Links for 19-10-2006
Antarctic weirdness, simulating nukes, talking to authors, why bees are so smart…
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“Rather than sewage bulbs, however, why not use the same technique to melt spherical chambers of a new, inverted cathedral one thousand feet below the Antarctic surface…?” This guy is some sort of random genius.
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“Note that the politicians aren’t talking about virtual items in the game that have been converted to real dollars or other assets [...] Instead, they’re looking at actually taxing the items within the game based on the perceived value of those assets.”
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“Moonbase planners hoping they might get oxygen and fuel as well as water from ice near the lunar poles have seen the idea melt away over the past two weeks.”
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“Consciousness is the defining feature of the human species. But is it possible that it is also no more than an extravagant biological add-on, something not really essential to our survival?” Long article; will probably take half an hour to read.
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“So why should any nation test-blast weapons anymore if supersimulators can do the job? Because, nuclear experts say, it has turned out to be tougher than most people thought to mimic the ‘real thing.’” Very weird concepts in here.
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“Their study revealed that the initial conditions of bubble formation can affect the dynamics of the singularity that occurs when a bubble pinches off a nozzle.” This means that black holes may ‘remember’ their formation states.
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“Borrowing a page from nature’s playbook, researchers … have developed a novel platform for the self-assembly of experimental hierarchical surfaces in a fluid.” Heavy science, but interesting nonetheless.
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“Never tell us that you don’t read or like books. Or that you only read non-fiction or John Grisham. Unless we write non-fiction or are John Grisham we don’t want to know.”
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“Even if a computer passes the Turing Test it will not really be aware that it has passed the Turing Test.” Nova Spivak is (literally) betting against hard AI.
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“I just left WoW permanently. I was a leader in one of the largest and most respected guilds in the world, a well-equipped and well-versed mage, and considered myself to have many close friends in my guild. Why did I leave?” Interesting.
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“A colossal collision between galaxies is seen in greater detail than ever before in an image from the Hubble Space Telescope.” Pretty pictures plus big astronomy equals w00t!
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“Backers of commercial space travel continue to make progress in building customer-carrying spaceships, pursuing novel ways to fly the public into suborbital space.” Okay, but when will the prices come down, huh?
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“The robots cannot communicate and must act only on what they can see around them. They follow simple rules to fulfil their task - mimicking the way insects work together in a swarm.”
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“…if we understand how their vision and memory system manages to be so elaborate in a brain the size of a sesame seed we will be able to use this technology to make more intelligent auto-pilot programs and robots.”
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“Jane Poynter spent two years in the world’s most famous artificial environment. Her new book, The Human Experiment, throws open the Biosphere 2 airlock to the world — the good science, the hard work and the raging conflict among crew members.”
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“The fear of losing money can be similar to the fear of physical pain, according to a study of brain scan images.” Well, duh. The methodology seems a little weird to me, but I’m no scientist, after all.
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“How could you possibly study the interior of a giant planet orbiting another star? Especially when that planet is so drowned in its star’s light that we can’t even see it?”
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“More than one in eight US adults finds it hard to stay away from the internet for several days at a time and about one in 11 tries to hide his or her online habit, according to a study released on Tuesday.” Panic! Hype! Technophobia!
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“…he has built an modeller in Second Life that [...] produces a self organizing atomic looking structure showing how (as in this case) multiple software systems could be interconnected.”
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20 - Ms. DeweyA search engine with a (foxy and snarky) human face. Probably no competitor for the big G et al, but much easier on the eye…
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“Madry got out his laptop … and looked over lands in Burgundy, near his research area. Immediately, he spotted features that, to his trained eye, resembled outlines of Iron Age, Bronze Age, ancient Roman and medieval residences, forts, roads and monumen
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22 - Russia From Space“These are photos of some industrial places in Russia from GoogleEarth.” Couple of shots of Baikonur in there.
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How do you track down pickpockets? “I stuff my wallet with paper and keep it in my pants pocket. Then I linger in prime tourist spots in foreign cities. Sooner or later, someone steals the wallet, and I try to steal it back.”
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Over a decade’s worth of NASA’s ‘Astronomy Pictures of the Day’ - you’ll never want for desktop wallpaper again! Link via MonkeyBites.
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“Archaeologists announced Friday that a monolith discovered Oct. 2 near Mexico City’s main square is perhaps the largest ever found in the city’s center …[it] is rectangular and measures nearly 4 meters on its longest side.”
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26 - EVE Insider“The preparations for the attack on the Interstellar Alcohol Conglomerate (IAC) began almost immediately after the Battle for 9UY.” Description of a vast in-game operation by an EVE player; the complexity is astonishing.
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Tags: links
October 19th, 2006 at 11:13 pm
Ms. Dewey—COOL! SEARCH FOR PHARMACY- if only i had such an assistant