Australian Bioscience News & Views

Fight spam with one click!

It's just so easy! I love it, spam and hoax busting is a little hobby of mine. I'm nowhere near as proficient as some of my more determined and technopowerful friends, but I've always delighted in thwarting spammers. Now my little internet sport has become the right of every Australian resident.

SpamMATTERS is a handy little add-in for common email programs, created by the government, for the people of Australia.

You can download it, and the instructions guide one through installation with no grief, though I have to admit I didn't bother reading them, predicting it would be as painless as it was. In default mode, it only reports the offending piece of spam to the Australian Communications and Media Authority. Scrolling down the user guide page after the installation instructions, there is information on how to set it to delete the unwanted emails.

Ahh, the  simple pleasures of the internet!

Computing power

When your computer is idling, you can use those spare CPU cycles to contribute to a world of amazing scientific and social endeavours. The malariacontrol.net project is not currently taking new subscribers, but the gift of computing power can also be given to the Climate Change Experiment, a multitude of other climate change related research projects, protein structure prediction, another group is looking for similarities between proteins, the European Large Hadron Collider, FightAids@Home, the search for extra terrestrial intelligence, and Einstein@Home a search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors.

If none of that takes your fancy, there are a few good projects around that are pretty different. The ISBN database project has a multilingual database of books with well-defined remote access protocols and free individual access. The Worldwide Lexicon (WWL) project uses volunteer human translators to translate words and phrases between languages, with an emphasis on uncommon language pairs. Compute Against Cancer is a particular favourite of mine, and I also wish to check out Screensaver Lifesaver - another cancer one, The Smallpox Protection Project, and Stardust@home is just about to start looking for grains of interstellar dust in an aerogel particle collector which was returned from NASA's Stardust space probe to Earth on January 15, 2006. I switch between them sometimes, for a bit of variety.

Images of life

Lately, thoughts and conversation have returned to the former cultural links between the 'sciences' and the 'arts', or outlining sad consequences of the perceived gulf between them today. Though it's not all doom and gloom, maybe that artificial divide is gradually narrowing again.

I note 'biological', microscopic, technical images as decorative art reappearing in various places. The Mac Mini that serves as the web surfing & graphic novel viewing part of our media centre has a gorgeous screen saver of clear, beautiful, even elegant snaps of microscopic and hugely magnified parts of plants. These examples may appear too superficial to relate to cultural shift, but maybe the decorative aspects of domestic and work life indicate memetic connections in the wider population ... or so I hope. They certainly stimulate memetic connections in me.