From David Brooks' summary of a symposium organized by Edge.org on "What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?"

Path Dependence
Decisions for any circumstance is limited by decisions taken in the past, even though past circumstances may not be relevant anymore.
“something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice.”

Einstellung Effect
Predisposition to solve problems based on past experiences rather than approaching each problem individually.
the idea that we often try to solve problems by using solutions that worked in the past instead of looking at each situation on its own terms. This effect is especially powerful in foreign affairs, where each new conflict is viewed through the prism of Vietnam or Munich or the cold war or Iraq.

Focusing Illusion
Bias that occurs when one aspect of an event is given too much importance, thereby affecting the accuracy of the predicted future outcome.
“nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.”

Supervenience
This is one of the harder ones. Supervene literally means to take place or occur as something additional or extraneous.
In essence it means, to be dependent on a set of facts or properties in such a way that change can occur only after change has occurred in those facts or properties.
Imagine a picture on a computer screen of a dog sitting in a rowboat. It can be described as a picture of a dog, but at a different level it can be described as an arrangement of pixels and colors. The relationship between the two levels is asymmetric. The same image can be displayed at different sizes with different pixels. The high-level properties (dogness) supervene the low-level properties (pixels).

Fundamental Attribution Error
Wikipedia explains it as the 'tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors.'
Don’t try to explain by character traits behavior that is better explained by context.

Emergence (Concept)
Ah! The easiest way to understand emergence is through fractals. It is basically, the way how complex systems arise from simple interactions.

This is interesting: One Bad Apple Spoils the Bunch: Exploiting P2P Applications to Trace and Profile Tor Users

Assume that a source wants to leak top secret documents anonymously. It is considered secure to do so through Tor using a privacy-enhancing browser plugin such as TorButton. However, assume that, at the same time, this source uses another insecure application on Tor. Is it then possible to associate the top secret documents with the IP address of the anonymous source? The answer to this question is yes!

Abstract: Tor is a popular low-latency anonymity network. However, Tor does not protect against the exploitation of an insecure application to reveal the IP address of, or trace, a TCP stream. In addition, because of the linkability of Tor streams sent together over a single circuit, tracing one stream sent over a circuit traces them all. Surprisingly, it is unknown whether this linkability allows in practice to trace a significant number of streams originating from secure (i.e., proxied) applications.

In this paper, we show that linkability allows us to trace 193% of additional streams, including 27% of HTTP streams possibly originating from “secure” browsers. In particular, we traced 9% of all Tor streams carried by our instrumented exit nodes. Using BitTorrent as the insecure application, we design two attacks tracing BitTorrent users on Tor. We run these attacks in the wild for 23 days and reveal 10,000 IP addresses of Tor users. Using these IP addresses, we then profile not only the BitTorrent downloads but also the websites visited per country of origin of Tor users. We show that BitTorrent users on Tor are over-represented in some countries as compared to BitTorrent users outside of Tor. By analyzing the type of content downloaded, we then explain the observed behaviors by the higher concentration of pornographic content downloaded at the scale of a country. Finally, we present results suggesting the existence of an underground BitTorrent ecosystem on Tor.

Here's a one-liner that will save some time. Uses sed, uniq, sort and of course regular expressions.

yum remove `yum search enlightenment | awk '{print $1}' | sed -e 's/.\(x86_64\|i686\|noarch\)//' -e '/^[:=]/d' -e 's/\(Loaded\|font-manager\)//' | uniq | sort`

What does it do?

It uses yum to remove all packages that are related to the Enlightenment Window Manager.

It does this by searching the package lists for the word enlightenment, prints just the first word, filters out unnecessary stuff, lists only the unique ones and finally sorts the result. This resulting list of packages is then passed on to yum to remove.

This is not what HTTP Status codes are intended for:
https://grepular.com/Abusing_HTTP_Status_Codes_to_Expose_Private_Information

Useful, but creepy!

Credit: Bruce Schneier (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/02/hacking_http_st.html)

In a world of Arnold Schwarzenegger's and Sylvester Stallone's, people like Franz Kafka or J.P. Müller stand out.

My take: Müller's system combined with yoga and meditation might be the perfect exercise system.

From the article:
The exercise guide, which promised that just "15 minutes a day" of prescribed* exercise would make "weaklings" into strong men (and women)
[...]
Müller wasn't interested in building muscle mass through dumbbells.

Source: Franz Kafka, J.P. Müller: The exercise system that swept Europe in the early 1900s. (Sarah Wildman - Slate Magazine)

Today the W3C released an official HTML5 logo. Its a call to rally forward the advancement of the HTML5 spec.

Just as quickly, the awesome designer Jen Simmons branded the HTML5 Logo for Drupal.

Those are the shiny new logo's you see on top.

I'm using the Sky Theme, which uses HTML5 and CSS3. It still gives you some ugly code, but it is more or less HTML5 compliant. I've made some modifications here and there, mostly to the CSS, but I want to do a complete rewrite that gives pure HTML5. I'll be working on that shortly. After all this is the future!

Btw, both these logo's are licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

I upgraded the site to Drupal 7. The upgrade was smooth. I had to disable some modules that I used on the old site. I didn't have much use of them, so might as well keep things simple.

Some things still need to be fixed. Like the error reporting and logging. I'll get around to that eventually.

But for now, go Drupal!!

Over at O'Reilly Radar, Andy Oram tackles the possiblities of a free software cloud.

I like how he defines 'cloud computing' as evolved from the concepts of time sharing and remote backup. [1] It does make sense.

[1]Oram, Andy (December 15, 2010). Defining clouds, web services, and other remote computing. O'Reilly Radar. Archived from the original on 2010-12-19. Retrieved: 2010-12-19.

An old but thought provoking article from the February 1924 issue of The American Magazine - Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men.
Simply put, genius is overrated. So is perfection.

This is where I found the article. (Tao Yue explains how he discovered this gem).
http://taoyue.com/stacks/articles/brilliant-men.html

In case, you just want to read the article.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_I_Never_Hire_Brilliant_Men

Uploadprogress is a useful php extension that displays the progress of a file upload.

Till recently I assumed that you couldn't set it up under a shared hosting environment. I'm glad that I was wrong.

This comment in the Drupal forums gives step-by-step instructions on how to do it. (PECL uploadprogress on shared hosting)

I'll have to document the entire process for archival purposes. But some other time. For now its all there in that link.