Science Daily writes :

New research investigating the transition of the Sahara from a lush, green landscape 10,000 years ago to the arid conditions found today, suggests that humans may have played an active role in its desertification. […] As more vegetation was removed by the introduction of livestock, it increased the albedo (the amount of sunlight that reflects off the earth’s surface) of the land, which in turn influenced atmospheric conditions sufficiently to reduce monsoon rainfall. The weakening monsoons caused further desertification and vegetation loss, promoting a feedback loop which eventually spread over the entirety of the modern Sahara.

Some 40 authors are listed in the title of Persistent effects of pre-Columbian plant domestication on Amazonian forest composition in Science.

The TL;DR is: The Amazonas Rain Forest is a 10.000 year old garden, which has been left untended for the last 500 years after the Amerindian genocide of European conquistadors.

The extent to which pre-Columbian societies altered Amazonian landscapes is hotly debated. We performed a basin-wide analysis of pre-Columbian impacts on Amazonian forests by overlaying known archaeological sites in Amazonia with the distributions and abundances of 85 woody species domesticated by pre-Columbian peoples. Domesticated species are five times more likely than nondomesticated species to be hyperdominant.

Salted Doorknobs kill MRSA

Says this article at The Atlantic :

Superbugs like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, have wreaked havoc on the health-care system in recent years. […] How do you stop them? Frequent hand washing is one option, but that requires a behavior change, which can be difficult, even for hospital staff. Another option is to coat those frequently fondled objects most likely to carry the bugs—doorknobs, bed rails, toilet handles—with a special anti-microbial surface, like copper. […] Whitlock found that salt killed off the bug 20 to 30 times faster than the copper did, reducing MRSA levels by 85 percent after 20 seconds, and by 94 percent after a minute.

Commit to git

Erik Bernhardsson has been running Big Data on Git repositories of various kinds. He was trying to find out what the half-life of code is. That is, when you commit to a repository, your code becomes part of a project, but eventually other code will replace it and it will no longer be part of the current version. How stable is the codebase, what is the half-life of code? And why is it different in different projects?

The historic 8008 processor is 45 years old: It was released on the 13th of March 1972. Ken Shirriff has a blog post that explains features of the CPU, from a die photo.

Compared to modern CPUs, the 8008 is weird in multiple ways: The storage for the stack is on chip instead of in memory, and it is not accessed in linear order for weird transistor saving reasons. Things have changed since then a lot, but back then, a central processing unit was usually not a single die, but a bunch of discrete electronics on a board.

Some time ago, I gave a talk about boring technology at Booking , which means choosing the simplest, stable and maintainable solution you can get away with for solving a problem at a given scale.

Apparently Dan McKinley has similar views, which he explained in Choose Boring Technology . The writeup explains nicely what boring technology is, and why to prefer this. Never forget your mission, which is business, not technology. The technology is a necessary tool, but likely not your friend .

So Saturn has a ‘moon’. At least that’s what They want us to believe. But we know better.

Supposedly Pan , a Saturn Moon, as seen by Cassini.

BASIS , as we know it from Rhodan

In any discussion about cycling in Germany, sooner or later some geek who has been exposed to USENET shows up and then the ADFC #173 (http://bernd.sluka.de/Radfahren/fdf173.pdf ) is being quoted. That’s a thing from 1992.

The usual thing happened here on Facebook - a discussion about the SolaRoad Krommenie diverged into “Cycle Paths are stupid” and then linked over to the ADFC #173.

Here is a bunch of more recent material and links.

Work Chat said: [On boiling water with Gas instead of an electric cooker]

L> Yeah, they have 110 freedom volts. Or whatever weird unit they use for that.

I> So what is the imperial unit for Volt?

Let’s see. Volt in SI units :

That gives us $$ 1V = 1 kg * m^2 * s^{-3} * A^{-1}. $$

We can turn the kg into pounds and the square meters into square feet, but we can’t easily imperialize the seconds and Amperes. That leaves us with

Tech.co has an article titled Artificial Intelligence Startups Are Winning the Cybersecurity Race . The claim is basically first that old, pattern and signature based malware recognition is useless, and second, that new, behavior based malware recognition employing mystery AI technologies fixes things. The article closes with

In the near future, we predict that AI will be able to effectively fight against hackers by easily detecting repacked viruses. It’s just a matter of time. That’s why, more than resources or experience, companies who actively apply AI, especially cybersecurity companies, will ultimately be successful.