Technology
clock | August 23, 2009
Does your iPhone have a tape measure? Eh? How can you beat that?
Hat-tip: Science Lush
clock | August 22, 2009'How to get strangers to talk to you' instead of 'How to talk to strangers'? I find this blog post and slide-show quite interesting. I see how it may apply to introverts - and I sure am not one of them - but I can also see how much of it applies equally well to extroverts like me, almost as a reminder to keep one's over-extroverted mannerisms under control:
The Shy Connector
View more documents from Sacha Chua.
drorzel | August 22, 2009Via Bora on FriendFeed, a cute little art project from MIT that takes a name, scans the Web for mentions of that name, and produces a color-coded bar categorizing the various mentions of that name. Here's what you get if you put my name in:
You can click on it for a bigger image, that makes the labels easier to read (these are screencaps edited in GIMP, because in true MIT Media Lab fashion, the whol site is a Flash thing with no way to link directly to anything). It's nice, and all, but there's something a little bit funny about it. Something... missing. Let's see if we can't illuminate the…
grrlscientist | August 21, 2009tags: Personas, Online Personality, Online Information, technology, art
GrrlScientist Personas [larger view]
Personas is an interesting program that searches for online references to you and uses it to create a piece of art that describes you. To do this, it analyzes these references for repeated words and phrases and builds a graphic (like the one you see above) that "describes" you. It's really interesting because you can watch the process as it builds this picture and gives you some food for thought regarding the sorts of information that is "out there" about you. It's almost as…
pharyngula | August 21, 2009I hope not, but they have filed one of those ridiculously broad, sweeping patents that covers a big chunk of basic techniques in the field:
The patent, filed by Microsoft researcher Steve Ozer in July 2007 and recently discovered by a graduate student at the University of Texas in Austin, claims ownership of several common phylogenetic methods. At its most basic, however, it seems to patent identifying any evolutionary relationship from sequences: "receiving a plurality of sequences across a plurality of species [and] mapping at least a portion of the plurality of sequences to an…
razib | August 21, 2009Switched back to Firefox from Chrome. I've been using it for the past 2 days and there isn't a discernible difference in speed. I got tired of some of Chrome's minor bugs which emerge in AJAX driven websites which haven't been test-driven on that particular browser, so I thought I would see if version 3.5.2 had closed the speed-gap. Seems like it has. At least with only a few extensions.
clock | August 21, 2009Yesterday PLoS and Google unveiled PLoS Currents: Influenza, a Google Knol hosted collection of rapid communications about the swine flu.
In his blog post A new website for the rapid sharing of influenza research (also posted on the official Google blog), Dr.Harold Varmus explains:
The key goal of PLoS Currents is to accelerate scientific discovery by allowing researchers to share their latest findings and ideas immediately with the world's scientific and medical communities. Google Knol's features for community interaction, comment and discussion will enable commentary and conversations to…
pontiff | August 20, 2009I Am Poor, the $0.99 iPhone app:
The mac & cheese, Ramen noodles, and tuna is my artistic rendition of what poor college students eat with their limited funds.
The icon on your iPhone or iPod Touch always reminds you (and others when you show it to them) that you were able to afford this.
But, we all would like to get a little richer so tapping on the info button will let you read on old classic by P.T. Barnum called 'Art of Money Getting' to give you some sage advice to help you increase your wealth.
Barnums "Golden Rules for Making Money" found in 'Art of Money Getting' will pay for 'I…
razib | August 17, 2009Check this out from Google Trends:
Did Facebook hit an inflection point in early 2009? Google must have much better data sets, probably one reason Hal Varian left Berkeley for Google.
edyong | August 17, 2009In a Swiss laboratory, a group of ten robots is competing for food. Prowling around a small arena, the machines are part of an innovative study looking at the evolution of communication, from engineers Sara Mitri and Dario Floreano and evolutionary biologist Laurent Keller.
They programmed robots with the task of finding a "food source" indicated by a light-coloured ring at one end of the arena, which they could "see" at close range with downward-facing sensors. The other end of the arena, labelled with a darker ring was "poisoned". The bots get points based on how much time they spend near…
clock | August 15, 2009A run-down of good recent stuff, highly recommended for your weekend reading and bookmarking:
PLoS One: Interview with Peter Binfield:
...In my view PLoS ONE is the most dynamic, innovative and exciting journal in the world, and I am proud to work on it.
