Emergence is the development of complex organized systems. Like intelligence in the field of AI, or agents in distributed artificial intelligence, emergence is a central concept in complex systems

Emergence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Book Description
Tito is in his early twenties. Born in Cuba, he speaks fluent Russian, lives in one room in a NoLita warehouse, and does delicate jobs involving information transfer.

Hollis Henry is an investigative journalist, on assignment from a magazine called Node. Node doesn't exist yet, which is fine; she's used to that. But it seems to be actively blocking the kind of buzz that magazines normally cultivate before they start up. Really actively blocking it. It's odd, even a little scary, if Hollis lets herself think about it much. Which she doesn't; she can't afford to.

Milgrim is a junkie. A high-end junkie, hooked on prescription antianxiety drugs. Milgrim figures he wouldn't survive twenty-four hours if Brown, the mystery man who saved him from a misunderstanding with his dealer, ever stopped supplying those little bubble packs. What exactly Brown is up to Milgrim can't say, but it seems to be military in nature. At least, Milgrim's very nuanced Russian would seem to be a big part of it, as would breaking into locked rooms.

Bobby Chombo is a "producer," and an enigma. In his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for manufacturers of military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. Hollis Henry has been told to find him.

Pattern Recognition was a bestseller on every list of every major newspaper in the country, reaching #4 on the New York Times list. It was also a BookSense top ten pick, a WordStock bestseller, a best book of the year for Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and the Economist, and a Washington Post "rave."

Spook Country is the perfect follow-up to Pattern Recognition, which was called by The Washington Post (among many glowing reviews), "One of the first authentic and vital novels of the twenty-first century."

Bring the Gibson, baby!

Amazon.com | William Gibson's Spook Country | August 6

ASProf is a realtime profiler for Macromedia Flash MX.

ASProf - Realtime Actionscript Profiler

All well and good. Science is full of homo sapiens-humbling insights. But the trade-off for these lessons in insignificance has always been that at least now we would have a deeper — simpler — understanding of the universe. That the more we could observe, the more we would know. But what about the less we could observe? What happens to new knowledge then? It’s a question cosmologists have been asking themselves lately, and it might well be a question we’ll all be asking ourselves soon, because if they’re right, then the time has come to rethink a fundamental assumption: When we look up at the night sky, we’re seeing the universe.

Not so. Not even close.

Out There : Most of the Universe is Dark Matter

This isn't a zXML error. You must pass a value to send() in Firefox, even if the value is null. So you should be doing:

oReq.send(null);

In firefox 2.0+, on Windows, you cannot do a GET XMLHttpRequest and send(), you must send(null). Been getting away with this for months, until tonight when Firefox auto-upgraded.

p2p.wrox.com Forums - zxml.js exception in Firefox but works fine in IE

Welcome to test the document exploration tool WEBSOM. An ordered map of the information space is provided: similar documents lie near each other on the map. The order helps in finding related documents once any interesting document is found.

Developments
Since the start of the project the following main developments have taken place: creation of considerably larger maps, improved quality of maps, automatic labeling, and a possibility to perform searches on the maps.

NEW:

Self Organizing Maps: The coolest technology you've probably never used. What good is publishing a CS paper without source code?

Alas, Dr. Teuvo Kohonen has informed me that the rights to WEBSOM have been sold to Finnish company Gurusoft Ltd. You'll never get to play with it :(

WEBSOM - A novel SOM-based approach to free-text mining

A US grand jury in Guam opened an investigation of controversial lobbyist Jack Abramoff more than two years ago, but President Bush removed the supervising federal prosecutor, and the probe ended soon after.

The previously undisclosed Guam inquiry is separate from a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia that is investigating allegations that Abramoff bilked Indian tribes out of millions of dollars.

In Guam, a US territory in the Pacific, investigators were looking into Abramoff's secret arrangement with Superior Court officials to lobby against a court reform bill then pending in Congress. The legislation, since approved, gave the Guam Supreme Court authority over the Superior Court.

In 2002, Abramoff was retained by the Superior Court in what was an unusual arrangement for a public agency. The Los Angeles Times reported in May that Abramoff was paid with a series of $9,000 checks funneled through a Laguna Beach, Calif., lawyer to disguise the lobbyist's role working for the Guam court. No separate contract was authorized for Abramoff's work.

Follow this, Poppy Bush nominated the formaer US Attorney in 1991, Clinton left him there, he stayed on the job until about the beginning of 2003. Here's where things get interesting. At that point he's investigating and has sent out subpoenas based on what he's got and then gets axed.

We're probably looking at fraud, money laundering, bribes, and any number of other things based on the description given, and that's just in Guam. Now let's take a trip to Washington. This is not someone who was fired with all the other US Attorneys, he's got a different track. He gets fired, and replaced by, get this, an operative of the then governor of Guam, who the prior attorney was investigating for corruption!

Bush may end up meeting the high standards or Harding of Buchanan. Oh who am I kidding, he's exceeded them. Harding didn't get us into a war and Buchanan didn't have the same levels of influence peddling and corruption. Bush combines the worst of both worlds.

Bush removal ended Guam investigation - The Boston Globe

The MIT researchers focused on a key property of ethanol: when it vaporizes, it has a pronounced cooling effect, much like rubbing alcohol evaporating from skin. Increased turbo�charging and cylinder compression raise the temperature in the cylinder, which is why they lead to knock. But Cohn and his colleagues found that if ethanol is introduced into the combustion chamber at just the right moment through the relatively new technology of direct injection, it keeps the temperature down, preventing spontaneous combustion. Similar approaches, some of which used water to cool the cylinder, had been tried before. But the combination of direct injection and ethanol, Cohn says, had much more dramatic results.

Neat.

Direct Port Ethanol Injection, Properly Times, Decreases Detonation, allowing you to increase compression dramatically

Cause for "A script in this movie is causing Flash Player to run slowly" alert
Issue

While viewing a Macromedia Flash movie in any Macromedia Flash Player environment (browser, standalone, or projector), an alert appears stating "A script in this movie is causing Flash Player to run slowly". Additionally, the message box gives the viewer the option to abort the script, as can be seen in Example 1.

Beware of trying to do too much in flash: this alert will kill you.

Adobe - TechNote : Cause for 'A script in this movie is causing Flash Player to run slowly' alert

The man pages listed below are linked to the current Solaris Express Reference Manual Collection. You can view the man pages online by installing the Solaris Express Community Release (Build 27a or later). Make sure you install the SUNWman package.

ZFS is interesting because it is the kind of filesystem that everyone will be using in 5 years.

ZFS Documentation at OpenSolaris.org