Technology
gregladen | February 26, 2009Bash 4.0 includes associative arrays, a superwildcard called "**" and a new redirection operator. Details are here.
clock | February 25, 2009Seed Magazine has posted a bunch of very interesting videos of talks bringing together the worlds of architecture, design and science. Just check the menu on the bottom right of the Seed Design Series homepage. Here is the one I liked first:
Jessica Banks & Ayah Bdeir: Open Source Snobs
The duo from OpenLab at Eyebeam explains why the future of cutting-edge design -- such as a robotic lamp that senses its environment and a Jell-O-like levitating chair -- relies on the free flow of information and ideas among individuals lovingly referred to as "snobs."
(Hmmm, all the embed codes are for…
clock | February 24, 2009Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellows Program:
Around the world, visionary change agents are hard at work incubating new approaches to the planet's toughest challenges. Yet they're often doing so without taking advantage of the latest tools and thinking in technology, communications and innovation - or a network of experts, peers, and supporters who can help them truly change the world.
The Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellows program is designed to help fill that gap - to equip the next generation of world-changing innovators with the tools, insights, visibility and social network that can help…
clock | February 24, 2009Genetic Manipulation of Pest Species: Ecological and Social Challenges:
In the past 10 years major advances have been made in our ability to build transgenic pest strains that are conditionally sterile, harbor selfish genetic elements, and express anti-pathogen genes. Strategies are being developed that involve release into the environment of transgenic pest strains with such characteristics. These releases could provide more environmentally benign pest management and save endangered species, but steps must be taken to insure that this is the case and that there are no significant health or…
razib | February 23, 2009The Kindle: Good Before, Better Now. A woman was using a Kindle at Starbucks the other day. She really didn't get much reading done, people kept wanting to talk to her about her Kindle, and look at it themselves. The Kindle will have made it when people can actually use it in a public place without being harassed.
drorzel | February 23, 2009Inspired by Leigh Butler at tor.com, I've been re-reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. This happened to coincide with my recent vicious cold, which is good, because they're great sickbed reading.
Most of my re-reading has been done on my Palm, which miraculously came loaded with electronic copies of all the books. These are of, shall we say, variable quality, and riddled with typos, including one hilarious bit in which Rand is pursued by "Trollops." It's a little like reading the Wheel of Time as written by Matthew Yglesias.
As a result, the re-read is also serving as a nice reminder…
drorzel | February 22, 2009This week's Science Saturday on bloggingheads.tv features Carl Zimmer and Phil "Bad Astronomy" Plait:
It's a wide-ranging conversation, covering topics in astronomy, why people believe crazy things, how the Internet can help, and the death of newspapers and their eventual replacement by blogs. Plait is really energetic (he spends a couple of minutes talking over Zimmer without even noticing), making it a livelier-than-usual conversation.
I'm not sure I agree with him about newspapers, though. What he rattles off is more or less the standard triumphalist-blogger line-- newspapers are too slow…
gregladen | February 21, 2009I know every computer box needs a CD/DVD reader in order to boot the thing up under adverse conditions (and your system should always be set up so that you can do this, by the way!). But as a matter of actual functionality, maintaining a current and high-functioning version of this sort of device, or two or more of them especially, built into the box is usually a bad idea for me. My computer boxes are not ever conveniently located. For my main computer, I can reach the off on switch with my toe, which is how I start up the machine. (The button is not needed to turn it off, of course.) So…
gregladen | February 21, 2009 ... more like Verizon Without a Net Math ...
I would like to have seen a calculation of how far off these were in dollars per week. Canadian dollars, I suppose.
The fact that the rates quoted are almost always an order of magnitude or two lower than the actual rates would strongly suggest that as a class, Verizon Wireless customers are being robbed intentionally by the corporation. It would seem that these service personnel are being trained to lie. Otherwise, there would be a more even distribution of incorrect statements. Am I wrong?
But wait, there's more:
Verizon, Don't Waste…
jlynch | February 19, 2009So I’m contemplating getting a Macbook Pro and thus leaving my current main machine (an XP laptop which I have been very happy with, by the way). I’m specifically looking at the 17 inch model, particularly because of the eight hour battery life. Any readers out there have any experience with the new Macbooks? Pros? Cons? Do you really get 8 hrs with WiFi enabled?
I’m assuming I’m going to have to buy iWork, but is there any other software (for pay or free) that you would recommend?
