Because miracles are just one scientist awa...
Friday, 30 September 2011
First off, Farhad Manjoo has posted a week-long series on robots entering more and more complex (read: high-paying) job markets, like robot pharmacists and robot lawyers. Some of the articles are quite good, and they all deserve at least a skim.But today's article about computer scientists seems to me to fly directly into the face of empirical evidence also reported today by Jonah Lehrer:The psychologists conducted their experiments on four and five-year-olds, so they had to be pretty simple. Sixty kids were shown a boxy toy that played music...
Wednesday, 28 September 2011
A lot of people are trumpeting as one of its features "that are better than the iPad 2" the fact that it weighs 14.6 ounces and the iPad 2 weights 21.6 ounces. It causes me intestinal distress to defend an Apple product, but...Size of Kindle Fire screen: 7"Size of iPad 2 screen: 10"Ratio: .70Weight of Kindle fire: 14.6 ozWeight of iPad 2: 21.6 ozRatio: .68Any questions? There is no miniaturization breakthrough here, just product shrinkage.My personal opinion? The reason I got a Kindle was because the e-ink screen is easy on the eyes when I am reading...
Hitch hates Christianity, this much is known. But here he really takes a stab at American Christianity as the reason the Death Penalty survives in America:The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.) Once we clear away the brush, then, we can see the crystalline purity...
Tuesday, 27 September 2011
Somehow a scientist has created a "crack" in the fabric of the universe that leads back 85 million years ago to a much younger Earth. Okay, so when people go through the time portal, it's apparently a one way trip, with no way back. How do they know what is on the other side of the portal? At one point they show a "probe" they sent through first, remarking (in order to silence time travel critics like myself) that after sending the probe back 85 million years, they could not find it in the present (2149 AD) which led them to believe the past was...
Monday, 26 September 2011
Let me ask you something. Consider a future scenario in which:1) Robotics, nanotech, and human-machine-interface technology had sufficiently advanced to a point where we could upload our consciousness into solid-state memory and become Intelligent androids. This process is really expensive, and 2) Replacement parts, double redundant backup of your memory (aka brain), upgrades, etc are all readily available to enable your android self to achieve immortality. However these things are also really expensive.In short, immortality and complete freedom...
Friday, 23 September 2011
If tau neutrinos could travel faster than light, then we should be able to regularly measure them doing that from a constant source of tau neutrinos - like the Sun. Except, we never have.The news quickly latched onto this finding with claims "interstellar hyperspeed travel is once again a possibility." Oh please. A neutrino has almost zero mass, so the energy required (E = mC^2) is relatively minor, in fact neutrinos traveling much slower than light speed is pretty weird.A little background on neutrinos: they're pretty poorly understood. The mass...
Thursday, 22 September 2011
Here, John Dabiri suggests vertical-axis wind turbines are much safer for birds and migratory bats: Big [horizontal] turbine blades have long been blamed for bird and bat kills. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency officials are investigating what happened to six golden eagles found dead last month near a 3-year old wind farm near Tehachapi, Calif. The agency estimates windmills kill a half million birds a year, however the American Wind Energy Association, an industry group, disputes those figures. Dabiri says 30-foot vertical windmills are much...
Sunday, 18 September 2011
Surely J.K. Rowling didn't realize she was an innovator when she imagined the magic portraits of Harry Potter's universe. But nevertheless, the feasibility of a magic, animated portrait that can interact with real humans approacheth. Wednesday night Mrs. TAE and I saw Harry Potter 8, or Deathly Hallows Part 2 or whatever the last damn movie was called, and I enjoyed it. The epilogue was awkward and terrible, but the rest of it was tense and good, if a bit (necessarily) brief and topical.Nevertheless, when I watched HP, Ron and Hermione sneak into...
Saturday, 17 September 2011
Of course, I've covered monogamy here at TAE several times, mostly from the standpoint that the tribal culture of our early species, combined with the long gestational period, seems to indicate to me that monogamy was probably the preferred (though admittedly not always followed) sexual construct for our species tens of millennia ago. Typically when I write those posts Ben will chime in that even if I'm wrong it doesn't matter because humans have free will and can choose monogamy anyway.Here, Ben wrote about Dan Savage's no-nonsense approach to...
Thursday, 15 September 2011
io9 asks: "Where do you stand on the subject of human enhancement?" By this they mean do you believe it is ethical to give someone a brain implant that gives them direct access to wikipedia, as an arbitrary example.Such a question is on par with asking "where do you stand on the subject of smartphones?" And by that I mean "smartphones are here, your opinion is irrelevant to the inundation of culture with the technology. It's here, its not going anywhere. The penetration of (insert technology here) will only increase.Because lets be honest with...
Tuesday, 13 September 2011
I see a young man, about 25, wearing ripped-knee-levis and a graphic t-shirt that references an 80's cult classic movie via a humorous quote. He's got Chucks on his feet and white earbuds hanging out of his ears. He is wearing a knit stocking cap slightly askew and too loosely to actually provide thermal insulation. In short, he is cool. He strolls down the street, preoccupied with the Grace Potter's cover of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit."At an intersection he stops and waits for the "walk" sign. Next to him, and elderly woman drags two bags...
Wednesday, 7 September 2011
Here's the usual "scientists complaining that changing environmental conditions might cause changes in animal populations":The research team [is] worried for Echinoderms — animals like sea urchins and starfish that Smith says constitute a significant portion of the seafloor life on the Antarctic shelf — which have disappeared from regions inhabited by the crabs, and will likely continue to be wiped out if the crabs continue to colonize new areas of the shelf.Apparently the ocean is getting warmer and now the giant (and might I say delicious-looking!)...
I woke up, that Tuesday morning, about 8 am (CST). I remember getting up and brushing my teeth then going to Zac's room (I lived at a fraternity house; I was a sophomore in college) to watch a little Sportscenter before I showered and headed to class. When I got to Zac's room, he did not have Sportscenter on. Maybe he had ESPN on, but what was on his TV was not sports. It was calamity.Later that afternoon, full of rage, I drove with a pledge brother to the recruiting station in town to enlist. It was closed, and I later calmed down and decided...
Friday, 2 September 2011
Sharon Weinberger is doing some incredible work over at Danger Room. Know outrage.It was time for a change, Pentagon officials thought. In 2010, they had just wrested control of a $1 billion contract to train Afghan policemen from the Pentagon, and they thought the work should go to Xe Services, the infamous private security firm formerly known as Blackwater.The deal, an umbrella-style contract, would come from an unlikely, obscure Army bureau called the Counter Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office, or CNTPO, that brings new...
Thursday, 1 September 2011
In a relevant post, Sharon Weinberger points a damning finger at sole-source government contracts.The Air Force planned to award a multibillion-dollar contract for a new tanker, based on the Boeing 767, as a “sole source” — meaning there would be no opportunity for a formal competition. The unusual lease-to-own deal would have cost the Defense Department approximately $37 billion, according to one government estimate.But the tanker lease contract never went through. The deal derailed after it came to light that Darleen Druyun, a senior...
Got a great comment this morning: "Your post was awesome and eye opening. I agreed with it completely but your recommendation for the penalty was maybe too harsh. I think the risk vs reward ratio would be too high for companies because you'd essentially bankrupt them if they failed at a large project."Of course, I'm not the ultimate authority on the ideal way to structure effective government-funded R&D. The specifics of my proposal should be...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
