Technology
gregladen | January 13, 2008It's a good one....
Jan 13
Horatio Alger born, 1834
Jan 13
Sophie Tucker born, 1884
Jan 13
Wilhelm Wien born, 1864, Nobel prize for blackbody radiation laws
Jan 13
Fellowship enters Moria
Jan 13
National Liberation Day in Togo
Jan 13
Eric Clapton plays the "Rainbow Concert" in London, 1973
Jan 14
Albert Schweitzer born, 1875
Jan 14
The first "Be-In" is held in Golden Gate Park, 1967
Jan 14*
Adults Day in Japan
Jan 14
Konferenz von Casablanca, 1943
Jan 14
Julian Calendar New Year's Day
Jan 14
Anniversary Day (Southland)
gregladen | January 12, 2008A 14 year old kid in Lodz, Poland, modified a TV remote to control the public transit train system.
"He studied the trams and the tracks for a long time and then built a device that looked like a TV remote control and used it to manoeuvre the trams and the tracks," said Miroslaw Micor, a spokesman for Lodz police.
"He had converted the television control into a device capable of controlling all the junctions on the line and wrote in the pages of a school exercise book where the best junctions were to move trams around and what signals to change.
"He treated it like any other schoolboy might…
retrospectacle | January 12, 2008CES, or the Consumer Electronics Show, is a trade show held in Las Vegas where new products are announced and demonstrated to the press. This year's CES just ended January 10th, and it looks like there was a small scandal that occurred. Gizmodo, a popular tech/gadget blog owned by Gawker media, pulled a prank which has resulted in the prankster being banned from attending CES in the future. In a nutshell, they brought some devices called TV Be Gone to the shows and proceeded to randomly shut down screens during presentations and press demonstrations. This resulted in a lot of embarrassed…
omnibrain | January 12, 2008
The memory-evaluation study, headed by Dr. Franklin McCarroll of New York University's School of Psychology, revealed that approximately 47 percent of Jenkins' hippocampus is dedicated to storing notable video-game victories and frustrating last-minute defeats, while 32 percent of his amygdala contains embedded neurological scripts pertaining to game strategies, character back stories, theme songs, and cheat codes. In addition, his entire dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is devoted to remembering the time he did a helicopter dunk from half-court with Shawn Kemp at the buzzer to beat the…
gregladen | January 12, 2008Or, one of those 1960s flowers similar to bathtub decals. Who cares, it runs Linux and is only $199.00 US.
It'll have an Intel Celeron processor, a 945GC chipset, 512MB of memory and either a 60GB or 80GB hard drive. What it won't have: an optical drive or a PCI Express slot. Despite that, it's a pretty good-looking box, and comes in red, blue, white, and black, each with a different icon stamped on the front.
Details here.
gregladen | January 9, 2008A glow in the dark pig has given birth to more glow in the dark pigs.
Fluorescent Chinese pig passes on trait to offspring from PhysOrg.com
A pig genetically modified in China to make it glow has given birth to fluorescent piglets, proving such changes can be inherited, state media said Wednesday.
[...]
The pigs were originally modified (to glow) using somatic cell nuclear transfer.It is not entirely clear to me how the gene got into the gametes. It also appears that the distribution of the gene in the offspring is not exactly the same as in the parent, suggesting something interesting…
gregladen | January 9, 2008
Totally ripped off rom Quantum Pontiff
When you think about it, this guy had/has more power than even Robert Altman...
drorzel | January 8, 2008Having made a snide comment or two about engineers earlier, I feel like I should relate a positive experience today:
Over the Christmas break, there was a power outage in my lab. Not an accidental outage, but a planned outage that nobody told me about-- a contractor cut the breakers in order to do some work down the hall. After the outage, a piece of laser diagnostic equipment wasn't working. After exhausting the really sketchy information in the manual about the particular failure mode of this device, I tried to call the manufacturer. Of course, the original company got bought by a different…
pontiff | January 8, 2008Video from the keynote at CES:
The real question is, now that Bill is working for the foundation, which is opening an office in lower Queen Anee, will Bill be buying us a new bridge to aid his commute?
gregladen | January 7, 2008Carbon is cycled from gas (C02) to solid (plant tissue) and and back (through fire, digestion, fermentation, etc.) again and again.
Some of that carbon is trapped over long periods in the form of "fossil fuels."
The earth has, in a sense, grown accustom to having a huge chunk of the available carbon stored away in coal and oil, so the recent (last century or so) release of large quantities of this carbon is a problem. This is why fuels made of plants (ethanol, diesel) are of interest. But those fuels require two steps: The carbon is captured by plants, then the plant matter is converted…
hrynyshyn | January 7, 2008With a little over a year left for analog television broadcasts, just about every non-Luddite who hasn't already bought an HDTV will be doing so in 2008. For most, the selection process will boil down to getting the largest set in their price range. More sophisticated buyers will weigh the pros and cons of the plasma, LCD, rear-projection technologies. But there is another criteria that we should consider: the science of power consumption.
