L'article faux qui a rapporté 1,4 million de visites à BuzzFeed - Capture d'écran de BuzzFeed - Au lieu de faire quelque chose de productif comme finir le deuxième chapitre de mon livre (c'est en bonne voie de toute façon), j'ai passé une heure ce mardi 3 décembre à regarder comment l'Internet s'était fait avoir par un nouveau canular. Elan Gale, un producteur de The Bachelor et donc une des pires personnes de la planète, a passé une partie de son Thanksgiving à live-tweeter ce qu'il affirmait être une querelle avec une femme irritante portant «des jeans de maman» qui se plaignait trop bruyamment du retard de son avion. Gale lui a envoyé des boissons et des petits mots pour lui dire de se taire et de «manger une bite» («eat a dick» en anglais, expression utilisée pour répondre en marquant son énervement à une attaque verbale). publicité Internet a adoré, surtout BuzzFeed. Problème: l'histoire de Gale n'était pas vraie. BuzzFeed s'est moqué de moi Je ne dis pas que BuzzFeed devrait virer qui que ce soit. Malheureusement fréquent «Trop bon pour vérifier»
How snowflakes get their shape The key is here: each branch on a single snowflake experiences the same history of variations as it falls, but different flakes don't. The thing with (classical) physics is that if you start with identical starting conditions, and subject something to the same conditions, you get the same outcome. But isn't it amazing that the snowflake is small enough that even then there are no variations on the conditions each of the six branches experiences?! It is amazing :D Snowflakes are such a weird size, really — just big enough that we can see them, but as you said, small enough to act like a "particle" when you consider its environment.
Listen to Isaac Asimov in 1988, explaining why scientists rule Each generation informs the next, a larger public belief in the mystical only hinders our progress as we return to that which we have ruled out as possible, many of these belief systems insisting that their followers act on blind faith and follow doctrine without question. A return to tradition only stifles progress as we are tempted to continue centuries old conflicts started by men long dead. It makes me sad to know that I shared the world with Issac Asimov and Carl Sagan and other great minds before I was aware of them or the brilliance of their vision and now that I have learned to respect them they are no longer here to admire. I am however grateful that they have left us with documents such as this interview where they speak from the heart for the coming generation that is ready to listen.
The future of nukes: Even if everything goes wrong, nothing happens GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN—Carlo Rubbia, Nobel Prize winner and former Director General of CERN, has spent his more recent career thinking about energy, and he has some strong thoughts on nuclear power. Those thoughts have been driven in part by climate change (nuclear provides the only source of low-carbon electricity that can be deployed anywhere), but they've also been driven by the events at Fukushima. At least twice during a Nobel Dialog panel, Rubbia said that the sort of risk analyses that we've been doing for nuclear power are simply insufficient. The analyses are based on probabilities: if the failure of a given pump creates an obvious risk, you simply put in a second pump, then a third if necessary. In the end, you get an infinitesimal risk that you can approximate as zero. In its place, Rubbia said that we need to have some form of design that makes safety deterministic—something where, even if things go completely wrong, nothing happens. He's hedging his bets.
3-D Printed Car Is as Strong as Steel, Half the Weight, and Nearing Production | Autopia Engineer Jim Kor and his design for the Urbee 2. Photo: Sara Payne Picture an assembly line not that isn’t made up of robotic arms spewing sparks to weld heavy steel, but a warehouse of plastic-spraying printers producing light, cheap and highly efficient automobiles. If Jim Kor’s dream is realized, that’s exactly how the next generation of urban runabouts will be produced. His creation is called the Urbee 2 and it could revolutionize parts manufacturing while creating a cottage industry of small-batch automakers intent on challenging the status quo. Urbee’s approach to maximum miles per gallon starts with lightweight construction – something that 3-D printing is particularly well suited for. Jim Kor is the engineering brains behind the Urbee. “We thought long and hard about doing a second one,” he says of the Urbee. Kor and his team built the three-wheel, two-passenger vehicle at RedEye, an on-demand 3-D printing facility. Photo: Sara Payne “We’re calling it race car safety,” Kor says.
The Artificial Womb Is Born And The World of the Matrix Begins ”One by one the eggs were transferred from their test-tubes to the larger containers; deftly the peritoneal lining was slit, the morula dropped into place, the saline solution poured . . . and already the bottle had passed on through an opening in the wall, slowly on into the Social Predestination Room.” Aldous Huxley, ”Brave New World” The artificial womb exists. In Tokyo, researchers have developed a technique called EUFI — extrauterine fetal incubation. They have taken goat fetuses, threaded catheters through the large vessels in the umbilical cord and supplied the fetuses with oxygenated blood while suspending them in incubators that contain artificial amniotic fluid heated to body temperature. Yoshinori Kuwabara, chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Juntendo University in Tokyo, has been working on artificial placentas for a decade. Kuwabara and his associates have kept the goat fetuses in this environment for as long as three weeks. Between Womb and Air
MIT's shapeshifting display lets you reach out and touch someone MIT has demonstrated a "Dynamic Shape Display" that can physically change shape to render 3D content. As Fast Company reports, the display is called inFORM, and it's a large surface that sits atop a series of pins, actuators, and linkages. By moving each actuator, inFORM can move the pin it's attached to up or down, allowing for a wide range of interactions. A projector mounted above the surface provides context to the shapeshifting pins, giving them color and highlighting depth. In a video released by MIT, the table is shown moving a ball, mirroring a book, displaying 3D charts, and giving an extremely visible smartphone notification. When used in conjunction with a Kinect sensor, inFORM gets a lot more interesting. MIT says it's exploring "a number of application domains" for inFORM. It's extremely impressive stuff, but it's just one step on a long path to what MIT calls Radical Atoms.
21 Science Fictions That Became Science Facts In 2013 Topological defect Also see topological excitations and the base concepts: topology, differential equations, quantum mechanics & condensed matter physics. In mathematics and physics, a topological soliton or a topological defect is a solution of a system of partial differential equations or of a quantum field theory homotopically distinct from the vacuum solution; it can be proven to exist because the boundary conditions entail the existence of homotopically distinct solutions. Typically, this occurs because the boundary on which the boundary conditions are specified has a non-trivial homotopy group which is preserved in differential equations; the solutions to the differential equations are then topologically distinct, and are classified by their homotopy class. Topological defects are not only stable against small perturbations, but cannot decay or be undone or be de-tangled, precisely because there is no continuous transformation that will map them (homotopically) to a uniform or "trivial" solution.
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!)
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:
What Is The Singularity And Will You Live To See It? 1. I'm generally skeptical of the singularity and of post-scarcity economics in general. 2. I think it's interesting to ponder why the singularity might not occur. 3. 4. 5. 6. 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.