How my PS3 helps to cure Cancer, Alzheimer, ALS and Parkinsons...

Bear with me:

If you suffer one of the diseases mentioned in the title, you have a good chance it was caused by what are called "badly folded proteins". An error in the formation-process of proteins result in "bad" proteins, which lead to a chain-reaction that cause the disease. If scientists can find out how the folding goes wrong, they might find a way to detect or reverse these "bad" proteins, and thereby stop the disease.

Scientists have modeled this folding process to be simulated on computers. But because proteins are very large (complex) molecules, this folding process takes very long (years and years) to simulate, even on the fastest computer.

Some smart people at Stanford University have developed a way to pick apart the complex folding-process, and to distribute the simulation over many machines. This is called "distributed computing". So instead of one machine that takes years and years, thousands of machines now only take months to accomplish the same task. A research team contributes a "folding" problem (usually some enzyme identified with a cryptic name) which is then distributed over many computers that participate in what is called the "folding @ home" network.

With the latest update of the PS3's software (1.60), a new program was added that takes part in this folding@home project. There are a few very cool things about letting you PS3 join this project:

1. When not playing games, your PS3 is used for a good cause. You feel you're donating something to science, without actually paying more than your electricity bill
   
2. The enzyme which is being simulated is shown in animated 3D. The program also shows who else in the world is using folding@home. Seeing all the dots light up on the black earth gives you a feeling you are part of something big. This even translated to my wife who said "wow" (always the ultimate approval of something-nerdy-but-cool).
3. The ranking of the PS3 in the folding@home project is now 3x higher than that of all PC's combined. It will be very likely that folding@home's PS3's will become "the worlds fastest computer".
   

Sony is often depicted as "evil" because of the restrictions they put on using their machine (makes sense because they're also a media company who have to protect their investments).
But adding the folding@home to the PS3 is surely a "good" thing. How cool would it be if one day the PS3 will be known as "the machine that cured cancer"?

Fingers (and enzymes) crossed.

By the way: Sony's latest update also solved the PAL playback (it can play my entire DVD collection now) . One more points for my PS3!

Risks, Fear and Bruce Schneier

I am not a person who easily subscribes to mailing lists or newsletters. I feel that just revisiting sites I like every now and then is more than enough to stay on top of things.

However, I do make an exception for Bruce Schneier. This man has such terrific insights into the world we live in, and presents our follies regarding security and risks so nicely (integrated into the latest news every month), that I read his newsletter religiously.

Americans seem obsessed with foiling plots a la "24", and I recommend you read his "Movie-plot contest", where readers are invited to send in their most exotic (fictional) terrorist attacks.
It is classic, hilarious, and illustrates beautifully that protecting against them makes no sense (or in Bruce Schneier's words "is a bad trade off").

In his latest newsletter, he has printed a draft of his latest essay "The Psychology of Security", an essay that describes why our fears often are so irrational, and not well-prepared for our modern world:

"[He] relates an incident when he and his wife lived in an apartment and a large window blew in during a storm. He was standing right beside it at the time and heard the whistling of the wind just before the window blew. He was lucky -- a foot to the side and he would have been dead -- but the sound has never left him:

But ever since that June storm, a new fear has entered the
mix for me: the sound of wind whistling through a window. I
know now that our window blew in because it had been
installed improperly.... I am entirely convinced that the
window we have now is installed correctly, and I trust our
superintendent when he says that it is designed to withstand
hurricane-force winds. In the five years since that June, we
have weathered dozens of storms that produced gusts
comparable to the one that blew it in, and the window has
performed flawlessly.

I know all these facts -- and yet when the wind kicks up, and
I hear that whistling sound, I can feel my adrenaline levels
rise.... Part of my brain -- the part that feels most _me_-
like, the part that has opinions about the world and decides
how to act on those opinions in a rational way -- knows that
the windows are safe.... But another part of my brain wants
to barricade myself in the bathroom all over again.[7]

There's a good reason evolution has wired our brains this way. If you're a higher-order primate living in the jungle and you're attacked by a lion, it makes sense that you develop a lifelong fear of lions, or at least fear lions more than another animal you haven't personally been attacked by. From a risk/reward perspective, it's a good trade-off for the brain to make, and -- if you think about it -- it's really no different than your body developing antibodies against, say, chicken pox based on a single exposure. In both cases, your body is saying: "This happened once, and therefore it's likely to happen again. And when it does, I'll be ready." In a world where the threats are limited -- where there are only a few diseases and predators that happen to affect the small patch of earth occupied by your particular tribe -- it works.

