Technology
gregladen | May 2, 2008On May third, 1978, Gary Thuerk, working for the Digital Equipment Corporation Marketing Department, sent 393 unsolicited emails to users of Arpanet (arpanet would eventually become The Internet).
Thuerk and Digitial Equipment Corporation were both chastised for this, and the official Arpanet administrators reprimanded DEC. Nobody liked the fact that Gary Thuerk had done this, and it was all round considered to be a bad idea, an abuse of the system, and something that should never happen again.
Check out this page at New Scientist, on Spam.
Also on this day, in 1491 Kongo leader Nkuwu…
gregladen | May 2, 2008I was just recently annoyed by a large female human bosom with a cat on it. Never mind the details. Anyway, I looked into it and discovered this:
revere | May 2, 2008I'll admit I don't keep up with what's going on in the world of robotics, so I was pretty stunned a couple of months ago when a reader sent us this link to the promo for Boston Dynamics Big Dog robot. It's a longish clip, but this is a pretty amazing beast (I use the word deliberately). As long as its only used to fight other robots I won't worry too much, but I suspect that's not the Defense Department's plan:
It's pretty clear the world of robotics is moving ahead pretty fast. There's a ton of stuff on the net about some remarkable devices, including Honda's Asimo, that walks just like a…
awild | April 27, 2008
Myrmecos.net is 5 years old. It has grown from a few dozen photographs to about 4,000, and in recent years 1,500 people visit the site every day. In spite of the site's high profile, myrmecos has not changed in any fundamental way since it first went online in 2003 (archived versions are accessible here). The pages are simple 1990's technology, hand-written in html. There are no underlying databases, just scores of flat files stored in folders. If you do any web design you can imagine what a pain in the behind it is to manage a static site with thousands of individual html files.
It is…
drorzel | April 27, 2008From the tablet today:
Yes, oh, yes it was...
The problem here, from my perspective, is that when the tablet is plugged into a power supply, it does not go to sleep properly. I can put it to sleep, and then connect it to charge the battery, but a few hours later, it will just be off, and when I turn it back on, I get the "Resuming Windows" screen, and it takes much longer to re-start than when it wakes up from being in sleep mode.
I've sort of grown resigned to this. every now and then, though, it pops up an actual error message (generally "Windows Host Process experienced an error and had…
drorzel | April 27, 2008Over at Shifting Baselines, Randy Olson posts a comment suggesting how to combat anti-science movies like Expelled:
You want to know how to start -- why doesn't somebody run a film festival for pro-evolution films? THAT is how you reach out to tap into new voices, new blood, new perspectives. THAT is what is desperately needed. Efforts to fan the fires of creativity and innovation. THAT was how I got started as a filmmaker -- winning awards at the New England Film and Video Festival while I was still a professor. That festival, and others, drew me into the world of filmmaking. But right now,…
pontiff | April 25, 2008Bill Gates, in his transition from Mr. Big at Microsoft, to Mr. Big at the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, has been going around to various college campuses and given a talk "Bill Unplugged." You can watch the video here if you are so inclined.
Notes from the talk.
First of all no one asked the question I wanted him to answer: how is he going to commute to work. You see Gates' house is on the "east side" which is separated from Seattle by floating bridges (I kid you not.) The commute across these bridges, is, well, lets just say, not the most pleasant experience. The new offices for…
revere | April 25, 2008When I read about this Japanese robot designed to clean urinals that was made to look like a stylized elephant I was reminded of a joke. First the robot, then the joke.
Here's a pic of the robot followed by a machine translation of the Japanese Press Release (courtesy 3Yen, hat tip Boingboing):
The "DCBA" men's room cleaning robot
Robot.Watch, Impress.co.jp 2008 April 22 (edited translation)--On April 17, 2008, MERTEC Company unveiled a urinal cleaning robot, the "DCBA" in Kobe Airport terminal....
...Mr. Susumu Kanai was in charge of the design of the DCBA. He said that, " I imaged a…
gregladen | April 24, 2008Linux is more than grandma-ready. Linux is by far the preferred operating system for most grandmas.
The other day graduates of my UMN degree program presentations of their work. One of the students had borrowed a laptop from the UMN unit she worked for to give an on screen presentation. She had borrowed a Windows XP computer the week before for the practice session, and everything went fine. But this time, with the same computer, same software, same presentation, etc. she could not get it working.
At the last second, I whipped out my laptop, booted it up, we threw her presentation on…
pontiff | April 23, 2008Via Digg, an article on hilarious Google searches. Hmm, reminds me of one I discovered a while back. (Below may or may not be NSFW, depending on your level of puritanism. And it can certainly lead to clicking which is definitely NSFW.)
Why, no Google, you pornography obsessed search engine, that is not what I meant at all.
Update 4/24: Another good physics related google search at Swan's on Tea.
clock | April 22, 2008I think I have a profile on Friendster - I don't know, I haven't checked since 2003. I have bare-bones profiles on MySpace, LinkedIn and Change.Org and I will get an e-mail if you "friend" me (and will friend you back), but I do not have time to spend on there. I refuse to even look at all the other social networking sites like Twitter - there are only so many hours in the day.
But I am interested in possible ways of making science communication more interactive and more Webby 2.0, beyond just blogs. Pedro, Carl and Phillip have recently written thoughtful posts about this topic as well.…
revere | April 22, 2008It's kind of strange when suddenly there are a lot of articles on growing meat in a vat (it's probably because there was a recent conference in Norway on the topic). Even we posted on it last week and today the New York Times tells us that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - scientists excepted), the militant and sometimes violent animal rights group, is offering a $1 million prize for the "first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012":
Jason Matheny, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins…
sciencetolife | April 22, 2008
This post from one of my favorite blogs, AfriGadget, highlights interesting ways that Africans are modifying cell phones for their unique technological needs. It is based on the author's (Erik Hersman) conversation with Jan Chipchase, a design and usability ethnographer for Nokia, who travels around the world to explore how mobile phones are used worldwide and then reports his findings back to Nokia's design team. He explains:
While exploring in Africa [Jan] found a booming market of hackers and mobile phone mechanics who are doing all kinds of interesting things such as creating new mobile…