Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for September 9, 2019

Massive denial of service attack left wikipedia unreachable in parts of Europe and the Middle East; Moody's expects blockchain standards by 2021; MIT Media Lab insiders say the personal food computer is mostly smoke and mirrors; The most likely explanation for the Loch Ness Monster - A giant eel; Arguing that there are limits to what science can accomplish

Fresh Internet Content Daily: Welcome to my little corner of the blockchain

Straight from my RSS feed

Whatever gets my attention

Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

pixabay license: source.

STEEM Wikipedia says massive hack attack took down the website in Europe & Middle East - Starting on Friday, and well into Saturday, wikipedia was unavailable for users in "UK, Poland, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Italy". According to wikipedia, the problem was caused by malicious activities by unknown actors. The official statement didn't provide any details, but a German Twitter page said the attack was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which involves the use of numerous computers to flood a web site with more traffic than it can handle. (A 10% beneficiary has been set for @rt-international)

Research: Blockchain Technology to Be Standardized by 2021 - A report from Moody's was published on September 5. The report says that the firm expects industry blockchain standards to be published by 2021, and that it will be helpful for "future securitisations using the technology." as well as overall interoperability. Moodys says that the driving force behind this effort is the International Organization for Standardization.

The Epstein-funded MIT lab has an ambitious project that purports to revolutionize agriculture. Insiders say it's mostly smoke and mirrors. - Two employees of the MIT Media Lab say that the organization's "personal food computer" simply doesn't work. The goal of the device from the Open Agriculture Initiative is to "turn anyone into a farmer". The project's director said, "We design CO2, temperature, humidity, light spectrum, light intensity, and the minerality of the water, and the oxygen of the water". These insiders claim, however, that the devices are basically "glorified grow boxes", only two of the devices have actually produced plants, and many demos were rigged with plants that are grown using other methods. An e-mail was sent to MIT asking for comment, but no reply was received. (For more on Epstein and the MIT Media Lab, see today's "business, leadership, and management" post. I'll add a link after both are posted. Update: Link here)

Environmental DNA Evidence Suggests the Loch Ness Monster Could Be a Giant Eel - Led by Neil Gemmell, a team of researchers collected 250 samples from all over Loch Ness, and used it to create a DNA survey of the life in the lake. No DNA from unknown species was collected, ruling out the more adventurous theories about Nessie. The study also ruled out sharks, catfish and sturgeons as explanations. One theory that could not be ruled out was the idea that "Nessie is a giant eel. The article suggests that a large eel swimming at the surface of the lake might look like the backbone of a larger animal. A great deal of eel DNA was collected, so this seems to be the most likely explanation for "monster" sightings that date back to the 6th century.

The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience - Starting in the 1980s, John Horgan recaps a long list of scientists who have claimed that with advances in science, computing, and mathematics, we were on the verge of discovering a "theory of everything". But, Horgan points out that among a host of other shortcomings, the idea that everything can be explained by science suffers from the problem of infinite regress. Even if the laws that control nature were all known, the problem would remain to explain where those laws came from - and so on. Personally, I encountered this sort of overconfidence in my own career in 2004, when an executive predicted that by 2015, "Everything that could be digitzed would be."

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