Technology
laelaps | July 9, 2008Hot on the heels of the ScienceBlogs Book Club comes another special, limited-run blog all about alternative energy called Next Generation Energy.
The blog will be another active group discussion, with multiple authors (from Sb and beyond) throwing in on energy technologies and policy. The first topic gets right to the point, asking what the most viable energy solution might be as we are further mired in the energy crisis. The blog will only have a limited run, though, starting today and going through October 9, so be sure to keep up on what will surely be a lively discussion.
gregladen | July 8, 2008First, an important note: According to what I've read lately the Reiser File System does have a maintainer, and should progress as a project. If you want, I can give you more details.
Now, for some breaking news just in (Hat tip: Virgil Samms)
CONVICTED MURDERER Hans Reiser led prosecutors and police in Oakland, California to his missing wife's body Monday afternoon, just two days before he was scheduled to be sentenced to prison, possibly for life.
...[he] ... reportedly agreed to show authorities the location of his estranged wife's body in exchange for a shorter prison term. Reiser…
laelaps | July 7, 2008
Oh dear. I guess the History Channel decided that the U.S. needed an equivalent to "The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs" and will soon be featuring a show called "Jurassic Fight Club." Here's the synopsis;
JURASSIC FIGHT CLUB
They were the ultimate fighters -- prehistoric beasts who walked the earth millions of years ago. With cunning and strategy, they hunted their prey -- transforming the prehistoric world into a battlefield. Today, archaeologists are uncovering these battlefields -- and are gaining startling new insight into how quick thinking, maneuverability, and striking at the exact…
gregladen | July 7, 2008Thanks to Evan I am now aware of LOLcode. I knew there was a proposal, but I had no idea how much it had advanced. LOLcode is being developed in a series of projects that I would divide into two categories: Bleeders and sneakers.
Bleeders are implementations in a particular interpreted language (so far all LOLcode implementations are interpreted) whereby the syntax or other important aspects of the interpreter 'bleed through' to the LOLcode implementation. The bloodies of the bleeders are simple translators, while others strive for more. Sneakers are implementations where the LOLcode is…
gregladen | July 6, 2008I don't think you see this too often. It is my first. An LOL cat used in an actual commercial advertisement, in this case for an esoteric software development tool on a techie web site:
cevans | July 6, 2008
Dear readership,
As far as I know, I have never used this website as a political platform. I have weakly festered under the steely gaze of a particularly anti-science American administration without uttering much of a peep, but this, however, I cannot let stand.
The Arecibo telescope is the world's largest radio telescope and currently the source of all the data processed and used by various (and already much-maligned) SETI projects, particularly SETI@home. Currently, it's facing massive budget cuts that will effectively end its ability to continue the search for life beyond Earth. The…
gregladen | July 5, 2008 Hans Reiser asks for a new lawyer (see below) This first item is not exclusively Linux at all...
Remember the effort by Firefox to break a downloading record? They did it. Guinness has given Firefox the record, officially. Over eight million hamburgers sold...
The de facto registrar of superlative achievements has credited Mozilla for officially setting a record for downloads in a 24-hour period: 8,002,530 copies of Firefox.
Mozilla's Download Day on June 17, whose server-crippling success delayed its official start, sought to popularize the open-source Web browser. Mozilla, which…
omnibrain | July 3, 2008 Hitachi recently announced that they would be producing a 5 TB drive in the near future (2010?). This is totally unexciting to me but what Hitchachi's Yoshiro Shiroishi said was. According to Techradar:
As for what can be stored on such disks, Hitachi's Yoshihiro Shiroishi explains, "By 2010, just two disks will suffice to provide the same storage capacity as the human brain."
In other words, a next-generation hard drive will be able to recall that trip to the seaside in 1976, but never where it left the car keys last night.
Ignoring the faulty memory comment for a moment - Where in the…
gregladen | July 2, 2008Adam Grosser talks about a project to build a refrigerator that works without electricity -- to bring the vital tool to villages and clinics worldwide. Tweaking some old technology, he's come up with a system that works.
razib | July 1, 2008If you have ever used the Perl programming language then you have heard the name Larry Wall. But, you might not know that Larry Wall is an active member of the Church of the Nazarene (the "bless" function anyone?). According to the Religion in American Culture survey 63% of Nazarenes accept a literal interpretation of the Bible, as opposed to 46% of Ameican Protestants as a whole. James Dobson is probably the most prominent American Nazarene. So with that, Larry Wall's opinion on evolution might interest:
A great deal of my theological thinking has been driven by the notion of trying to…
gregladen | July 1, 2008Steven Levitt shares data that shows car seats are no more effective than seatbelts in protecting kids from dying in cars. However, during the Q&A, he makes one crucial caveat.
