First impressions of Belgrade from Avala train.
September’s melancholic mood with last few glimpses of sunshine offered a perfect backdrop to our first Balkan-bound journey in our project. It couldn’t have been more different to our preceding journey to the relatively clean-cut Poland where…
Malcolm Gladwell’s take on social media is like a nun’s likely review of the Kama Sutra — self-righteous and misguided by virtue of voluntary self-exclusion from the subject. But while the nun’s…
EDF Climate Corps bridges this resource gap. We match trained students from leading business schools with companies that need to develop practical, actionable energy efficiency plans.
“I’ll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes“Gobi Desert Opera” because, well, it’s just kind of plonkingly obvious that there’s no good reason to go there and live. It’s ugly, it’s inhospitable and there’s no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it’s so hard to reach.”
–Bruce Sterling
Science writer Steven Johnson’s latest book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation is, in some ways, a classic Johnson book: drawing from diverse sources across many…
Citizens of Nevada, you can now relax. The Nevada National Security Site, home to tens of millions of cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste — and location of over a thousand Cold War nuclear…
They’re building robots, they’re making us immortal, they’re hanging out with Stevie Wonder and getting off on fruit-fly porn. These are the visionary thinkers who can make our future bright, and…
Should we listen to futurists or are they leading us towards ‘nerdocalypse’?
What’s going on behind the curtain is that the Eschaton is a local enforcer for the Strong Anthropic Principle; it can only ensure its survival if nobody else commits GCV within its light cone. So it…
At this point in time, two major areas of physics, statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics, rest on the foundations of probability and entropy. The last century saw several significant…
The Random Forests algorithm was proposed by Leo Breiman in 1999. The algorithm can be used for both regression and classification, as well as for variable selection, interaction detection,…
I am often puzzled by what we call errors of grammar and usage, errors such as different than, between you and I, a which for a that, and so on. I am puzzled by what motive could underlie the unusual…
and Khezr, the Hidden Prophet, the Green Man, King of Hyperborea, wily servant of Moses, trickster-cook of Alexander, Khezr who drank from the fountain of life in the Land of Darkness. Flowers and…
What tattoo art has to do with fashion, vintage atlases and Nazi concentration camps.
Tononi
In 1939, at one of civilization’s lowest points, a little-known Swiss sociologist, Norbert Elias, published a book called “Über den Prozess der Zivilisation” (“On the Civilizing Process”) with a…
The bards or poets ranked with aristocrats and even royalty, but musicians were merely the servants of the bards. In Dumezil’s tripartite structure of Indo-European society, as reflected in Ireland,…
DASH7 is a new wireless sensor networking technology using the ISO/IEC 18000-7 standard for active RFID, operating at in the 433 MHz unlicensed spectrum. DASH7 provides multi-year battery life, range…
Now we are aiming our technologies inward where they will start to…
That two human beings can communicate with each other at all is rather remarkable.
Before I make a start I would want to make it very clear that inspite of what that the title may suggest, this is not a “sensational” post. It is just something that really intrigued me. It basically…
Great visualizations achieve a harmonious balance of information, granularity, motion and audio. Great visualizations possess an ambient simplicity that transcends time and will remain memorable for…
Science fiction creators need to stop making self-aware machines into a metaphor for our society.
China launched a week-long series of anti-terrorist drills called “Great Wall 5”, in preparation for the upcoming 2008 Olympic Games. The drills involved emergency responders, “police forces, the…
Todd Reichert has achieved what’s believed to be an aviation first. The University of Toronto PhD candidate built a human-powered aircraft with flapping wings which he hopes has set a world record.
So as you imagine this ultimate creative playground, does Cuba come to mind? From what we know of Cuba, especially since the embargo in the 1960s, it seems like anything but the ideal…
Solutions for a Creativity Crisis: Technological Disobedience
Field is a development environment for experimental code and digital art in the broadest of possible senses.