Any comments will be gratefully received!
drorzel | February 19, 2009A few days ago, Bee put up a post titled Do We Need Science Journalists?, linking back to Bora's enormous manifesto from the first bit of the Horgan-Johnson bloggingheads kerfuffle. My first reaction was "Oh, God, not again..." but her post did make me think of one thing, which is illustrated by Peter Woit's latest (no doubt a kerfuffle-in-the-making).
Bee quotes Bora urging bloggers to keep twirling, twirling, twirling toward the better day when scientists communicate to the general public, without all the hype and exaggeration:
Perhaps if we remove those middle-men and have scientists and…
gregladen | February 17, 2009First, I want to tell you that I think I might have accidentally broken facebook. It is going to be a while before this becomes apparent, but I think it might be true. Then, I've got some cool links for Linux Lovers.
Here's the story with facebook. I get a form from the University's Central Administration every semester or so asking "WTF is going on with certain students, because they seem to have a lot of credits and we just want to make sure they have a plan to finish soon." However, my students never need to have a form sent from Central because they are always good. So I get this…
gregladen | February 15, 2009I still have not found a satisfactory way to sync my calendar and to do list between the University's calendar server, my Windows "computer" at work, my Linux Laptop, the iPod Touch, and the main computer in the Blog Cave.
But we may be getting there.
To-do syncing has always been one of the gaping holes on the productivity side of the iPhone and iPod touch. Several third-party apps have filled this hole, but with Google Sync, to-do syncing gets even better.
The Knowliz weblog details how to set up popular to-do list manager Toodledo (and it's calendar feed feature) to work in conjunction…
gregladen | February 14, 2009If you buy an iPhone from Apple, you don't own the iPhone. No. Apple owns you.
According to this item on Slashdot regarding this item from somewhere else on the intertubules.
So if you buy this thing, you can do whatever you want with it as long as whatever you want is what Apple wants. If you want to do something else with your thing, the Apple Police will come and get you.
Big brother, it turns out, is all about Oedipus.
clock | February 14, 2009From TechDirt:
This is wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin. Google doesn't devalue things it touches. It increases their value by making them easier to find and access. Google increases your audience as a content creator, which is the most important asset you have. It takes a special kind of cluelessness to claim that something that increases your biggest asset "devalues" your business. Thomson's mistake seems to be that he's confusing "price" and "value" which is a bit scary for the managing editor of a business publication. Yes, the widespread availability of news may…
edyong | February 13, 2009In the summer of 2007, thirty-four travellers left home with backpacks in tow to see the world. But these weren't human students, out to get drunk and pretentious find themselves in foreign lands - they were small songbirds, migrating to tropical climates for the winter.
Their backpacks were light-measuring devices called "geolocators", each about the size of a small coin. By measuring rising and falling light levels, these miniature contraptions revealed the timings of sunrise and sunset wherever the birds happened to be flying. Those, in turn, revealed where they were in the world, and…
ksharpe | February 10, 2009Originally published by Janet Stemwedel
On February 9, 2009, at 6:25 PM
Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
by P.W. Singer
New York: Penguin
2009
For some reason, collectively humans seem to have a hard time seeing around corners to anticipate the shape our future will take. Of those of us who remember email as a newish thing, I suspect most of us had no idea how much of our waking lives would come to be consumed by it. And surely I am not the only one who attended a lab meeting in which a visiting scholar mentioned a speculative project to build…
clock | February 9, 2009I will be on a panel, Open Science: Good For Research, Good For Researchers? next week, February 19th (3:00 to 5:00 pm EST at Columbia University, Morningside Campus, Shapiro CEPSR Building, Davis Auditorium). I am sure my hosts will organize something for us that day before and/or after the event, but Mrs.Coturnix and I will be there a couple of days longer. So, I think we should have a meetup - for Overlords, SciBlings, Nature Networkers, independent bloggers, readers and fans ;-)
Is Friday evening a good time for this? Or is Saturday better? Let me know.
You can follow the panel on…
pharyngula | February 9, 2009Since I had the effrontery to critize futurism and especially Ray Kurzweil, here's a repost of something I wrote on the subject a while back…and I'll expand on it at the end.
Kevin Drum picks at Kurzweil—a very good thing, I think—and expresses bafflement at this graph (another version is here, but it's no better):
(Another try: here's a cleaner scan of the chart.)
(Click for larger image)
You see, Kurzweil is predicting that the accelerating pace of technological development is going to lead to a revolutionary event called the Singularity in our lifetimes. Drum has extended his graph (the…