Happy New Year!!

We have made it through another wild year, and now we are faced with the blank slate of 2024. Just one day in, and all we can only speculate what great discoveries and advances will be made in the scientific fields this year.

But that is not why I am writing this article today. This is a time when people throughout the world look at making changes to their lives and routines, and I am no different. Some of you may have noticed a decline in the number and the depth of the articl...
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Some of my loyal readers have noticed that I haven't updated my websites in the last three months, and have been wondering why that is. I assure you that it is nothing to worry about.

In February I was approached by a high tech start up to provide some consulting work on deep learning in medical imaging, and some related topics, and it has been devouring all of my spare time since then. It is a really exciting project, but unfortunately I am not at liberty to discuss the details at this point....
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Welcome!

As many of you are already aware, for the past fifteen years I have been maintaining a series of scientific blogs in which I write simple reviews of complicated scientific theories and concepts, as well as articles summarizing recent news and research from the scientific community.

Within those articles I have often created very brief explanations for concepts in modern physics and related scientific fields. These often take the form of simple analogies or diagrams that simplify the id...
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Today's article is going to be very different from my usual writing, in that it does not contain scientific or mathematics news, but rather news of a more personal nature. Ordinarily I would keep my private life private, but enough of my loyal readers have been asking about my recent absence that I feel it is worth giving a few updates.

For those who have not heard, on April 13th I was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery. I had been having abdominal pains for a few days before, but early ...
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It is true, I am capable of reading a calendar and I am aware that Christmas and New Year's Day were over a week ago. I could bluff and argue that since my grandmother was Ukrainian I am celebrating the orthodox Christmas instead, but the real answer is far more boring. 
 
For reasons that I still haven't been able to ascertain, the company that hosts my blog on this site and one of my other websites suddenly closed down their blogging program on Christmas Eve. Because of the holidays I haven't...
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For just over a year now, I have been told by various people that some browsers and search engines were raising security issues about some of my older websites. This past weekend I finally had the time to explore this issue further, and I have found the explanation.

I have been maintaining both personal and professional websites for over twenty years now. Due to changing technologies and services, some of the javascript and PHP widgets that I wrote many years ago needed to access remote reso...
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With the beginning of the New Year comes the beginning of many other challenges and opportunities, and I will be sharing these throughout the year as plans become finalized. However my first big change is the creation of a new website, and the start of the end of several old ones.

As some of my longtime followers know, I setup my first personal webpage twenty years ago when I was just a first year student at the University of Victoria. In keeping with the technology of the time, it was a rathe...
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Some loyal readers will recognize this entry as a repeat from the last three years. Each year it gets a good response, and kudos from my readers, and so as before I must appease my loyal followers...

To all the students starting University, enjoy this time of your life. Long ago when I started, a prof told me that this is the start of your real education. Now you get to choose your own courses and your own field of study. It is entirely up to you to decide what to do with this chance.

I know fr...

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With the arrival of September, students around the world will be returning to classes this week. And for those who are starting out at college or university, one of the most important considerations is how to live on a budget. These are the years when one has little or no income, but must bear the expenses of living independently for the first time. While giving advice on living on a budget is far too expansive to cover in this blog, I can tackle one small aspect of student life by providing ...
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I feel compelled to take a break from my usual posts on interesting topics in science and technology to address an issue that has been raised this morning.

Apparently some security software has been warning people that my webpage has been reported for phishing. For those of you not familiar with the term, phishing is a scam in which people are fooled into submitting personal information or private banking information to a fake website. Sometimes these websites claim to be a bank or credit card...
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With the arrival of September, students around the world will be returning to classes this week. And for those who are starting out at college or university, one of the most important considerations is how to live on a budget. These are the years when one has little or no income, but must bear the expenses of living independently for the first time. While giving advice on living on a budget is far too expansive to cover in this blog, I can tackle one small aspect of student life by providing ...
Continue reading ...

Some loyal readers will recognize this entry as a repeat from the last two years. I have had requests from some of my readers to repeat it again this year, and so I must once again acquiesce to the masses...

To all the students starting University, enjoy this time of your life. Long ago when I started, a prof told me that this is the start of your real education. Now you get to choose your own courses and your own field of study. It is entirely up to you to decide what to do with this chance.

I...

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A few people have been asking me about the Heartbleed Bug in the internet, so I will pass along what I have been told so far.

This is a security flaw in the OpenSSL software used by many websites to secure their systems against unauthorized entry. The OpenSSL is basically software that is used by webservers to maintain security with transmitted information. It encodes any private information so that anyone snooping on the website won't be able to access information such as banking records or ...
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It would appear that over the last two or three days several people have been receiving spam e-mails from an account that I used to own but no longer use. I feel that I owe it to the public to explain this situation.

Most people happily use their email accounts and never question how they work. And although I won't give a long exposition on the SMT protocol or POP services, I can give a simple explanation. When you send an email message, the application that you are using adds header informati...
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A slight departure from my usual science and technology ramblings today - this entry is just to remind readers that my older articles are still available on this site at my old science blog page.

For those who are not aware of the story, last fall my website got hacked into and several blog entries were vandalized. I am confident that I corrected and repaired the damage, but I still decided to start fresh with a brand new blog. So feel free to look at the old blog, and re-read your favourite a...
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Today marks a new beginning for my science and technology blog.

As most loyal readers are aware, I have maintained a blog on my website for the past four years, and another one before that for about three or four years, in which I pass on and explain interesting news stories or current theories in the fields of mathematics, physics, medicine, and technology (although primarily particle physics and astrophysics).

As many of you also are aware, in the Fall of 2011 my website was hacked into and s...
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