Month: September 2022

ALPHA PARTICLE ERRORS. "A 2011 Black Hat paper discusses the real-life security implications of such bit-flips in the Internet's DNS system. The paper found up to 3,434 incorrect requests per day due to bit-flip changes for various common domains. Many of these bit-flips would probably be attributable to hardware problems, but some could be attributed to alpha particles." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_error View in LinkedIn

COSMIC RAYS: what is the probability they will affect a program? (Just like DNA mutations). " ""It depends in part on where the program is being executed and how well it's shielded. On Earth, the cosmic ray flux is much lower than in deep space, or even near Earth orbit. The Hubble Space Telescope, for instance, produces raw images that are riddled with cosmic ray traces." http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580933/cosmic-rays-what-is-the-probability-they-will-affect-a-program View in LinkedIn

NATURAL CODE MUTATIONS. “Studies by IBM in the 1990s suggest that computers typically experience about one cosmic-ray-induced error per 256 megabytes of RAM per month. Apparently, not insignificant." http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580933/cosmic-rays-what-is-the-probability-they-will-affect-a-program View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend and concludes on the theme of imperfection in nature. Humans have a 2,000 year old history of seeing the world through a lens that tells a story, and within that story is embedded the theme of perfection. Thus, seeing nature through that lens has colored our perspective. But nature is a different reality. Evolution is a messy business. Ninety nine percent of her experiments have ended on the scrap heap. Resolving the distorting lens and reality is our challenge today. View in LinkedIn

THE MASTERPIECE OF NATURE. "The largest and most perfect animals are now propagated by sexual reproduction only, which seems to have been the chef d'oevre, or capital work of nature." (Darwin, 1803). https://lnkd.in/dqHKSHG View in LinkedIn

PERFECT ADAPTATION. "Thus I can understand how a flower and a bee might slowly become, either simultaneously or one after the other, modified and adapted in the most perfect manner to each other, by continued preservation of individuals presenting mutual and slightly favourable deviations of structure." (Darwin, 1859). http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/content/60/11/2957.full.pdf View in LinkedIn

DARWIN'S RELATIVE PERFECTION. "Certainly he does not believe that any current species is perfect, but he frequently cites a kind of relativistic perfection. “How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one distinct organic being to another being, been perfected?” https://lnkd.in/dWKSysJ View in LinkedIn

RELATIVE PERFECTION. "In searching for the gradations through which an organ in any species has been perfected, we ought to look exclusively to its lineal progenitors. But the state of the same organ in distinct classes may incidentally throw light on the steps by which it has been perfected." (Darwin). https://lnkd.in/d97MFVz View in LinkedIn

CONTEXTUAL PERFECTION. "The kind of perfection that Darwin sees in nature is a kind of temporary, fluctuating perfection that exists between different beings and between beings and their environment." https://lnkd.in/dWKSysJ View in LinkedIn

COULD-BE-WORSE-PERFECTION. "Nor ought we to marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as far as we can judge, absolutely perfect; and if some of them be abhorrent to our ideas of fitness...The wonder indeed is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of the want of absolute perfection have not been observed." (Darwin). https://lnkd.in/dWKSysJ View in LinkedIn