George Boole at the intersection of science and faith, plus having his house restored

Great article on the views of George Boole (many of them personal) by William Reville, an emeritus professor of biochemistry at University College Cork: available here. Interestingly, George Boole's (obviously former) residence, once a derelict building in Cork City is to be restored as part of the Year of George Boole, announced by UCC President Michael Murphy.

Elegant Email Spam Deterrent

Have you ever found yourself doing something like this on one of your webpages/blogs/etc...

"Contact me at your [dot] name [at] domain [dot] com", instead of "Contact me at your.name@domain.com"

...because clearly the latter (on a publicly accessible page) would have your inbox (or hopefully spam folder) crammed with junk in short order?

Try this:

<div style="float:left">
Contact me at</div>
<div style="text-align:left;direction:rtl; unicode-bidi:bidi-override">moc.niamod@eman.ruoy
</div>

It will display in a web browser as "your.name@domain.com", but... try copying the displayed text and pasting it into Notepad/Wordpad/etc. It pastes backwards, and is useless - particularly to robots that try to rip your email address from the document source. (Just don't make it a link!)

This method is of course still exploitable, bit it will avoid your email address from being picked up by poorly written code, of which 99.9% of malicious code is. Additionally, it is as safe as (or more safe than) "your [dot] name [at] domain [dot ] com".

Done!

IBM Pushes Atomic Depths of Data Storage

On January 12, IBM scientists published an article in Science describing a technique that can store 1 bit using just 12 atoms of iron. Modern storage devices typically use on the order of 1,000,000 atoms to store 1 bit. Beyond this, science will have to push through the atomic domain and into the sub-atomic to significantly increase storage density. Too bad it was just one month late to make the 6th annual IBM 5 in 5. Will this month be too long ago come next December for this discovery to make 2012's 5 in 5? If so, 2012 will be an exciting year indeed. For more from the horse's mouth see this link. Click here for the Science abstract.