m. c. de marco

Via Daring Fireball: the FriendDA is an informal NDA for sharing Ideas with Advisors. That is, when you’ve dreamt up the next Big Thing and need a helpful friend to tell you whether it’s MacOS X (brilliant!) or Windows Vista (don’t quit your day job…), a FriendDA gives you moral protection from theft of your possibly brilliant idea.

But it’s only moral protection. For legal protection, you’d need a real NDA.

In my ongoing zombie research, I came across a three-part YouTube video of Jan Sleutels expounding on Greek Zombies: not your average shambling undead, but Julian Jaynes’ pre-conscious ancient Greeks. If you don’t have time for all three parts, you can get a draft of the paper at his website.

Via a mailing list: Spaceflight Now reports on a recent interplanetary collision.

“It’s as if Earth and Venus collided with each other,” said Benjamin Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a co-author on the paper. “Astronomers have never seen anything like this before. Apparently, major catastrophic collisions can take place in a fully mature planetary system.”

Technovelgy speculates on time-traveling tinkerers as a possible cause of the Large Hadron Collider’s recent malfunction. Somehow or other our imminent death by planet-sucking black hole has been postponed until the spring, leaving us all plenty of time to do those last-minute things that a species should do before meeting its Maker.

If you look quickly, you may see Google being sucked into the planet-eating black hole created by the Large Hadron Collider today.

Via a mailing list: BoingBoing reposts a brief excerpt from The Science of Star Wars by Jeanne Cavelos, my teacher from Odyssey.

Thus it seems the lasers we have today would be capable of doing many of the things we see in Star Wars. We could injure or kill people; we could burn structures or melt holes in walls; we could destroy targeted areas of spaceships, assuming we could keep a beam on them for long enough. The main difference between Star Wars lasers and ours is the size.

Via plime: Discovery News reports on the successful sequencing of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA. Neanderthal Park is not far behind:

Geneticist David Reich at the Harvard Medical School also agrees that the newly sequenced genome “is exciting and important.”