Unfortunately, the brain's fear system doesn't scale the same way the body's immune system does. While the body can develop antibodies for hundreds of diseases, and those antibodies can float around in the bloodstream waiting for a second attack by the same disease, it's harder for the brain to deal with a multitude of lifelong fears."

Check out the full essay at http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0702a.html

Now if only every American would read his newsletter...

Mount your ipod on your PS3 using udev

To mount your iPod on your PS3 under Yellow Dog Linux, follow the below steps:

1. Create a new file /etc/udev/rules.d/11-ipod.rules and add:
## iPod
BUS="scsi", SYSFS{model}="iPod*", NAME="ipod"
2. Create a link for the ipod to be mounted:
mkdir /media/ipod
3. Add the ipod-mount to your /etc/fstab:
/dev/ipod /media/ipod vfat users,exec,noauto,managed 0 0

Note: only works with windows-configured ipods.

CEO with a twist

After reading and hearing a lot of praise on Jack Welsh' management methods, this man has an interesting counter-opinion:

Change of any kind, of course, takes leadership, and in your book you take kind of a swipe at somebody whom many executives regard as the ultimate leadership icon: Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric. You characterize his policy of annually firing the bottom 10 percent of employees as "microterrorism."

Yeah. I'd say there are two sides to Jack Welch. Yes, he is a paradigm, and everyone looks up to him as being the most perfect example of an executive. He would never have been able to accomplish what he did if he were not a tremendous man, so that should not be under discussion here.

The model that Jack Welch presents, however, has problems, principally in its emphasis on charismatic leadership. This is true not only of Welch but also of Lou Gerstner, Michael Eisner, and Roy Vagelos of Merck. CEOs around the world are drawn like a magnet to the idea of having the influence that Welch had. But I don't think it's in the best interests of GE or any company to have a very strong charismatic figure, because the capacity to make succession happen is diminished. When succession time rolls around, the question is, Should the organization be attuned to the Neutron Jack way of doing things, or should it be attuned to what GE needs to be in the new world? That is the trouble with the Jack Welch paradigm.

My second objection has to do with a method of management that says, Here's what I need you to do, here's my vision-lock into it and you'll be all right. Work hard, deliver, and you'll survive, but if you don't play along, you're out of here. To my mind, that's a format of terror. By eliminating the bottom 10 percent every year, you're losing a tremendous investment, because these people could change places and be used in other ways. You're also sending the message up and down the line that your company is a military hierarchy. The Welch paradigm is, after all, a military paradigm; it is a Norman Schwarzkopf paradigm. What's the difference between them? None to speak of. Wouldn't Welch have been able to run the Gulf War? Perfectly. Would Schwarzkopf have been able to run GE? I'm sure he could have. There's something wrong with that; it shouldn't be that easy to make that interchange, because the creative business world needs a lot of components-ingenuity, free thinking, leaps of faith-that the military model doesn't value.

For the complete interview, see http://www.conference-board.org/articles/atb_article.cfm?id=255&pg=1

A very accurate observation from more than one hundred years ago:

"From the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, Naturalism and Supernaturalism have consciously, or unconsciously, competed and struggled with one another; and the varying fortunes of the contest are written in the records of the course of civilisation, from those of Egypt and Babylonia, six thousand years ago, down to those of our own time and people.

These records inform us that, so far as men have paid attention to Nature, they have been rewarded for their pains. They have developed the Arts which have furnished the conditions of civilised existence; and the Sciences, which have been a progressive revelation of reality and have afforded the best discipline of the mind in the methods of discovering truth. They have accumulated a vast body of universally accepted knowledge; and the conceptions of man and of society, of morals and of law, based upon that knowledge, are every day more and more, either openly or tacitly, acknowledged to be the foundations of right action.

History also tells us that the field of the supernatural has rewarded its cultivators with a harvest, perhaps not less luxuriant, but of a different character. It has produced an almost infinite diversity of Religions. These, if we set aside the ethical concomitants upon which natural knowledge also has a claim, are composed of information about Supernature; they tell us of the attributes of supernatural beings, of their relations with Nature, and of the operations by which their interference with the ordinary course of events can be secured or averted. It does not appear, however, that supernaturalists have attained to any agreement about these matters, or that history indicates a widening of the influence of supernaturalism on practice, with the onward flow of time. On the contrary, the various religions are, to a great extent, mutually exclusive; and their adherents delight in charging each other, not merely with error, but with criminality, deserving and ensuing punishment of infinite severity."

T.H. Huxley, 1892 - http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE5/ProCQ.html