If you’re like me, you failed to grasp the importance of this recent report in the New York Times. Much like the prediction of new elements using the periodic table, in the 1970s an engineer named Leon Chua predicted the existence of a fourth circuit element (the first three are resistors, capacitors, and inductors) that he called memristors — resistors with a memory. Their resistance varies depending on their history.

A few years ago Hewlett-Packard researchers studying titanium oxide found puzzling results that turned out to be due to memristors. Only at very small sizes, they found, does memristance become large relative to other effects. How easily you can walk through a room depends on where the furniture is. Memristors involve moving the furniture (atoms). If these new devices can be made practical (e.g., fast enough), they will provide memory much smaller and more power-efficient than current devices. But it’s hard to predict the impact of this discovery — it’s like discovering a new dimension.

I wrote earlier — sounding like an ad — that my new Bose QuietComfort 15 noise-cancelling headphones made me feel much better after a subway ride. The usual exhaustion was gone. Along the same lines, I recently wore the headphones during a one-hour flight. When it was over, I felt like I hadn’t flown at all — I’d been sitting in a chair for an hour. This had never happened before.

Don’t ever use Dreamhost to host your website. I’ve had trouble with them in the past but the current problem is way over the top.

The Shangri-La Diet forums were hacked. A file was replaced and caused the forums to malfunction. It was easy to figure out what happened. To fix it, I merely needed to replace the two bad files with the correct ones.

And I had a recent backup. No problem, right?

Yet I have now exchanged six emails with Dreamhost Customer Support and have yet to figure out how to use the backup they automatically made for me and which I downloaded. I suggested that I send them the backup so they could figure out how to use it and in response they said I should make another backup! They would work with that one! They’re willing to work with a backup I don’t want but not with one I do! Ridiculous.

More No wonder I couldn’t extract the file I wanted. It wasn’t there! And the tech support people had — judging from their emails to me — no idea this was possible!

:> :~) — I’m bad at emoticons. But I appreciate other people’s work. From an article about the Lehman report:

“So it’s legally doable but doesn’t look good when we actually do it? Does the rest of the street do it?” one Lehman employee asks another in emails included in the report. The answers, respectively, are yes and no, followed by a smiley face.

At Berkeley, one of my most unusual students was a psychology major named Sandy Tesch, who by then had risen through Red Cross volunteer ranks to be on their national youth council. A few years later she was head of the youth council. During college, she assumed that after she graduated, she would work for a non-profit. Now, however, she does fund-raising for the UC Berkeley library.

She won a post-graduate fellowship and during her fellowship year she met a woman who worked in fund-raising. She realized she liked it. Why? I asked. Because when you do fund-raising, you’re working with a lot of caring people, she said. They’re like the volunteers she worked with during her Red Cross years. Instead of giving time, they’re giving money.

Peter Hessler on Peace Corps volunteers.

The QuietComfort 15 headphones ($300) are Bose’s newest noise-cancelling headphones. I had two of an earlier model, the QC 2, because when they broke I couldn’t bear to be without one for two weeks. I used them while walking on my treadmill and riding the subway. BART is noisy.

The model numbers went 1, 2, 3, 15. And, yeah, the QC 15 is much better than the QC 2 and QC 3, which were about the same. The first time I wore them on BART, when I got out of the subway I noticed I didn’t feel exhausted, the way I usually did after a subway ride. I felt normal. The noise had been exhausting.

You may have heard that Madonna’s attempt to adopt a Malawi child was rebuffed by the legal system. A judge ruled against the adoption:

Madonna was devastated by the ruling, said witnesses, and shouted at her attorney, “What went wrong? How could this have happened?” when the judge announced her decision.

Yet the ruling doesn’t appear mysterious. There are clear residency requirements, which Madonna didn’t come close to meeting.

Did her lawyer tell her the truth? The outburst suggests no, but in any case the perverse incentives are obvious: The lawyer benefits from being hired. Painting a rosy scenario — saying “I can definitely get you what you want” — increases the chances of that.

What about doctors? Dermatologists seem to claim, as a group at least, that acne is unrelated to diet. The fact that certain groups of people with unusual diets don’t have acne suggests that this is wrong. Again, the mistake is highly self-interested. If acne is due to diet, you need to try different diets to figure out the problem foods. You don’t need to see a dermatologist to do that.