DARPA Tried to Build Skynet in the 1980s I really don't understand the Google acquisition of Boston Dynamics, and how the government allowed it to happen. BD is a company that pretty much exists because of military contracts. Basically everything they've done thus far has been for DARPA or the Army. We've poured countless hundreds of millions into them with the expectation that the military will have access to this technology. And then Google comes in and scoops them up and says that they won't accept any new military contracts? Well isn't that wonderful. I cannot believe that this didn't ruffle some feathers at the Pentagon and in Congress, and I really can't believe that we're not hearing about it.
Quietest place on Earth mutes all sounds, messes with your head | Unplugged Twine, A Tiny Gizmo That Holds The Internet's Future | Co. Design "In the future, your house will send you a text message to warn you that your basement is flooding." Sounds like the kind of hooey you only hear in those fantastical "future of…" videos, doesn’t it? Not anymore. Two MIT Media Lab graduates have created a "2.5-inch chunk of the future" called Twine that does exactly that, and more, and is available right now. Well, not quite: It will be available in early 2012, thanks to its wildly successful Kickstarter campaign. Here’s the basic idea behind Twine: Software and physical stuff should be friends. Twine is a small slab of gray plastic that hides that PhD’s worth of engineering magic--a bunch of internal and external sensors and a Wi-Fi hub--"the simplest possible way to get the objects in your life texting, tweeting or emailing," in Carr and Kestner’s words.
The 48 Laws of Power Background[edit] Greene initially formulated some of the ideas in The 48 Laws of Power while working as a writer in Hollywood and concluding that today's power elite shared similar traits with powerful figures throughout history.[5] In 1995, Greene worked as a writer at Fabrica, an art and media school, and met a book packager named Joost Elffers.[4][8] Greene pitched a book about power to Elffers and six months later, Elffers requested that Greene write a treatment.[4] Although Greene was unhappy in his current job, he was comfortable and saw the time needed to write a proper book proposal as too risky.[10] However, at the time Greene was rereading his favorite biography about Julius Caesar and took inspiration from Caesar's decision to cross the Rubicon River and fight Pompey, thus inciting the Great Roman Civil War.[10] Greene would follow Caesar's example and write the treatment, which later became The 48 Laws of Power.[10] He would note this as the turning point of his life.[10]
Basics of Cloud Computing Michael Wood Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. Michael is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement, and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Maybe you have heard about Cloud Computing, maybe not. Like the song says, “Let’s start at the very beginning, because it’s a very good place to start." Cloud Computing has its roots in the service bureau concepts of the 1960s.
An Open Source Artificial Life Project Called OpenWorm OpenWorm is a very cool project that also scares me a little bit: a collaborative, open source attempt to construct an artificial life form -- a simple worm, computationally created from the cellular level to a point where it's sophisticated enough to solve, as the site explains, "basic problems such as feeding, mate-finding and predator avoidance". This would be the first digital life form of its kind, but if the project is successful, more sophisticated species are sure to follow. I first heard about this open source project because OpenSim pioneer John Hurliman recently joined OpenWorm's development team, helping with improving the code's deployment processes. "In the future I'd like to help with the physical and neural simulation aspects," he tells me. How's progress on the worm itself going? "Not a lot from the 'download and run it' perspective, it's a pretty massive undertaking," John tells me. Please share this post with people you like:
Mysteriously dark Mars regions are made of glass - space - 15 April 2012 THEY look dark, but mysterious expanses on Mars are mainly made of glass forged in past volcanoes. The dark regions make up more than 10 million square kilometres of the Martian northern lowlands, but their composition wasn’t clear. Past spectral measurements indicated that they are unlike dark regions found elsewhere on the Red Planet, which consist mainly of basalt. Briony Horgan and Jim Bell of Arizona State University in Tempe analysed near-infrared spectra of the regions, gathered by the Mars Express orbiter. The glass likely takes the form of sand-sized grains, as it does in glass-rich fields in Iceland. On Earth, such rinds coat volcanic glass weathered by water. More on these topics: PhotoSketch Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage Tao Chen1 Ming-Ming Cheng1 Ping Tan2 Ariel Shamir3 Shi-Min Hu1 1TNList, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University 2National University of Singapore 3The Interdisciplinary Center Abstract We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. Paper Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA 2009, ACM Transactions on Graphics, to appear Tao Chen, Ming-Ming Cheng, Ping Tan, Ariel Shamir, Shi-Min Hu System Pipeline Retrieval Results Composition Results Video Supplementary Materials 1. General supplementary materials, including intermediate results and comparisons. 2. High resolution compositions and detailed statistics of the user studies. Sktech2Photo Team Tao Chen, Kun Xu, Fang-Lve Zhang, Meng Ding and Ming-Ming Cheng Update: A web-based Sketch2Photo application: click here (Chinese), collaborated with Tencent. Acknowledgments Note Original Name: PhotoSketch.
