MousePotatoPower

There are lots of password checking websites/utilities that can be found on the internet.  And they all use a different set of rules for determining if your password is strong or weak.

Password Strength Checker uses it’s own set of rules, but it is the most thorough set of rules that I have seen.  Check it out and rate your passwords.  My strongest password only rates 38%.

Tip: you get severely penalized for having a chain of similiar characters (lower-case, upper-case, or numbers). abc, xyz, dnr OR MTV, PNP, JKL OR 123, 1982, 143, etc.

Another tip: if your password can be found in a dictionary, change it immediately.  using a word that is in a dictionary is about as insecure as you can get.

You’ve heard of the human genome project, an effort to identify all of the genes in human DNA.  It took 13 years of number-crunching by computers to complete it.

Well, somebody got the bright idea to start a Music Genome Project.  This may not provide any scientific breakthroughs, but it is quite amazing.  By identifying 400 different traits in music and having musicians listen to and analyze songs, a song’s “genome” can be identified.

What good is a musical genome?  Well, take a look at Pandora Radio.  Give the website an artist that you like and Pandora Radio will feed you a few songs by that artist.  Nothing fancy, iTunes can do that.  Well, keep listening and you will get music that is “genetically related” to your favorite artist.  You really have to hear it to believe it…pretty impressive.

I listen to a little bit of J-pop and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Pandora’s database even has Japanese music.

Pandora has partnered up with Logitech and Sonos to give you access to Pandora via Logitech’s Squeezebox and the Sonos Digital Music System.  So you can listen to music you like without a computer.  There is even an option to use your cellphone!  I don’t have an unlimited data plan, so that’s not up my alley.

There are licensing issues and Pandora is only available in the US.  Those of you that are “international” are just out of luck. 

Michio Kaku is a kind of strange Japanese guy with killer English skills. He’s a theoretical physicist. When he appears on the Discovery Channel, he is usually described as a futurist…and he has some pretty weird ideas about the future.

This is a clip from a BBC documentary. Michio Kaku doesn’t appear in this clip, but it’s his voice that is narrating it.

The first part of the clip shows an experiment trying to demonstrate time slowing down (or at least the perception of time slowing down). The second part is another experiment about rats, drugs, and time perception. The rat experiment made me laugh AND be in awe at the same time. I can just imagine a rat on cocaine tweaking out and the rat on marijuana getting stoned. LOL