There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
Why the Web 2.0 Bubble Doesn't Bother Silicon Valley
Topic: Tech Industry
6:45 am EST, Nov 15, 2007
File under "Atlanta is Hosed":
“The great news for me about these times of enthusiasm is that inevitably there’s a lot of bedlam, undoubtedly there’ll be carnage, there’ll be all sorts of carcasses strewn across the road,” he said. “But there will also be a handful of companies that will emerge to become very significant. And that’s what working and living and investing in Silicon Valley has always been about.”
“People in New York feel a chip on their shoulder because they’re not in the center of this thing,” says Seth Goldstein, a longtime Silicon Alley player now decamped to Marin County. “The question is, why didn’t Netscape start in New York? Why didn’t Google start in New York? Why didn’t Yahoo start in New York? It’s that things are able to percolate here, not because of idealism but because of a willing suspension of disbelief.”
Kaguya (Selene) Images of Earth-Rise Over the Moon
Topic: Space
9:47 pm EST, Nov 14, 2007
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency have successfully performed the world's first high-definition image taking of an Earth-rise* by the lunar explorer "KAGUYA" which was injected into a lunar orbit at an altitude of about 100 km on October 18, 2007.
Hijexx asked:
Have they released any true HD video or pictures yet? They list the camera's capabilities as 2.2 megapixel yet all I have been able to locate aren't even 0.5 megapixel.
It is difficult to imagine that Musharraf will ever recover the political strength necessary to govern the country.
Not surprisingly, neither the General nor President Bush seems to be aware of this.
Watch this interview with Musharraf, published today by the New York Times. It's nine minutes long. Listen to him try to explain why he can't resign as Army chief. For a more congenial interview, you might want to go back and review his appearance (part 1, part 2) on the Daily Show, during his book tour. At one minute into part two, Stewart asks:
You met with our President a few days ago, are you able to speak candidly with him about what you feel is working, and what isn't, and is he, [does he] seem open, or ... paying attention, or ... does he let's say have the TV on, ...
The President has spent December in sleeves-rolled-up discussions with State Department experts and military officers, apparently searching for such ideas. It seems a little late in his chief-executive-style Presidency for such an earnest return to graduate school.
In a competitive democracy, it is difficult to rescue a war built on distortions and illusions, because, to protect falsehoods proffered to voters in the past, a President and his advisers may find it tempting to manufacture more of them. It does not require a cynic to see that even an implausible escalation plan has the virtue of putting domestic political opponents back on their heels. The Bush Administration is now reworking this sad axiom, and, once again, American soldiers will be asked to give their lives for its assumptions.
The hands of the girl with dark glasses searched for somewhere to hold on to, but it was the doctor's wife who gently held them in her own hands, Rest, rest. The girl closed her eyes, remained like that for a minute, she might have fallen asleep were it not for the quarrel that suddenly erupted, someone had gone to the lavatory and on his return found his bed occupied, no harm was meant, the other fellow had got up for the same reason, they had passed each other on the way, and obviously it did not occur to either of them to say, Take care not to get into the wrong bed when you come back. Standing there, the doctor's wife watched the two blind men who were arguing, she noticed they made no gestures, that they barely moved their bodies, having quickly learned that only their voice and hearing now served any purpose, true, they had their arms, that they could fight, grapple, come to blows, as the saying goes, but a bed swapped by mistake was not worth so much fuss, if only all life's deceptions were like this one, and all they had to do was to come to some agreement, Number two is mine, yours is number three, let that be understood once and for all, Were it not for the fact that we're blind this mix-up would never have happened, You're right, our problem is that we're blind. The doctor's wife said to her husband, The whole world is right here.
Frank and Ramesh's difficulties with their ant-cemetery project were due, in large part, to their difficulties in thinking about emergent objects. They were adamant that dead ants should never be taken from a cemetery because they thought the dead ants define the cemetery. How can a cemetery grow, they wondered, if the dead ants in it are continually being taken away?
Too often, privacy has been equated with anonymity; and it’s an idea that is deeply rooted in American culture. The Lone Ranger wore a mask but Tonto didn’t seem to need one even though he did the dirty work for free. You’d think he would probably need one even more. But in our interconnected and wireless world, anonymity – or the appearance of anonymity – is quickly becoming a thing of the past.
Protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won. Anyone that’s typed in their name on Google understands that. Instead, privacy, I would offer, is a system of laws, rules, and customs with an infrastructure of Inspectors General, oversight committees, and privacy boards on which our intelligence community commitment is based and measured. And it is that framework that we need to grow and nourish and adjust as our cultures change.
Can you imagine trying to find things on the Internet without a search engine? Now you can navigate the complexity of your data center with IT Search. Splunk is the IT Search engine that indexes and lets you search, navigate, alert and report on IT data from any application, server or network device. Securely access logs, configurations, scripts and code, message, traps and alerts, activity reports, stack traces and metrics across thousands of components, from one place, all in real time.
Computational modeling of biological systems is becoming increasingly important in efforts to better understand complex biological behaviors. In this review, we distinguish between two types of biological models—mathematical and computational— which differ in their representations of biological phenomena. We call the approach of constructing computational models of biological systems ‘executable biology’, as it focuses on the design of executable computer algorithms that mimic biological phenomena. We survey the main modeling efforts in this direction, emphasize the applicability and benefits of executable models in biological research and highlight some of the challenges that executable biology poses for biology and computer science. We claim that for executable biology to reach its full potential as a mainstream biological technique, formal and algorithmic approaches must be integrated into biological research. This will drive biology toward a more precise engineering discipline.
1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free. 2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.
After you have done FreeRice for a couple of days, you may notice an odd phenomenon. Words that you have never consciously used before will begin to pop into your head while you are speaking or writing. You will feel yourself using and knowing more words.
This has the potential to be considerably more addictive than the ESP Game.
DARKON is a feature documentary that follows the real-life adventures of an unusual group of weekend "warrior knights," fantasy role-playing gamers whose live action "battleground" is modern-day Baltimore, Maryland, re-imagined as a make-believe medieval world named Darkon. These live action gamers combine the physical drama of historical re-enactments with character-driven storylines inspired in part by such perennial favorite fantasy epics like the legends of King Arthur, Lord of the Rings, and the saga of Conan the Barbarian. As role players, they create alter-egos with rich emotional, psychological, and social lives. They costume themselves and physically act out their characters exploits both in intimate court intrigue and campouts and in panoramic battle scenarios involving competitive strategies, convincingly real props, and full contact "combat." Because real life so often gets in the way, it's easy to understand these players motivations.
