Links for 29-11-2006
Cutters, cut-ups, India looks to Mars, brains react to brands, bomb-sniffing bees, corpse graffiti, mobile phone novel awards, swarmanoids…
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“This summer (June 2006) the British declared it “National Knife Amnesty.” The idea was that common folk were to turn in their illegal knives and other weapons with no penalty.” Nasty UK street cutters – can’t wait to walk home from work tomorrow.
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“The Father of beatnik, William Burroughs, devised a technique by which one’s writing may be cleansed of its cultural and semantic bias.” The Huge Entity has been at the Bug Powder Dust, methinks.
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“A more sophisticated version of the argument is that intellectual property laws are like drinking scotch: lovely, but only up to a point. Taken too far, they stifle innovation, by removing ideas from the public domain where they can be built on by later
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“India is already becoming very active within the space field, as they are already preparing to visit the Moon (although they only intend to do this via robots). Searching for life on Mars will probably raise India’s global status as a major space player.
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5 – Why We Worry About The Things We Shouldn’t…And Ignore The Things We Should — Dec. 4, 2006 — Page 1“Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think we’d get pretty good at distinguishing the risks likeliest to do us in from the ones that are statistical long shots. But you would be wrong.” Via SEED magazine.
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“Your brain may be determining what car you buy before you’ve even taken a test drive. A new study gauging the brain’s response to product branding has found that strong brands elicit strong activity in our brains.”
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“In their recent paper, “Why Anthropic Reasoning Cannot Predict Lambda” Starkman and Trotta find that different ways of defining the probability of observers in different universes leads to vastly different predictions of the cosmological constant.”
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“Psiphon is downloaded by a person in an uncensored country, turning that person’s computer into an access point. Someone in a restricted-access country can then log into that computer [...] using it as a proxy, gain access to censored sites…”
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“…sensors are attached around the edges of the surface. These pinpoint the position of a finger, or another touching object, by tracking minute vibrations. This allows them to create a virtual touchpad, or keyboard, on any table or wall.”
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“Scientists at a U.S. weapons laboratory say they have trained bees to sniff out explosives in a project they say could have far-reaching applications for U.S. homeland security and the Iraq war.” The power of Pavlovian reactions…
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“Why is design for hackability the same as design for long lifetime? Because the things a hacker wants to do to a device today [...] are the same things required to keep a device from getting obsolete years from now…”
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12 – Girrrrl power“…in an example to feminists of every species, the chimps are forming girl gangs of two to six members to protect themselves and stand up to their male attackers. And it appears to be working.”
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“Conjured up from thin air at the flick of a switch, this slippery blanket will help transport a fully laden tanker or container ship across the ocean at higher speed, and using far less fuel, than ever before.” Via Slashdot.
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14 – Clean it up!“For the past month, SL residents have come to Dragonfly Oasis and have been able to pick up a broom or wash a window to earn some lindens.” Exploitation of the disadvantaged in Second Life?
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“A Michigan public library has temporarily stopped offering internet access due to a “sudden surge” in people using the computers to surf porn.” Sudden surge, heh. I have a funny story along these lines, as it happens.
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“…the regulators aren’t shy in saying they believe traditional radio is a dying medium, and there’s little point in prolonging its suffering when the spectrum could be used for much better purposes, including radio replacements.”
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“Corpse graffiti, a form of emergence, is created by building a character with a clever name, i.e. “Mailbox” and dropping dead in a contextually-appropriate location, i.e. a mailbox in a high-traffic area.” More oddness via Warren Ellis.
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“Towa said she writes on a computer if one is around, but will also make additions to her mobile phone novels on her mobile phone itself. “Your thumb ends up hurting, though,” she told reporters…” Via Warren Ellis.
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19 – A dirty question“Who the warning is from, and who the intended recipient is, are another question entirely… And I don’t think it’s any accident that the British press have been very carefully pretending the phrase “dirty bomb” is not part of their vocabulary for the pa
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“To all the folks in the UK who’ve ordered copies of THE JENNIFER MORGUE and have just had their orders, at amazon.co.uk, canceled: Sorry.” Looks like my TJM ARC just increased in value…
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21 – The 33% Rule“A couple of months ago, I asked Do You Know When to Stop Reading? After that post, I thought I did. But I might have benefited from knowing The 100-Page Rule one month later when I was midway through Blindsight before I finally gave it up.”
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“…annual AIDS deaths will more than double, and smoking will account for one-tenth of all deaths worldwide. But the good news is the world’s poor will become wealthier, live longer and stop dying of infectious diseases.”
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“While on patrol, four cameras mounted in the robot’s head and shoulders record video, and its sensors detect the presence of humans, water leaks and fire. When the robot encounters something suspicious, it alerts a computer in the security room and sen
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“The use of different kinds of robots in the same team follows the division of labor in ant colonies extremely well … And if scientists can scale the robots to a much smaller size than an ant, the possibilities are endless.”
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“11-year old Arfa Karim Randhawa, the world’s youngest Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP).” You go, girl. Reckon she’ll rebel and embrace open source in her teens?
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