Related to my last post on Europa Report, a movie I discovered when I read these articles earlier today, and also in the category of things I somehow missed, NASA is planning a robotic mission to Europa. This is exciting since, as I noted in the movie review, Europa's underground ocean makes it currently the … Continue reading NASA planning a robotic mission to Europa
Category: Zeitgeist
The web is 25 years old!
The Guardian has a nice article up about the web, its creation, and its creator Tim Berners-Lee, who I think it's definitely accurate now to call Johannes Gutenberg's heir. It sprang from the brain of one man, Tim Berners-Lee, and is the fastest-growing communication medium of all time. A quarter-century on, we examine how the … Continue reading The web is 25 years old!
Americans, Crimea is not about us
Watching the Sunday morning news shows, there is lot of stupid silly ridiculous commentary, mostly from conservatives out to score political points, that the Crimean crisis is somehow Barack Obama's fault, that maybe if he had been a stronger, more decisive, more manly leader, Putin wouldn't have sent troops in.I'm not going to pretend to … Continue reading Americans, Crimea is not about us
Credible and baseless concerns about AI
I caught James Barrat on CSPAN BookTV Saturday evening, talking about his book, 'Our Final Invention', the main theme of which appears to be that we're in danger of designing intelligent machines, won't be able to control them, and that will be the end of us. One of my earliest posts on this blog was on … Continue reading Credible and baseless concerns about AI
SMBC: Sperm cosmology
All kinds of ways to interpret this one. (Click through to see full sized version.) via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
Sleep and death
HuffPost has an interesting Sleep 101 article up. Sleep is anything but a waste of time. While many people think of catching ZZs as the body "shutting off" until morning, nodding off actually activates a complicated process that helps you feel rested and healthy the next day. Scientists divide sleep into four stages -- each … Continue reading Sleep and death
If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel – A tediously accurate map of the solar system
Wow! We've talked before that humans can't really comprehend large numbers, or very large or very small distances. We have to deploy metaphors to handle them. At this link is an image of the solar system, drawn to scale, including all the empty space. If you think you've ever seen that, you may be in … Continue reading If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel – A tediously accurate map of the solar system
When Classical Universes Collide, The Result is Quantum Mechanics, Say Physicists
I shared this on Twitter, but it occurred to me that, although I didn't have any particular comment to make on it, many of my non-Twitter readers might find it interesting. The strange behaviour of the quantum world is direct evidence of the interaction between our universe and many other classical universes, according to a … Continue reading When Classical Universes Collide, The Result is Quantum Mechanics, Say Physicists
Epigenetics: The sins of the father
A while back I linked to a BBC story on the discovery that mice could pass on a learned fear of certain smells to their descendants. This is an almost Lamarckian observation, one that may indicate that the long discredited scientific theory of acquired traits being inheritable may have had a glimmer of truth. This … Continue reading Epigenetics: The sins of the father
xkcd: Land Mammals
It's indeed true that sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. (Click through for full sized version.)via xkcd: Land Mammals.
SelfAwarePatterns 