Someone care to report back on Newt Gingrich’s book? I used to have hopes for him to veer our way. I’m not easily drawn back to such foolish thinking... but... one can hope. See: A Contract with the Earth
Sorry, but it's Halloween and I am getting gremlined. I cannot hot link all of the following. But it's cool stuff.
Oh, today I spent all day at the Salk Institute participating in "Beyond Belief" which had some major lumionary minds there... but turned out to be somewhat of an "atheism fest"... I wound up being the contrarian speaking up for God!
Researchers have developed a low-cost, low-power computer memory that could put terabyte-sized thumb drives in consumers' pockets within a few years.
Peter Thiel Explains How to Invest in the Singularity
The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet, by Daniel J. Solove, isn't much concerned with privacy advocates' usual bête noire, the surveillance state. Instead, Solove focuses on a more down-to-earth set of concerns, such as developing practical law for a quasi-voyeuristic-exhibitionist society. (Somone go read it and report back here!)
Adobe Systems is developing software that could bring the power of a Hollywood animation studio to the average computer and let users render high-quality graphics in real time.
An extremely simple Turing machine has been proved to be universal.
EEStor claims to have developed a car battery based on capacitors that can be charged quickly and is ready for large-scale production. The patent specifies charge storage that is much higher than anything achieved in an academic lab: 52 kilowatt-hours in a 2,000 cubic inch capacitor array -- more than 10 times the power density of standard cells.
See that fellow who documents every move he makes, in order to stave off “terror” profiling.
The US and UK governments are developing increasingly sophisticated gadgets to keep individuals under surveillance.
DigitalGlobe, provider of imagery for Google Earth, said WorldView I, a new high-resolution satellite to be launched on Tuesday, will produce one-half meter resolution images for commercial use.
There is new hope that we might survive an apocalypse five billion years from now. That is when, scientists say, the Sun will run out of fuel and swell temporarily more than 100 times in diameter into a so-called red giant, swallowing Mercury and Venus. Astronomers are announcing that they have discovered a that seems to have survived the puffing up of its home , suggesting there is some hope that could survive the aging and swelling of the Sun.
Organized crime may have brought in more than $2 trillion in revenue last year, about twice all the military budgets in the worldcombined.
Neural scientists have uncovered evidence of a distinct neurobiology of human intelligence. Their Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (P-FIT) identifies a brain network related to intelligence, one that primarily involves areas in the frontal and the parietal lobes. T he brain areas related to intelligence are the same areas related to attention and memory and to more complex functions like language. Haier and Jung say this possible integration of cognitive functions suggests that intelligence levels might be based on how efficient the frontal-parietal networks process information.
W hile there are essentially no disparities in general intelligence between the sexes, women have more white matter and men more gray matter related to intelligence test scores, suggesting that no single neuroanatomical structure determines general intelligence and that different types of brain designs can produce equivalent intellectual performance.
A low-carbohydrate/high-fat diet and a high-carbohydrate/low-fat diet both improve weight loss, enhance mood, and speed thinking, a study shows, but the low-carb diet may offer less benefit in terms of the rate of cognitive processing.
NASA researchers have designed and built a new circuit chip that can take the heat of a blast furnace and keep on performing.
McAfee CEO David DeWalt says cyber-crime has become a $105 billion business that now surpasses the value of the illegal drug trade worldwide. Worldwide data losses now represent $40 billion in losses to affected companies and individuals each year.
These people are creating software to make the world's statistical data accessible to the public.
(10/07) As if taken straight from The Transparent Society -- The U.S. Transportation Administration today promised to protect air travelers' privacy as TSA personnel peer through their clothes. The TSA has begun testing a millimeter wave scanner at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport as an alternative to pat-downs performed by security personnel when is deemed appropriate. The technology can see through clothing to detect weapons, explosives, and other objects. The TSA said that energy emitted by millimeter wave technology -- 10,000 times less than a cell phone -- is safe, that the technology is intended to keep passengers safe, and that it will keep the potentially embarrassing images safe.
The new "SuperSpeed" USB spec will provide a 10X boost in transfer rate (from 480-Mbits/s in USB 2.0 to 4.8 Gbits/s in USB 3.0), while dramatically lowering power consumption, with broad deployment by 2010. One example of their speed goals is to transfer a 27GB HD movie to a portable device in 70 seconds. The same thing would take 15 minutes
Brookhaven National Laboratory has overcome a major obstacle for using refractive lenses to focus x-rays. This method will allow the efficient focusing of x-rays down to extremely small spots
A computer program that emulates the human brain falls for the same optical illusions humans do, suggesting that the illusions are a by-product of the way babies learn to filter their complex surroundings. Researchers say this means future robots must be susceptible to the same tricks that humans are in order to see as well.
From Josh Duberman: “Larry Lessig appears on Danish TV to explain his new cause, devoting the next ten years to ending government corruption. Lessig is downright inspirational on the subject, calling on us to set aside our cynical instinct that tells us that money will always control government and use technology to expose corruption and rally citizens to end it.” A riff on transparency, of course.
Tool Cool. Nice to know things will boogy after we’re gone.
What Will China Look Like in 2035? Here's what economists at China's official government think tank predict for the future of the mainland, by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, an international investment banker and senior adviser at Citigroup, is the editor of China's Banking and Financial Markets: The Internal Research Report of the Chinese Government and the author of The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin, China's best-selling book in 2005.
Forget exploding dye or hot pursuits. Tiny GPS devices inside poackets of stolen money are now snaring bank robbers with trivial ease. And letting parents put fine restrictions on where and when their teens can drive. “Like a host of other location technologies in the works, the money-tracking tools can trace their origin to an initially obscure rule, written into the Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, which required that new cellphones be able to communicate their location to emergency responders whenever callers dial 911. Some companies planted chips in their phones that communicate directly with G.P.S. satellites. Others use cellular towers to triangulate the signal. With the location systems in place, a number of companies began working on other applications.”
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"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change" -Max Planc, Nobel physicist