Functional programmer extraordinaire Erik Meijer has a series of video lectures on “Functional Programming Fundamentals” where he teaches FP using Graham Hutton’s Programming in Haskell book. In the…
Erik Meijer’s suggestions for further reading in Functional Programming
I read with continuous partial attention and I don’t care that I am frequently interrupting my own reading. I despise the discourse that says we are all shallow, that we are all flighty, distracted,…
Simplistic ecosystem from the perspective of the robot. The red lines suggest relationships or interactions. The diagram represents the period of creation thus facilitating a focus on the motivation behind a robots development, subsequent build and its intended projection into the outside layers.
The team working to contain the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant now includes a robot. The machine, known as Monirobo (“Monitoring Robot”), was on the scene today, according to the…
Michael Moorcock is among the greatest of all writers alive today irrespective of genre. His legendary tenure as the editor of the science-fiction magazine New Worlds from 1964 to 1971 made his first…
Last week, a very prominent artist in the paleontology community somewhat publicly blew a gasket. His tirade started a conversation that has been sorely in need of attention for some time now. At…
Early April the Pictoplasma Festival in Berlin once more stages the world’s leading and largest celebration of contemporary character culture, with a dense, one-week program of inspiring artist…
There are plenty of mobile payment systems in Asia and Europe, and promises of ones to come from Apple and others in the US, but none so far have been as successful and ubiquitous as the simple…
If Japan’s nuclear power sector can withstand the worst natural calamity I hope to ever see in my life and contribute no deaths, minimal injuries and minimal environmental impact, then nuclear power…
The Google Crisis Response team assesses the severity and scope of a disaster to determine whether or not Google is able to uniquely contribute tools or content to response efforts. Examples of…
I don’t actually know this story - certainly no more of it than anyone who has read a few web pages. But luckily, I’m pretty good at making things up. So I want to tell you the story of etherpad, the…
Einstein’s desk. Here’s a photograph of Albert Einstein’s Princeton desk taken only a few hours after he died in 1955.
“According to the writer and editor who approved th[is] summary, “An explosion at a nuclear power plant on Japan’s devastated coast … made leaking radiation, or even outright meltdown, the central threat menacing a nation.” Apparently aftershocks, fires, broken dams, washed out highways, lack of clean drinking water, damaged sewer systems, destroyed airports, and at least a thousand known fatalities are not as much of a threat to the nation of Japan as the possibility that a few people might be exposed to a radiation dose that is roughly equivalent to the ones administered every day as part of routine medical procedures.”
–http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2011/03/sowing-calm-in-face-of-focused-campaign.html
it’s lame - like “AR graffiti” lame. You want to make graffiti art? Locate your metaphorical balls and go and make graffiti art: transcend some actual norms and/or laws. Making polite, sterile,…
Mr Khosla is gambling that venture capital can work similar magic in the field of clean technology. His approach is that of a pragmatic businessman rather than an eco-warrior. “I don’t view climate…
bp22.jpg (via http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/03/japan_earthquake_aftermath.html)
In contrast, the number of successful applications and companies in the
Twitter ecosystem that focus on areas outside of the mainstream consumer
client experience has grown quickly, and this is a…
consistency and ecosystem opportunities - Twitter API Announcements
This has been called the year of the foragers. Every year more and more people armed with guidebooks are exploring the hedgerows to indulge in a spot of Mesolithic role-play. Something that was once…
No One Knows What the F*** They’re Doing (or “The 3 Types of Knowledge”)
Twenty-five years after the Soviet-era meltdown drove 60,000 people from their homes in the Ukraine, a rebirth is taking place inside the exclusion zone. With Geiger counter in hand, the author…
Anti, a popular online commentator whose legal name is Zhao Jing, said in an interview Tuesday that his Facebook account was suddenly canceled in January. Company officials told him by e-mail that…
Activist Michael Anti Furious He Lost Facebook Account—While Zuckerberg’s Dog Has Own Page
But serendipity depends on inefficiency. Entire institutions, now being reconfigured in the age of convergence, were arranged to make serendipity possible. Remember library stacks? Books on a similar…
“Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.”
This page lists software known to us to provide some degree of support for reading, writing, or otherwise working with SBML. For an at-a-glance matrix summarizing key features of these software…
I wish there were a branch of mathematics—in my dreams I call it green mathematics—that would interact with biology and ecology just as fruitfully as traditional mathematics interacts with physics….
Meet Tetrahymena thermophila, which in addition to its seven different sexes—conveniently named I, II, III, IV, V, VI, and VII—has such a complex sex life that it requires an extra nucleus. This…
Voina is a Russian art collective that engages in street action art. It is a movement in contemporary art that is relatively new to Russia despite being widespread in the West and regarded by critics…
If science is neither cookery, nor angelic virtuosity, then what is it?
Modern societies have tended to take science for granted as a way of knowing, ordering and controlling the world. Everything…
This disturbing film records the successful experiments in the resuscitation of life to dead animals (dogs), as conducted by Dr. S.S. Bryukhonenko at the Institute of Experimental Physiology and…
Army Field Manual 2 22.3, or FM 2-22.3, Human Intelligence Collector Operations, was issued by the Department of the Army on September 6, 2006. The manual gives instructions on a range of issues,…
FM 2–22.3 Human Intelligence Collector Operations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“It does not trouble the mathematician that he has to deal with unknown things. At the outset in algebra he handles unknown quantities x and y. His quantities are unknown, but he subjects them to known operations - addition, multi-plication, etc. Recalling Bertrand Russell’s famous definition, the mathematician never knows what he is talking about, nor whether what he is saying is true; but, we are tempted to add, at least he does know what he is doing. The last limitation would almost seem to disqualify him for treating a universe which is the theatre of unknowable actions and operations. We need a super-mathematics in which the operations are as unknown as the quantities they operate on, and a super-mathematician who does not know what he is doing when he performs these operations. Such a super-mathematics is the Theory of Groups.”