Fang Zhouzi, sometimes called the “science cop”, claims to have exposed more than 900 cases of academic fraud in China. It was his investigation that brought to light the controversy around Tang…
The Dying Swan is sometimes moving smoothly and gently, sometimes in a dramatic and fiery manner, as Tchaikovsky´s majestic music from the ballet Swan Lake is playing. Yet this is no ordinary ballet…
This project intends to design and control modular robots, called Roombots, to be used as building blocks for furniture that moves, self-assembles, self-reconfigures, and self-repairs. Modular robots…
The deep union of ourselves with our inventions is not new. If a cyborg means a being that is part biological and part technological then we humans began as cyborgs, and still are. Our ancestors…
We’d like to create an international network of people growing all kinds of algae in their homes in a small community scale, sharing information, doing it all in an open source way. We’d be like the…
THE GLOBAL RISK REGISTER (GRR) IS A SCIENCE FOR HUMANITY PROGRAM, ENGINEERED BY FLEXEYE. IT IS A COMMUNITY AND NETWORK TOOL FOR MANAGING INFORMATION ON GLOBAL RISK.
Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines
The project is a study in why we feel uneasiness when the Nature brand is violated. It’s also about the exciting new-and-improved varieties of unnatural unease that have come to exist quite recently….
Communist Robot is a site designed to organize and present information on robots and other up-coming technologies that will likely have significant ramifications on the future of society. It has…
Issues of the Alchemy Journal published between 2000 and 2007 by the International Alchemy Guild, encompassing the 27 issues from Volume 1 Number 1 to Volume 8 Number 3, are archived below.
Zackary Chiragwandi at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, and colleagues are developing a photovoltaic device based on green fluorescent protein (GFP) from the jellyfish…
Mr. Pearcy and other drifters and homeless people were recruited onto the Green Party ballot by a Republican political operative [Steve May] who freely admits that their candidacies may siphon some…
PLoS ONE: Is a High Impact Factor a Blessing or a Curse? « The Scholarly Kitchen
“I’d kinda like to have a cool hackerly cybernetic computer-controlled food-generation system (so as to have all the benefits of agriculture without ever actually working), but the fine-print here is…
Illustrations from the 1979 children’s book Your Name? Robot.
On the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog Luigi responds to the Economist article, in a post Is there really no downside to Brazil’s agricultural miracle?. He praises their coverage of agriculture, but…
many popular psychology sources are rife with misconceptions. Indeed, in today’s fast-paced world of information overload, misinformation about psychology is at least as widespread as accurate…
The BioPod uses the biolytic filtration process - the efficient breakdown of waste by a range of soil organisms. The organisms quickly aerate the sewage and convert it to oxygen-rich humus. As the…
The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is an old and well-studied problem in computer science. Given a collection of cities on a map, a salesman must make a tour of the cities, visiting each once, and…
I find it a very useful approach to design to imagine that I am making the past for some future, rather than the future itself. Artefacts that reflect ideas and inspiration but are things that…
“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own tastes”
–Marcel Duchamp
Researchers at the NanoRobotics Laboratory of the École Polytechnique de Montréal, under Professor Sylvain Martel, produced this remarkable video showing a swarm of about 5,000 flagellated…
This page contains links for some useful resources collected for the Music Hack Day - London 2010
A Selection of Antique Microscope Slides from the Victorian Era c. 1830s ~ 1890s
Here we demonstrate experimentally that the detectors in two commercially available QKD systems can be fully remote-controlled using specially tailored bright illumination. This makes it possible to…
Hacking commercial quantum cryptography systems by tailored bright illumination
A slightly belated congratulations to PLoS One for a superb first impact factor of 4.351 – putting it in the top 25th percentile of biology journals
Not sure why I’m starting to think this way, I’m just starting to think it’s correct. I was going through Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics – in particular, there’s sections on liberality and…
The International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS) is among the first and oldest organizations devoted to interdisciplinary inquiry into the nature of complex systems, and remains perhaps the…
This post is part of a Nature Blog Focus on hallucinogenic drugs in medicine and mental health, inspired by a recent Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper, The neurobiology of psychedelic drugs:…
The secret history of psychedelic psychiatry : Neurophilosophy
Microbes may become the heroes of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill by gobbling up oil more rapidly than anyone expected. Now some experts suggest we ought to artificially stimulate such microbes in…
Two hundred years ago, Ascension Island was a barren volcanic edifice. Today, its peaks are covered by lush tropical “cloud forest”. What happened in the interim is the amazing story of how the…
Bayesian probability, and in particular the Naïve Bayes classifier, is successfully used in many parts of the web, from IMDB ratings to spam filters. The classifier examines the independent features…
