How Do You Count Parallel Universes? One question, one wildly off-tangent hypothesis. Question: given how we can't seem to find dark matter, let alone dark energy, is there any theory that suggests that neither exists *within* our universe, but are instead somehow manifestations of the multiverse? I.e., perhaps "shadows" of something we can't ever see directly? Wildly off-tangent hypothesis: I'm as atheist as they come, but I've always thought that if anything could prove the existence of God (or, "God"), it was proof of the multiverse.
After all, given infinite forms of creation, the odds would favor a universe creating a near-omnipotent power at least at *some* point. I tend to think that our Universe didn't produce that— physical laws *here* being what they are— but who knows?
The Sound of History: Mescaline, Music, and Terror - How the ancient priests of Peru’s Chavín de Huántar may have manipulated sound—and drugs—to manipulate their followers — and how we found out about it through the new field of “archaeoacoustics.” A thousand years before the birth of Christ, in an Andean valley in Peru, a priest may have handed a subject a ceremonial bowlful of the juice of the San Pedro cactus.
That subject would then be led down into a black and confusing labyrinth. As the mescaline filtered through the body, shadows from some unseen light would have danced on the walls: maybe heads with snakes for hair, or heads with jaguar fangs. A sound that could be rushing water—or the snarl of panthers—may fill the air. Terrified, he or she would do anything the priests say. This is the theory of the acoustical madhouse of Chavín de Huántar, a 3,000-year-old temple complex about 150 miles north of Lima.
“If you have archaeology and no acoustics, you’re deaf,” says archaeoacoustician David Lubman. The Song of the Pututu. Entertainment - Govindini Murty - Decoding the Cultural Influences in 'Prometheus,' From Lovecraft to 'Halo' A guide to the literary, artistic, and political tropes alluded to in Ridley Scott's sci-fi blockbuster Fox Ridley Scott's long-anticipated Prometheus took in $50 million at the weekend box office, and with its heady mixture of sci-fi spectacle and metaphysical speculation is already generating passionate debate. Set in the year 2093, the film depicts the crewmembers of the spaceship Prometheus as they journey to a distant moon to search for the origins of humanity.
The team is led by scientist Dr. The striking images Ridley Scott devises for Prometheus reference everything from Stanley Kubrick's 2001 to Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man and Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires. The following guide unveils the cultural mysteries of Prometheus. The lost souls of telecommunications history. When Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN, Geneva's celebrated European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1980, he'd been hired to help replace the control systems for several of the lab's particle accelerators. Almost immediately, the inventor of the modern Web page noticed a problem: thousands of people were coming and going from the famous research institute, many of them temporary hires. "The big challenge for contract programmers was to try to understand the systems, both human and computer, that ran this fantastic playground," he later wrote.
"Much of the crucial information existed only in people's heads. " In his spare time, Berners-Lee was working on some software that might alleviate this fragmentation and spread more useful information around. Berners-Lee was pleased with what he eventually produced, but the PASCAL application ran on CERN's obscure and proprietary operating system, so he didn't take it with him when his contract expired. Four years later, Berners-Lee returned to CERN. Feature. The Curse of XanaduBy Gary Wolf It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form. Instead, it sucked Nelson and his intrepid band of true believers into what became the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing - a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair. The amazing epic tragedy.
I said a brief prayer as Ted Nelson - hypertext guru and design genius - took a scary left turn through the impolite traffic on Marin Boulevard in Sausalito. Nelson's left hand was on the wheel, his right rested casually on the back of the front seat. Nelson is a pale, angular, and energetic man who wears clothes with lots of pockets. Nelson's life is so full of unfinished projects that it might fairly be said to be built from them, much as lace is built from holes or Philip Johnson's glass house from windows. No Joke: Subway Systems Obey Emergent, Natural Laws As They Grow. Subway systems are marvels of engineering and design, even more so for the ones (like London’s or New York’s) that were built in the early 20th century. But still, any rider of a mass transit system has no doubt cursed its design at some point. Why doesn’t the train go here instead of there?
Why should an express line reach this neighborhood and not that one? Who’s to blame (or praise) for mass transit system design? According to a French physicist named Marc Barthelemy, nobody is. Barthelemy and his fellow researchers published a paper depicting the design of subway systems as an "emergent phenomenon" of large cities. The three patterns that any major metropolitan subway system (with more than 100 stations) should have in common are: A core and branches, with core stations arranged in a ring shape above the city center A number of branches that tends toward the square root of the total number of stations About 20% of core stations contain transfers to two or more other lines. Death By Utopia. John B. Calhoun relaxing in Universe 25 In the late 20th Century, John B. Calhoun decided to make Utopia; it started with rats.
In 1947 he began to watch a colony of Norway rats, over 28 months he noticed something, in that time the population could have increased to 50,000 rats, but instead it never rose above 200. Then he noticed that the colony split into smaller groups of 12 at most. He continued to study rats up until 1954. Then in 1958, he made his first lab. He bought the second floor of a barn, and there he made his office and lab. 2.7 metres square with 1.4m high walls. Society broke. The outside of Universe 25 The purpose of the experiment for Calhoun was to examine a pressing problem, overpopulation.
After day 600, the male mice just stopped defending their territory, listless mice congregated in the centres of the Universe. The ‘beautiful ones’ withdrew themselves ever so quietly, removing themselves from the sick society. Poster for dystopian film Soylent Green Further Reading.
Brief History of the Internet. The original ARPANET grew into the Internet. Internet was based on the idea that there would be multiple independent networks of rather arbitrary design, beginning with the ARPANET as the pioneering packet switching network, but soon to include packet satellite networks, ground-based packet radio networks and other networks. The Internet as we now know it embodies a key underlying technical idea, namely that of open architecture networking. In this approach, the choice of any individual network technology was not dictated by a particular network architecture but rather could be selected freely by a provider and made to interwork with the other networks through a meta-level “Internetworking Architecture”. Up until that time there was only one general method for federating networks.