gregladen | July 1, 2008Among the top five hundred super computing sites, the vast majority are running Linux. For the desktop environment, there are many opportunities for Linux. For audio, have a look at 42 of the Best Free Linux Audio Software. More broadly, consider these Seven Reasons to Move to Linux. The world of Linux distros is dynamic and stable. The most recent Surprise Desktop Linux Move: Xandros Buys Linspire. It should be no surprise that Linux experiences 'prolific' growth, says Linux Foundation's Zemlin.
Meanwhile, Microsoft tactics push India toward Linux.
gregladen | June 28, 2008Nicholas Negroponte talks about how One Laptop per Child is doing, two years in. Speaking at the EG conference while the first XO laptops roll off the production line, he recaps the controversies and recommits to the goals of this far-reaching project.
laelaps | June 28, 2008
When I think of many of the robots that appear in Hollywood films and occasionally pop up in segments on news magazines I can't help but notice how many of them look like people. There seems to be some expectation that when we all have personal helper droids they'll look more like us than R2-D2, but I have to wonder if our body plans provide a good design for robots that might eventually be made to do a number of tasks. (Our upright bipedalism, for example, means that every time we take a step we have to prevent ourselves from falling over. Such a mode of locomotion is difficult to…
pontiff | June 27, 2008This spring/summer has been particularly cloudy in the northwest. But today it is sunny and looks to get to the pleasant high 70s. This, obviously, is due entirely to the fact that Bill Gates controls the weather and today is his last day at Microsoft. Seattle is of course, introspective on the man who certainly changed the region dramatically. Here are some of the more entertaining Gates articles.
Would you have invested? Speaking of which why isn't someone working on face recognition software to predict future business success. I mean, come on, if that picture doesn't say "creators of…
neurophilosophy | June 26, 2008
Technology pundits speculate that mind control is the future of gaming. They envision that the movements of computer game characters will be controlled not with joysticks but with non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) which monitor the brain's electrical activity and transmit the signals to the games console.
Although scientists are concerned about the non-therapeutic use of BCIs, such devices are already commercially available; last year, Emotiv Systems demonstrated its Project Epoch EEG cap, and began marketing it to games developers such as Sega and Nintendo.
In anticipation of…
revere | June 25, 2008In our earlier discussion of the science behind greenhouse gases we pointed out that all objects radiate electromagnetic radiation, doing so at a peak wavelength dependent upon their surface temperatures. That means two things. One is that things at the usual temperatures in our world are radiating EM radiation at wavelengths characteristic of the far infrared region. The other is that by measuring the intensity of infrared you can also measure the surface temperature of the body without touching it. Commercial devices are touted as highly accurate. Clinicians use them to measure body "core…
pontiff | June 24, 2008I'm always behind the times. I just discovered Tiddlywiki and I love it!
What is TiddlyWiki? Well, okay, first of all it is a kind of wiki. But, here is the first interesting fact, it is a serverless wiki: TiddlyWiki is exactly one file. This file is written in a combination of html/Javascript/CSS, so you just view this one file in your browser. When you edit your wiki, it just updates this one file. How cool is that. This means, for example, that you can put your tiddlywiki on a thumb drive, and carry it around with you to use where ever you find a computer with a browser. Indeed…
gregladen | June 23, 2008Yes, I too was asked by EA games to install and test Spore. That is their hot new product.
I have run into certain hurdles. This is the best I could do for spores:
Spore only runs on a Windows computer. Well, I have one of those not for any really good reason, as it turns out ... to run games. (Mainly Julia's games.)
The hard drive is small and the processor is small, but I was able to download spore and convince it to install on an external hard drive that had plenty o' room.
Then when I tried to run it, I was informed that the graphics card is not up to snuff. That does not…
pontiff | June 23, 2008The first edition of the newly revamped Communications of the ACM is out. And I must say, so far I'm greatly impressed. First of all it seems that they've gotten rid of the absolutely horrible front pages for all articles that were (a) ugly (I'm not a font nazi, but sheesh that font choice was horrible!), and (b) a waste of space. This issue includes a blurb about quantum computing, an interview with the Donald Knuth, and a paper by David Shaw (yeah, THAT David Shaw) and coworkers on custom hardware for molecular dynamics simulations. Good stuff, I hope they can keep it up!