Things that I loathe, like, loathe to the point that I actually get depressed and just want to sit on the couch and eat chips until the cops come find my body...are exactly the things my wife sets to with a frenetic glee. For example: moving. In my youth I typically waited until 11 pm the night before I moved to pack everything, in a chaotic explosion of random, unsorted boxes. I cared not what went where, never labeled the boxes. I just hated packing so much. Then, when I got moved to my new destination, only 50% of the boxes ever got unpacked....
Friday, 29 October 2010
Wednesday, 27 October 2010
In a BAA released yesterday, DARPA announced their Reliable Peripheral Interfaces (RPI) program:DARPA seeks to develop reliable in-vivo peripheral motor-signal recording and sensory-signal stimulating interfaces. Such efforts will involve design, fabrication, testing, and analysis of new materials and technologies to demonstrate substantial improvements in reliability and quantity of peripheral motor-signal information. Ultimately DARPA desires to develop clinically viable technologies, enabling wounded service members to control state-of-the-art...
Friday, 22 October 2010
Thursday, 21 October 2010
What if China decided, one day, to not sell rare earth metals (in which it basically dominates the world market) to any company that did not have its corporate headquarters in China? In a day, Apple, Motorola, RIM, and a cadre of other cell phone manufacturers would fall to their knees. HTC would be fine.Southwest Airlines cheap flights, for many years, was partially due to the fact they'd locked in a multi-year gas pricing agreement, and as gas prices surged, they could still get their gas cheap. If I were Apple, or Dell, or Garmin, or anyone...
Wednesday, 20 October 2010
Tuesday, 19 October 2010
Adam Ozinek has an interesting article (cited on Sullivan) about what he sees as an inevitable future:Let me describe it extreme layman’s terms (the only terms I know): you’ll have a powerful computer in your future iPhone-like-device that is connected to a special contact lens that so that screens floats in front on your face, and you steer the whole thing with your brain. The most important facts about this technology is that a) nobody will be able to tell whether you’re looking at your computer or not, and b) it will always be available...
Old topics, dusted off again. Scientists once again discuss what to do if we encounter extra-terrestrial intelligence. Everyone discusses "what does Stephen Hawking think?" Everyone agrees that this is a complicated topic. No one mentions that there are a lot of problems here on Earth we should probably be concentrating on first.TAE loves the thought that there are aliens "out there" amongst the stars, possibly zooming about, possibly beneficent, possibly awe-inspiring. It would be the single most amazing moment in the history of our Solar System...
Monday, 18 October 2010
Friday, 15 October 2010
If God has any mercy on me, I will never work for a company that publishes boilerplate bullshit like this on their website:"We were engaged to manage the enterprise-wide SAP upgrade project for a Fortune 500 client. Our first step was to identify key success metrics, then drive buy-in from both executive business and IT stakeholders. Next we executed against our project methodology for testing and deployment, which resulted in going live on schedule. Our approach and methodology became a best practice for future upgrades and quartely releases due...
Wednesday, 13 October 2010
It comes as no surprise to me that after Google's quiet announcement of their work on driverless cars that the blogosphere would light up on the topic.Doron Levin:Cars that don’t need drivers also may not need private owners – since they could be summoned remotely and returned once their journey is complete. Why take on a lease if you can purchase a subscription to a car instead? Car owners who never want to spend a saturday under the hood or in the waiting room of a mechanic’s shop again might quickly adapt to a car subscription model. I...
Monday, 11 October 2010
With little fanfare on Saturday night, Google revealed that it has been furtively testing and refining driverless cars on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles, clocking up an incredible 225,000 test-driving kilometres as they did so. Google says it has quietly gotten into the automotive automation research business by hiring some of the robotics engineers who won (or at least, performed well) in the Pentagon's 2004, 2005 and 2007 self-driving car competitions - the so-called DARPA Grand Challenges. DARPA wants Humvees...
I'm sorry, how is this news? I knew this (literally) twenty years ago (as in it was common knowledge).Science articles make me chortle more often than I'd like. I keep waiting for headlines like "new satellite reports sun not visible on 'night side' of Earth" or "New NASA mission finds there may or may not be conditions for life on (insert planet or moon name here)." or "New ultra-expensive telescope confirms information we basically knew since Galileo published it in 1610. Further experiments should find tiny, incremental gains in the overall...
Two thoughts on the tenth anniversary of Andrew Sullivan's blog:1. I have a close friend who was physically abused, quite severely, by his father as an adolescent. He grew up and became a strong dissenter of physical abuse, which is understandable. However, if you try to talk bad about his father, he is incredibly defensive of the man, and will not stand to hear ill spoken against him. It seems paradoxical, that he is so ardently critical of physical abusive parents, and yet is so vehemently faithful to his own abusive father, and refuses to acknowledge...
Friday, 8 October 2010
This afternoon I spent my lunch break taking a short walk, just to take in the fall weather. I happened past a sycamore tree, which was already losing its leaves. I saw amongst the branches a small, abandoned bird nest. My inner monologue asked itself the age old question: "how do birds know how to build nests?" The most obvious answer is that they are "born knowing" how. But that begs a deeper thought: "how do you 'know' something?"The answer is that you know something because your brains has developed strong pathways between neurons when you...
Wednesday, 6 October 2010
So I got the itch to create. With Halloween coming up, and the Iron Man 2 DVD release last week, I felt compelled to finally get off my hindquarters and get busy on an arc reactor. Seems like dressing as "Tony Stark" for Halloween would be a grand idea. A quick search of other people's ideas on the net produced many good examples, but somehow copying someone else's work didn't seem right.So here are the ingredients of TAE's DIY Arc Reactor:1. 9000k...
I have to say that I am on board with Megan in the idea that the It Gets Better campaign should be expanded to pretty much anyone that is verbally or physically abused in adolescence: shouldn't people be doing this for more than just gay kids? A lot of kids are horribly bullied--weird kids, smart kids, new kids, whatever--and some of them, too, kill themselves. And even the many more who don't might need to hear that it doesn't just get better for gay people, but that Aspergers nerds and fat kids and everyone else who gets singled...
Tuesday, 5 October 2010
Alan Boyle writes:Experts have hammered out a simplified game plan to follow in the event that signals from an extraterrestrial civilization are ever detected. The new guidelines for dealing with theoretical radio transmissions from E.T. were adopted unanimously by the International Academy of Astronautics' SETI Permanent Study group last week during a meeting in Prague, the Czech capital.TAE asks: how can there be experts in something that has not happened nor is there any evidence that it will ever happen?Can a man be an expert in what...
Monday, 4 October 2010
Francis Collins on why scientists have trouble believing in God: Part of the problem is, I think the extremists have occupied the stage. Those voices are the ones we hear. I think most people are actually kind of comfortable with the idea that science is a reliable way to learn about nature, but it’s not the whole story and there’s a place also for religion, for faith, for theology, for philosophy. But that harmony perspective does not get as much attention, nobody’s as interested in harmony as they are in conflict,...
Friday, 1 October 2010
By Brian KnappI collect souvenirs. No, I don’t hop from location to location, sacking each gift shop in each respective airport. Instead, I mimic.Observation is probably the one skill that I would say I perform better than 99% of the population. I would rather sit back and drink in information in attempt to decipher the world rather than to actually live in it.In this case, I speak not only of the natural world, but of the social one. Human behavior is a powerful and interesting subject and understanding it is invaluable. Along the way, there are...
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