In many ways PLoS ONE operates like any other journal however it diverges in several important respects. The founding principle of PLoS ONE was that there are certain aspects of publishing which are best conducted pre-publication and certain aspects which are best conducted post-publication. The advent of online publishing has allowed us to…
grrlscientist | August 15, 2009It is rare when I manage to break my own blog. Like most people, I have managed to break my blog by doing truly stupid things like deleting the main template, for example, but I've never managed to break it by adding a plugin to Firefox, so this is the reason I mention it here: so no one else will do the same thing I did and then find themselves dead in the water for a couple days as a result.
The Sage-Too plugin -- an RSS blog and newsreader -- was the culprit. The strange thing is that adding this plugin not only destroyed my ability to publish blog entries using Firefox, but it also…
cevans | August 13, 2009
Recently, Rhizome.org invited me to contribute a long-form article to their Rhizome Writer's Initiative, a new program designed to give emerging and established writers the opportunity to pontificate on the world of new media arts. I was glad to do it, especially when I realized that the exhibition I was to review is called "Beam Me Up" and that the themes it dissects coincide neatly with my recent re-appreciation of Star Trek. I include my finished article here on Universe because I think some of the ideas discussed in it dovetail well with the recent topics here--systems, complexity,…
gregladen | August 13, 2009I am told that all Macs come with a three button mouse. I'm not sure I believe that, but it is what I'm told. But to me the three button mouse on a Mac represents one of interesting cultural features of Mac users. Years go, when I was arguing with my friend Mike about which was better, Windows or Macs (Linux was not really an option at the time), he kept insisting that Macs were better for all sots of reasons. After he listed a long list of made up (I assume) reasons that Macs were better, I said to him: "Mike I've got three words for you that make all that irrelevant. 'Three button mouse…
drorzel | August 13, 2009The vast majority of the SteelyKid pictures posted here have been taken with our Canon PowerShot A95 camera, which is around five years old at this point. It's served us well, but is getting old, and has a few sub-optimal features, in particular the lag time between pushing the button and actually taking the picture-- I can't tell you how many incredibly cute baby pictures have been missed because she moved or changed expression during the shutter lag.
I've got a little disposable cash at the moment, and I'm toying with the idea of getting a new camera. I'd probably look at something a little…
revere | August 12, 2009The Reveres are at the beach. It's not our natural habitat, but the generic Mrs. R. loves the beach so here we are. We often write in the morning (after emerging from our small flat in Hilbert space) but today we were otherwise occupied and then went to the beach and baked our brains out. Then we tracked sand into our rented unit ("Next time you vaccuum!") and now as we sit down at the keyboard we sense a distinct absence in neuronal activity. Our neurons, that is. Your neurons may be firing with alacrity, in which case you will want to go elsewhere. Because baked brains are a meal best…
gregladen | August 3, 2009A fake Automatic Teller Machine set up in a hotel lobby can collect PIN's, account information, even credit card numbers. This is why you should be careful where you stick your card. In a moment of great irony, one such machine was set up in the hotel at a conference hosting 8,000 security professionals. They noticed.
The criminals probably didn't realize that they were installing their ATM in a hotel that was soon going to be flooded with more than 8,000 security professionals, he added.
They were smart enough to place the machine in one of the few spots in the hotel where there was no…
ejohnson | August 3, 2009
The Internet may have largely replaced many traditional means of storing and sharing information, but as ScienceBloggers are pointing out, it has far to go before its potential is fully realized, particularly in research. On Built on Facts, Matt Springer discusses what it would take to digitize the entire Library of Congress collection—scanning the pages of all 32 million titles and finding enough server space to store the data produced. On Common Knowledge, John Wilbanks compares the functionality of published scientific journals to that of web-based publishing, arguing that the web not…
gregladen | August 3, 2009There is now a very simple way to make your own GNU/Linux distribution, called a "linux appliance," at SUSE.
SUSE is a Linux Distribution produced by Novell. It is one of the earlier distributions to make a sustained and effective effort to put Linux on your desktop. Perhaps even on your grandmother's desktop.
WEll, a few days ago, Novell launched a new thing called SUSE Studio, which allows you to develop your own "Linux Appliance."
A Linux appliance is essentially a specialized distribution. The SUSE Studio is a web applicatoi that lets you name the "
appliance," specify software…