Analog TV will be history on Feb. 17, 2009. The U.S. government has already started offering $40 coupons for those who want to continue using their old-…
gregladen | January 5, 2008
Redmond, Wash.-based Microvision is unveiling a fully functioning, self-contained prototype that should be available as a real product--possibly from Motorola--later this year.
Dubbed SHOW, the lensless PicoP projector is designed for home and business use, and uses tiny lasers to shoot a WVGA (848 by 480, roughly DVD resolution) image on virtually any surface that isn't a dark color or textured. It can even project onto curved and uneven surfaces. From a distance of two feet, it could project a two-foot diagonal, full-color image on a white T-shirt. From five feet away, it could show a five…
gregladen | January 5, 2008To get his annual predictions, I mean. Actually, now that I think about it, talking to god does not work either...
I don't pay much attention to Bill Gates (and I'm sure it's mutual) but I was just noticing that today is not only his annual prediction speech in Las Vegas, but it is also probably his last one as he will shortly be stepping down from his position at Microsoft to get busy giving money away. At that point, I will start paying a lot more attention to him, I assure you.
So for fun, here are a few of the predictions Bill-o has made in the past:
Bob. Remember Bob? Not the one on…
revere | January 4, 2008Note to Senator Larry Craig. Now you can have "intimate contact with an anonymous stranger [in a public toilet] without the associated awkwardness of verbal discourse". No toe tapping required. Just look for the yellow color in the new thermochromic toilet seat (h/t Boingboing).
This beauty glows when it's warm, so that you can always sit on a toilet seat recently vacated by a stranger and get that nice warm feeling of "the other." Just look for the yellow (hot) Springfield Oval. And enjoy. Here's a pic:
gregladen | January 4, 2008Indeed, in science. The current issue of Science reviews the positions of each of the major presidential candidates in the area of science.
Writing the overview to this collection of views, Jeffrey Mervis states:
Many factors can make or break a U.S. presidential candidate in the 2008 race for his or her party's nomination. The ability to raise millions of dollars is key, as are positions on megaissues such as the Iraq war, immigration, and taxes. Voters also want to know if a candidate can be trusted to do the right thing in a crunch. Science and scientific issues? So far, with the…
omnibrain | January 4, 2008The mind is a complicated and a still very much unknown entity. The earliest conceptions of the mind didn't even have it placed in the brain, instead it was very much separate from the body. This is of course all very silly, the only possibility is that the mind wholly and completely resides in the neural system and that system is responsible for every aspect of the mind, from perception, to language, and even for experiencing the presence of a higher power.
With all of these misperceptions of the mind it isn't surprising that people could think that this soul of ours could interact with…
pontiff | January 3, 2008As we move ever closer to the day where using a computer involves flapping your hands around in the air:
drorzel | January 3, 20081) Kate and I went to a New Year's party at the home of a colleague in Math, whose kids got a Wii for Christmas. We spent a while playing with it, and it's way more interesting than any other gaming system I've seen in years.
2) Windows Vista sucks ass. Evidence: It is incapable of switching between users on my tablet without locking the entire system up in a way that requires a hard power off to reset. Kate set up a separate account for herself, so she wouldn't have to log me out of GMail and Bloglines to check her messages, but it is impossible to log in under one account, and switch to the…
jlynch | January 1, 2008Events
1801 - Dwarf planet Ceres is discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi.
1925 - Edwin Hubble announces the discovery of galaxies outside the Milky Way.
1983 - The ARPANET officially changes to using the Internet Protocol, creating the Internet.
1985 - The Internet’s Domain Name System is created.
1989 - The Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer comes into force.
Births
1774 - André Marie Constant Duméril, French zoologist
1854 - Sir James George Frazer, Scottish anthropologist
1876 - Harriet Brooks, Canadian physicist
1878 - Agner Krarup Erlang, Danish scientist and…
gregladen | January 1, 2008Installing Linux on a Macbook Pro; KDE - to be or not to be; Microsoft Developing Emacs.net ... WTF?; Tricking out Gimp; Cool, or possibly utterly useless, Firefox add-in
From Kahvipapu...Why? install Linux on a Macbook Pro?
Just because I can. Believe me, I heard question "Why on earth you want to run Linux on mbp?! Why don't you just use OS X? It's purrfect!" more than once. Yes, OS X is nice and I do like it, it's hands down better than Microsoft's operating systems and has some extremely nice unique features. I just happen to like Linux more for the tasks I do (No doubt Photoshop junkies…