Technology
purepedantry | April 4, 2008I didn't have much to do this afternoon, so I played hookie and went down to the FIRST Robotics Competition. The competition pits bands of high school students (and their engineer/mentors) in a contest to see who can build the best robot for an assigned task. At the moment the local competition (the national competition is in Georgia, I think) is going on in the Javits center in Manhattan.
This convention is a true festivus of geekiness. I kid you not: I have never seen such a raucous bunch of robotics nerds in my life. It was like the party scene from Real Genius. At one point the…
pontiff | April 4, 2008Previously, I had found a way to get a Mac running Firefox to not choke on recognizing pdfs correctly when downloaded from the arxiv.org. Commenter Dan has tracked down the reason for this and suggested another way to fix this which should be compatible with the latest versions of Firefox:
Update:
It seems that the source of this bug is the following problem:
Arxiv.org does not like Macs! :-O
Fortunately, there is an easy work around: Using the UserAgent Switcher extension, you fool arxiv.org into thinking your web-browser is running Windows.
Then the PDF download problem goes away! No MIME…
drorzel | April 4, 2008The Perimeter Institute will be hosting a workshop in September on "Science in the 21st Century":
Times are changing. In the earlier days, we used to go to the library, today we search and archive our papers online. We have collaborations per email, hold telephone seminars, organize virtual networks, write blogs, and make our seminars available on the internet. Without any doubt, these technological developments influence the way science is done, and they also redefine our relation to the society we live in. Information exchange and management, the scientific community, and the society as a…
awild | April 1, 2008
If you watch this video about a new technology for visualizing insect fossils hidden in opaque amber, pay special attention around 0:36-0:44. There's a brief 3D image of what is clearly a well-preserved sphecomyrmine ant. The clip is excerpted from a detailed demonstration here, showing the insect in all its glory (warning: 57MB!). It's among the most detailed glimpses of a Sphecomyrmine yet.
Why is this ant interesting? Sphecomyrminae is in many respects a classic piece of evidence for the wasp ancestry of ants. It is an extinct Cretaceous subfamily that shows a few characteristics of…
clock | April 1, 2008There have recently been several articles in the media about brain enhancers, so-called Nootropics, or "smart drugs". They have been abused by college students for many years now, but they are now seeping into other places where long periods of intense mental focus are required, including the scientific research labs. Here is a recent article in New York Times:
So far no one is demanding that asterisks be attached to Nobels, Pulitzers or Lasker awards. Government agents have not been raiding anthropology departments, riffling book bags, testing professors' urine. And if there are illicit…
clock | March 31, 2008Words of wisdom (via):
The internet isn't a decoration on contemporary society, it's a challenge to it. A society that has an internet is a different kind of society than a society that doesn't.
I agree. And people, regardless of chronological age, appear to separate along "generational" lines, with the word "generation" really meaning how much they grok the immenseness of the societal change. It changes everything: politics, economics, media, science, environment, public health, business.... The "old" generation thinks of the Internet as yet another place to put their traditional…
revere | March 31, 2008Record and movie companies want to turn file sharing into a moral issue -- I think there are some moral issues here, although they fall on both sides -- but in reality everyone knows it's just about money and the fact that they have their hands on the levers of the legal system which they use for their benefit. It's not about justice. They recover money from teenies and grandmas and then don't redistribute it to the artists. In fact they have a long history of cheating artists. And now they have been caught again with their hands in the cookie jar.
I found this on Slashdot but the original…
pontiff | March 31, 2008As part of my switching to a Mac, I've started using Firefox (one reason being that I'm investigating using Zotero for grabbing bibliographic citations from the web.) However, an annoying problem I encounter was when using Firefox and downloading pdfs from the arXiv. The problem was that Firefox failed to recognize the files as pdf files and thinks the pdf for arxiv XXXX.YYYY was a file of type YYYY. Note that this isn't just a problem of downloading any old pdf, but specifically pdfs from the arxiv. I've now figure out how to fix this.
The problem, as was hinted at by a commenter was…
neurophilosophy | March 30, 2008This track, called Design Coding by The Poetic Prophet, has just been uploaded on YouTube. I thought it was hilarious the first time I saw it, and it's still very amusing on the fourth viewing. I'm not an expert on search engine optimization, but the advice provided here is, as far as I know, accurate.