When Debt Is More Important Than People, The System Is Evil Submitted by Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds When Debt Is More Important Than People, The System Is Evil The Empire of Debt has only one end-point: a death spiral. It is evil and must be dismantled. Ethics has no place in the Empire of Debt. The reality being masked is that debt is now more important than people. 1. 2. This begs further investigation. The ethics of debt, at least in the officially sanctioned media, boils down to: nobody made them borrow all those euros, and so their suffering is just desserts. What's lost in this subtext is the responsibility of the lender. Consider an individual who is a visibly poor credit risk. Now a lender comes along who can create credit out of thin air (via fractional reserve banking) and offers this poor credit risk $100,000 in collateral-free debt at low rates of interest. This is the basis of bankruptcy laws--or used to be the basis. The debt is discharged and the borrower must live within his means without relying on credit.
No Light Work: Researchers Claim to Have Created World’s Lightest Solid Scientists are breaking new ground in the eternal quest to create ever lighter materials – this time forging a metal so weightless it can sit atop a dandelion. Yahoo News reports that the team of U.S. researchers from University of California at Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology has developed the metal, which is about 100 times lighter than Styrofoam. They constructed a metallic lattice of hair-thin pipes to show off their latest creation, beating out the previously lightest substances in the world, aerogels. (LIST: The 50 Best Inventions) The work is significant because the strategy employed by the team could lead to the development of more materials of extraordinary strength and lightness, according to detailed findings in the Nov. 18 issue of the journal Science. LIST: All-TIME 100 Gadgets
OpenWorm milestone: artificial worm gains muscle sensation James sez, "Mini-milestone in the OpenWorm Project, the collaborative, open source attempt to construct an artificial life form from the cellular level to the point where it's able to have basic problem-solving abilities. They've now artificially recreated internal muscle sensation, a building block for movement, entirely through code -- watch the eerie video!" "The core algorithm for the physics simulation is called PCI-SPH, which is a somewhat advanced but well understood particle simulation method. The main source of complexity is the architecture: going from brain firing signals to muscle contractions to moving particles around." So yes, it accurately simulates the muscle algorithm for these kinds of worms: "Any time you do a simulation like this you're trying to make intelligent abstractions," John allows. Artificial Life Milestone: OpenWorm Team Recreates Internal Muscle Sensation Entirely Through Code (Thanks, James!)
Neutrinos best studied in space Neutrinos are flowing through the Earth all the time, and many of them come from the Sun. In this computer simulation, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada has detected a solar neutrino, which then produces a small burst of light, depicted by the colourful lines. The new research suggests the mass of neutrinos is better measured in the galaxy than in experiments such as this one. Image: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory The lightest known subatomic particles in the Universe are now able to be more accurately scrutinised, in light of new astronomic research two years in the making. After more than 200 nights of galaxy-gazing and thousands of calculations, an international team of astronomers, including researchers from The University of Queensland, has published a new study that has made a remarkable headway in the way the mass of neutrinos are measured. “One of the major challenges is that galaxy formation is not well-described theoretically,” said Dr Riemer-Sørensen.
What is Debt? – An Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber David Graeber currently holds the position of Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths University London. Prior to this he was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University. He is the author of ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’ which is available from Amazon. Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer based in Dublin, Ireland. Philip Pilkington: Let’s begin. David Graeber: Yes there’s a standard story we’re all taught, a ‘once upon a time’ — it’s a fairy tale. It really deserves no other introduction: according to this theory all transactions were by barter. The story goes back at least to Adam Smith and in its own way it’s the founding myth of economics. Think about what they’re saying here – basically: that a bunch of Neolithic farmers in a village somewhere, or Native Americans or whatever, will be engaging in transactions only through the spot trade. DG: Well historically, there seem to have been two possibilities. How did this happen?