The idea of open-architecture networking was first introduced by Kahn shortly after having arrived at DARPA in 1972. Four ground rules were critical to Kahn’s early thinking: Thoughts on Google Plus: The Magic Isn’t Social, It’s Semantic. It’s been said that I’ve called Google Plus “one of the subtlest and most user-friendly ontology development systems we’ve ever seen.”
I did, and you can listen for yourselves on the Semantic Link podcast. Why did I do so? Well, G+ follows some of the basic principles of linked data: it uses persistent HTTP URIs for people, Sparks (concepts) and posts. It allows you to indicate a relationship between to entities and give that relationship a type. It collects, and types, attributes about entities from the expected experts – the entities themselves. Let’s take those points one at a time, with pictures. Persistent URIs for People Everyone with a G+ account gets assigned a random string of numbers as their unique identifier. [click images to open them at full size in new tabs/windows] How is this ontological? Persistent URIs for Sparks Sparks are the name Google uses to refer to concepts, also known as subjects, categories, tags, terms (you get the idea.) Persistent URIs for Posts.
Semiotic web project. D Rams article. Without Internet, Urban Poor Fear Being Left Behind In Digital Age. Jillian Maldonado is a 29-year-old student at the Mid-Manhattan Adult Learning Center and an Avon sales representative who earns $300 a week. On most nights, she takes the D train from her classes in Manhattan back to her third-floor apartment in the South Bronx. It’s a tough neighborhood. A few months ago she heard gunshots outside her window. Once home, Maldonado cooks dinner. She cleans up. She helps her 9-year-old son, Nelson, with his homework. Then the single mother and her son bundle up and walk three blocks — past a check-cashing store, a small supermarket and the occasional drug dealer on the corner — to their local library. A year ago, Maldonado’s computer stopped working and she cannot afford a new one. When she returns to her apartment, she rummages through her purse and places whatever money she can spare in a jar half-filled with coins and crumpled dollars.
“My teacher assumes everyone has Internet at home,” she said. Maldonado is not alone. One Per Cent: 3D printer provides woman with a brand new jaw. Paul Marks senior technology correspondent An 83-year-old Belgian woman is able to chew, speak and breathe normally again after a machine printed her a new jawbone. Made from a fine titanium powder sculpted by a precision laser beam, her replacement jaw has proven as functional as her own used to be before a potent infection, called osteomyelitis, all but destroyed it. The medics behind the feat say it is a first. "This is a world premiere, the first time a patient‐specific implant has replaced the entire lower jaw," says Jules Poukens, the researcher who led the operation at Biomed, the biomedical research department of the University of Hasselt, in Belgium. "It's a cautious, but firm step.
" Until now, the largest 3D-printed implant is thought to have been half of a man's upper jawbone, in a 2008 operation in Finland. In this operation, a 3D printed titanium scaffold was steeped in stem cells and allowed to grow biocompatible tissue inside the abdomen of the recipient. Elings. 21st Century Description and Access. Many recent articles, reports, and presentations in the library profession have identified major environmental, technological, and philosophical changes that are requiring us to completely rethink how libraries perform bibliographic control.1 Even the term bibliographic control is an anachronism: Bibliographic: This term has a lot to do with published literature – mainly book literature but to some extent also journal–, but not much at all to do with many of the forms of communication now being used on the Internet.
When we harvest web sites, what is the part that we can call bibliographic? How bibliographic is, for example, a collaborative blog? We desperately need a more general and generic term for this, which for lack of a better idea I've decided to select descriptive, since no matter what the resource we are basically talking about describing a resource. Control: What part of this do I need to explain? Figure 3. Library 2.0 Theory: Web 2.0 and Its Implications for Libraries.
Jack M. Maness MLS, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, 1720 Pleasant St., Boulder, CO, USA. Email: jack dot maness at colorado dot edu Received June 19, 2006; Accepted June 29, 2006 Abstract This article posits a definition and theory for "Library 2.0". Keywords Web 2.0, Library 2.0, Blog, Wiki, Streaming media, Social network, Tagging, RSS, Mashup Introduction While the term is widely defined and interpreted, "Web 2.0" was reportedly first conceptualized and made popular by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty of O'Reilly Media in 2004 to describe the trends and business models that survived the technology sector market crash of the 1990s (O'Reilly, 2005).
The implications of this revolution in the Web are enormous. Most writers on Library 2.0 would agree that much of what libraries adopted in the first Web revolution are static. Library 2.0 According to Miller (2005a), "Library 2.0" is a term coined by Michael Casey on his LibrayCrunch blog. It is user-centered. Synchronous Messaging. How Big Telecom Used Smartphones to Create a New Digital Divide. As the 2011 holiday shopping season geared up, the country’s leading mobile wireless carrier, Verizon, announced a special deal.
For a limited time only, customers could get the popular HTC Droid Incredible 2 smartphone for free, if they signed up for a two-year data plan. Since the phone’s full retail price is usually more than $430, the deal meant a savings of more than $200 with a new contract. It features a four-inch touchscreen and eight mega-pixel rear camera, along with top-of-the-line video and one of the industry’s fastest processors. It’s everything you need to feel like you’ve got the Internet in your pocket, and for a fraction of the price of a computer. That’s a compelling selling point for many buyers, but particularly so among the black and Latino consumers who are so key to the now-massive smartphone market. There are 234 million cell phone subscribers in the United States, 45.5 million of whom own smartphones. America Online—and Mobile The same goes for civic life.