Here's a transcript of the lyrics:
Your site design is the first thing people see,
It should be reflective of you and the industry,
Easy to look at with a nice navigation,
When they can't find what they want it causes frustration,
A clear call to action to increase the…
clock | March 28, 2008Henry Cate is liveblogging the Space Access 2008 meeting. Tourists in space? Of course! And the trip will be liveblogged as well.
drorzel | March 28, 2008My sabbatical is coming to an end, so I've begun prepping my class for the term that starts Monday. I'm teaching the honors section of introductory E&M, and for the intro classes, I lecture off PowerPoint. We're starting an entirely new syllabus this year, and I plan to use my spiffy tablet PC to do my lectures, so I've been making up new lecture slides.
At times like this, I wish I got paid an hourly wage, because I'd be tempted to send Microsoft a bill for the time I've wasted because of their redesign of Office. I spent an hour figuring out how to get things back to the way I want them…
omnibrain | March 27, 2008 Growing up it seemed like the only science on television was Mr. Wizard, Nova, and Star Trek (ok ok ... it's fiction but most scientists love star trek). Now there are a number of channels that regularly feature science shows. National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel, Discovery Health, the Learning Channel, and even the History Channel. There are probably even a few more I don't even know about. It's great!
However, It seems like 90% of these 'science' shows are actually engineering shows or something else sciency but not quite science. Usually they build stuff and…
pontiff | March 27, 2008A list of observations I found in moving from a PC to a MAC.
The default on a Mac is that the tab key only moves between text boxes. That's just silly. To fix this, go to System Preferences, click Keyboards and Mouse, and then select the appropriate radio box under the Full Keyboard Access section.
Latex Equation Editor and Leopard don't seem to be getting along well. See here for example. My workaround has been to use LaTeXiT instead. However LaTeXiT doesn't work with Leopard yet, and in particular the linkback functionality apparently causes all sorts of problems. One solution is to…
revere | March 26, 2008The Reveres are crazy busy. So what do we do to keep this space from going dark? We put up posts like this one:
Identigene is selling at-home DNA testing kits for paternity testing at drugstores across the country. The $30 kit includes swabs for the child, mother, and "alleged father," consent forms, and a mailer to be sent back to the company. You'll also want to include a check--the lab fees are an additional $120. Results are available in 3-5 business days once the samples have been received.
Only $150 separates you from the truth about your child's paternity, although you'll have to pay…
pontiff | March 25, 2008From the bits blog at the New York Times, a list of technology famous quotes which may or may not have been said. Two of which I believe I've used before (doh!):
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." This quotation is attributed to Bill Gates, but Mr. Shapiro suspects that it is apocryphal, and is seeking the person who either said it or first attributed it to Mr. Gates.
...
"I think there is a world market for about five computers." This is a attributed to Thomas J. Watson, Jr., but Mr. Shapiro suspects it of being apocryphal and is seeking the person who either said it or first attributed…
gregladen | March 24, 2008The [British] government is appealing against a High Court decision that granted Symbian a patent on a computer program.
The ruling overturns a refusal by the UK Intellectual Property Office to give the mobile phone firm a patent.
The case is being watched with interest because before now it was rarely possible to patent dedicated computer programs in Europe.
Read the rest here.
omnibrain | March 21, 2008Rev 1:16 And the robot spoke onto him "Nice Weather Today Sir" and out of his hand went a semi-automatic .22 rifle.
Rev 1:17 And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last:
Rev 1:18 I [am] he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.
Rev 1:19 Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter;
See even the bible is foretelling the end of days when a computer offers small talk and…
pontiff | March 19, 2008Last year, Google announced a set of resource to help students and faculty with CS education. They've revamped the set of resources and redesigned the web page and all the jazzy stuff to produce: Google Code University. Marty Stepp, whose courses are featured in the Google code university, has his office just down the hall from me. His name plate says "Marty Stepp++"
Being someone who teaches (pay no attention to the "research assistant professor" title), I often wonder about how the web and technology is going to change our educational system. While I certainly am sympathetic to the…
drorzel | March 19, 2008A question for the Firefox users: How do I make Firefox on a PC use something other than Adobe Acrobat to read PDF files?
Background: Opera is my browser of choice for web surfing, but I use Firefox for accessing GMail, Movable Type, and a few other sites that don't play well with Opera, and Firefox is the only browser on the computer in the lab. It works very well, except for when I make the mistake of clicking on a link to a PDF.
Firefox reads PDF's through some sort of Acrobat plug-in, and Acrobat has one of those automatic update-checking things installed. When I click on a PDF file…