The ability of radiation to cause cancer is dependent on whether or not the radiation is able to alter chemical bonds. This occurs when electrons involved in bonding in a molecule absorb radiation with enough energy to allow them to escape – this is called ionization. The thing is, whether or not radiation is ionizing is based solely on its energy, not on its number, and as we saw above, its energy is determined entirely from its frequency.

Cool article on WordPress.com about Why Cell Phones Can’t Cause Cancer, But Bananas Can, which I read while eating (and finishing) a banana. It covers dielectric heating too.

Speaking of color masculinity, here’s Kanye on creativity, society, and color from his 2008 FADER interview:

I feel like all the words are in you, you’re just blocking yourself, you’re blocking your creativity. Society has put up so many boundaries, so many limitations on what’s right and wrong that it’s almost impossible to get a pure thought out. It’s like a little kid, a little boy, looking at colors, and no one told him what colors are good, before somebody tells you you shouldn’t like pink because that’s for girls, or you’d instantly become a gay two-year-old. Why would anyone pick blue over pink? Pink is obviously a better color. Everyone’s born confident, and everything’s taken away from you. So many people try to put their personality on someone else.

SxSW Interactive

Travel

So, is anyone else going to South by Southwest Interactive next week? This will be my first time and I’m incredibly excited, but also a little bit anxious since I have no idea what it’s going to be like. I’m going to be staying in Pflugerville with my wonderful sister but I suspect I’m going to spend most of my time in town.

If you’ve been before, I’d love to hear whatever tidbits of advice you have. If you’re going, definitely let me know and hopefully we can meet up. I’d love to start putting some non-Houston faces with the domain names :).

Search Updated

Events, Gallery, Meta, Web Standards

I’ve cleaned up the ht://dig search engine quite a bit, though I still have to hack it to be XHTML 1.1 compliant and fit better with the site, but after updating the index I got these interesting stats:

./htstat
htstat: Total documents: 11490
htstat: Total words: 1933258
htstat: Total unique words: 17660

The bulk of those pages are from the photolog, which is currently 5200 photos, but before the index was huge because my URLs weren’t very tidy and sometimes the same thing would have 10 different ways to access it. That’s still true a bit, but I’m working on it. Also I’ve been working very hard on a new project, but I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk about it yet.

Spring Broken

Personal

On this delightfully dreary day I’ve decided to bundle up for a spell with some hot tea and get some serious coding done. In fact that’s much how my day has been so far: code, code, code, surf blogs, (4 hours later) code. We’ll see how this goes…

Panels Finished

Events, Personal, RSS

My last panel was yesterday at 5 PM so now I’m taking as much time as I can to catch the panels that are left and learn a few things. Speaking was more stressful than I expected but most of the feedback was good. I still need to check out the web feedback though, as people are probably more candid online than when they’re shaking your hand.

Mr Mailman

Personal

To the tune of Mr Sandman

Mr Mailman
Where could you be?
I’ve got to leave
Way before three
Your lousy schedule
While isn’t suprising
Is gonna make my blood pressure be rising

Mr Mailman
Give me a clue
I’ve based my day
Around the things that you do

Please get in your little Jeeeeep
Mr Mailman
Bring my mail to meeeee

Usable Security

WordPress

Usable Security is a new blog about—you guessed it—the intersection of usability and security. This comes up every few weeks since I improved the error messages on the WordPress login (and bbPress) to specify which part of the login was mistaken, the username or the password. Security folks see this as a problem because you’re revealing more information but I see making the error message more generic as premature security optimization. Plenty of systems where login names are public or easily discoverable, such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, most email systems, and so forth, seem to be doing just fine.