Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Links: Sleep and "The worst Mistake"

Science News - Sleep Deprivation: The Great American Myth

An interesting article about sleep and sleeping pills.
And

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race another interesting article by a rather famous author looking at what may have been the biggest mistake in human history from a certain point of view.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Life expectancy Calculator

Apparently this is based off the sort of thing some insurance companies use to calculate health insurance.
Life expectancy Calculator

I didn't know the answers for all the questions so leaving them to the default I was informed I could expect to live for something like 92years. And that my biggest risk factor was being a Male.

It also claimed I was about 9 Kg's underweight.

P2P Apps

For those of you doing a lot of P2P downloading theres something to keep in mind about the difference between P2P apps like bittorrent and hub/network based ones like DC++.

Bittorrent is a fast way to download single files or collections of files. A BT download is hundreds of slow connections downloading different bits of the file to maximise your download rate. So you'll get one file fast.

DC++ on the other hand is more a fast way to download a large number of files. You have a number of slowish connections each downloading a different file till you max out your bandwidth. The result is you get a lot of files downloaded togeather in a bunch.

The important thing to keep in mind with this is for DC++ you want to download large numbers of files and to use the priority settings to group important files. If your just downloading a couple of files at a time your most likely wasting a good part of your available bandwidth.
With BT you only want to download one or two files at a time as if your BT client is opening up 40 connections per torrent your downloading. Then the number of connections increases dramatically with the number of files your downloading. If you had 10 files downloading at an average of 40 parts each that's 400 connections to the net. Do you really think your cheap $100 ADSL Modems going to be able to cope with that many connections plus your, email, RSS, Web Browser, IM and Widget connections, and the connections of any one else who uses that internet connection.

I don't think so!

Monday, March 20, 2006

EDGE: SPECULATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE By Kevin Kelly

Must be my day for finding interesting stuff to read on the net. Any way this is well worth a read for any one who has had any thing to do with any scientific or technological field. EDGE: SPECULATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE By Kevin Kelly