for this device, pressing Delete in your iOS Mail app will delete that email from your device and send it to your Gmail Trash.

Finally!

My biggest complaint with using Gmail with an external client (eg Mail on an iPhone) is that delete doesn’t really delete – it archives. I don’t want it to archive, I want it to delete!

Sure, using the Gmail app or the browser view works around this, but that really doesn’t solve the problem.

Now, finally, you can configure the action from the Google Sync settings page on your mobile device.

Posted via email from Richii