Today I Learned:
1) There was a time, during the mid 19th century, when three* major factions of doctors in the United States vied for legitimacy and control of the medical establishment, as it were… those three (very loose) factions were the homeopathics, who used homeopathy; esoterics, who used almost exclusively herbal medicine; and regulars, who practiced scientific inquiry, impeccable manners, and exploration of hypotheses… and were best known for their use of purging, bleeding, and mercury. *sigh*.
*this, I suspect, is a vast oversimplification — I think there were many, many schools of medicine at the time, but the most popular ones clustered into these three.
2) Chris Voigt, of synthetic biology fame, went to Caltech, where he worked on computational optimization of directed evolution under Francis Arnold. Who knew!
3) GCC has built-in protection against “stack smashing”, which is a method of computer attack* based on writing outside the bounds of an array to cause a function to return to the wrong (arbitrary) address. Futhermore, the output you get from GCC when you *try* a stack smash is surprisingly verbose! None of this “abort trap 6” business — it actually gives you a stack trace and tells you a fair bit about what variables are in scope, if you can decipher it. …and in case you’re wondering, I found this out because it turns out to not be terribly difficult to accidentally stack smash if an array is smaller than you think.
*though why this isn’t just called an “illegal operation” is a bit beyond me.
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