–Arthur Stanley Eddington,“New Pathways in Science”, 1934
“Mutate or Die” is a bioart project being conceived of and executed by Tony Allard and Adam Zaretsky. Bioart tends to use cutting edge biotechnology as an art making device and specializes in…
Persona management entails not just the deconfliction of persona artifacts such as names, email addresses, landing pages, and associated content. It also requires providing the human actors…
*People who ridicule this political strategy of Anna’s really aren’t getting it. They remind me of people ridiculing the iPad. “Look, a sleeper agent who just launders money globally, joins social…
On Thursday Belgium equals Iraq’s record as the country that has been without a new government for the longest period of time since a general election. Belgium went to the polls to elect a new…
The man who pulled off one of the greatest confidence tricks in the history of modern intelligence was not easy to pin down. He arrived at a hotel in his adopted home town of Karlsruhe, looking…
Curveball: How US was duped by Iraqi fantasist looking to topple Saddam
Asked by an editor at the GourmetLive app, Are there any stories about design and food? I came up with two pitches. The first, “The Architecture of Food,” ran last November and discussed the rising…
Because the human language is enormous and because one question could potentially be asked dozens or even hundreds of different ways by a user we have developed Zero as a means of analyzing the…
Of course, the bulk of foodie writing falls between the extremes of Pollan- esque sanctimony and Bourdainian oafishness. The average article in a Best Food Writing anthology is a straightforward if…
Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how… - but does it float
Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how… - but does it float
Driven by the demands of academia, which requires the regular publication of high-quality creative work to maintain your job, I developed a system. As an homage to David Allen, I call it “Getting…
Getting Creative Things Done: How To Fit Hard Thinking Into a Busy Schedule
Today, thanks to the heavy hand of the law, not much new was allowed to happen, and eMusic’s customers are of an average age of 39, and of course it’s young people who can make a music business…
The White House Asks: What’s Blocking Innovation in America? - My Answer: IP Laws
University of Arizona researchers have cracked one of the puzzles surrounding what has been called “the world’s most mysterious manuscript” – the Voynich manuscript, a book filled with drawings and…
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has recently unveiled a new report which ambitiously declares the world can switch to 95% renewable energy sources by 2050. The report is meant to be both inspiring and…
People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence - but does it float
Yes, I am suggesting technological solutions to social problems. Yes, I am aware this is considered a state of sin by many. But Victorian London damn near doubled its life expectancy on the basis of…
The Noctilux-M for the Leica-M rangefinder cameras has been introduced in 1976 and is the ‘brainchild’ of Dr Mandler of the then Leitz Midlands factory. It has a weight of 630 grams and the highest…
Yesterday’s amazing house of tomorrow is today’s boring house of today - Boing Boing
A corpse rules society – the corpse of labour. All powers around the globe formed an alliance to defend its rule: the Pope and the World Bank, Tony Blair and Jörg Haider, trade unions and…
THE SCIENTIFIC PAPER HAS LONG BEEN THE UNIT OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE. NOW, WITH PRINT MEDIA LAPSING INTO OBSOLESCENCE, THE INTERNET IS POISED TO TRANSFORM SCIENCE PUBLISHING
ABSTRACT: POSTCARD FROM EUROPE about political disunity in Belgium. Brussels is the unofficial capital of the European Union. Like the E.U., Brussels is in a permanent state of identity crisis: it is…
The world gives little thought to Belgium. Yet it may soon have to pay more attention. As the crisis drags on, a break-up of Belgium looks less unthinkable than it was. The effects would be felt far…
Turns out learning in small steps – how to crawl before standing before walking – makes for a better adapted robot in the real world.
Researchers conducting tests in the harsh environment of Mono Lake in California have discovered the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic….
NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemicals
“There are machines out there that are already doing things that have ethical import, such as automatic cash withdrawal machines, and many others in the development stages, such as cars that can…
The National Science Foundation sent out a “Dear Colleague letter” some time ago requesting white papers on grand challenges in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, and has now published…
In the 1980s we did not overreact. We did not stage ill-fated invasions of distant countries. People did not cease traveling and the airline industry did not fall into chaos. We were lazy in enacting…
“Grand Challenge” White Papers for Future Research in the Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences
The surrealistic paintings of Tetsuya Ishida (1973-2005) explore the dark side of modern life.
The facts of schizophrenia are so peculiar, in fact, that they have led Torrey and a growing number of other scientists to abandon the traditional explanations of the disease and embrace a startling…
In the run-up to the G20 summit of leading economies, to be held Thursday and Friday in Seoul, the president of the World Bank has published a column in the Financial Times calling for a fundamental…
An Australian researcher is using bacteria to develop a biological cement that may help patch up failing Dutch dykes, essential in protecting the land from rising sea levels.
Environmentalists have a special affinity for maps. Whether terrestrial or marine, the environment and its ills are tied to a geography that can be expressed in a rectilinear scale.
