Marching Morons

Little lost bot

2009-04-12T22:42:00.000-07:00

Aided by the kindness of strangers, the Tweenbot takes a trip through Gotham.Notwithstanding the military's reaction to the robot Gort in the recent remake of the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, plain old folks apparently like robots, and will even lend a helping hand to a lost little mechanism, especially one with a smiley face.Kacie Kinzer constructed a simple but cute bot and launched it

2009 International Year of Astronomy

2009-01-03T15:46:00.000-08:00

Being that 2009 is the 400th anniversary of Galileo first pointing his telescope at the night sky, astronomers and amateur sky-watchers all over the world are inviting people like you, and your friends and family, to look up in wonder at the night sky, and to seek out answers to some of life's biggest questions.(Tip o'the hat to the science wonks at Universe Today.)

Meeting the Other

2008-09-12T02:19:00.000-07:00

And you think Macs are expensive...

2008-04-30T01:35:00.000-07:00

Computer advertisement circa 1977

Think about it

2007-05-16T09:58:00.000-07:00

So just how big is Betelgeuse?

2007-05-05T00:24:00.001-07:00

A series of photos comparing the sizes of the planets of our solar system is available at Rense.com, of all places. The fun part is that the series of models continues up to stellar objects. Wait till you get a gander at how big Antares is!Photo credits are unavailable

Problematic Factions: A Cyber Solution

2007-04-30T15:28:00.001-07:00

Ethics, anyone?

2007-04-30T14:14:00.000-07:00

The militarization of neuroscience By Hugh Gusterson | 10 April 2007 We've seen this story before: The Pentagon takes an interest in a rapidly changing area of scientific knowledge, and the world is forever changed. And not for the better. During World War II, the scientific field was atomic physics. Afraid that

Scary cyber stuff

2007-04-29T17:24:00.000-07:00

First it's rat brains, now it's this ... The line between living organisms and machines has just become a whole lot blurrier. European researchers have developed "neuro-chips" in which living brain cells and silicon circuits are coupled together. The achievement could one day enable the creation of sophisticated neural prostheses to treat neurological disorders or the development of organic

Tom Swift & His Amazing Electric Rat Brain!

2007-04-29T17:19:00.000-07:00

Neuron from rat brain on a linear array of transistors. The ionic current in the cell interacts with the electronic current in the silicon. Max Planck Institute--R

Think your Mac PowerBook is speedy? Well, think again

2007-04-29T16:52:00.001-07:00

Intel processor can perform about a trillion calculations per second By Jordan Robertson SAN JOSE, Calif. - Intel Corp. has designed a computer chip that promises to perform calculations as quickly an entire data center — while consuming as much energy as a light bulb. The world's biggest chipmaker said Sunday it developed a programmable processor that can perform about a trillion calculations

2007-04-19T13:47:00.000-07:00

Having lived in Missouri (the dead center of Tornado Alley) for some years, I have seen some of these storms up-close and personal, but I never had a camera when I needed it.But Mike Hollingshead was there. He had a camera and took some amazing photographs. Go to this link to read his story. It's pretty amazing.Thanks to Stumble!

2007-04-14T01:15:00.000-07:00

Gaming a world without oilImagine eight people brought together by trouble: trapped together (with thousands of others) in the Denver airport by a blizzard. We had a lot of time on our hands. We talked. We bonded. Awww. How nice. One thing we talked about a lot: how the Internet scoops the official media. It's real obvious in a crisis. In Denver, as in the Katrina disaster, people found the

2007-04-12T11:14:00.000-07:00

Hard drive failure, anyone?This is rich: Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) on the Senate floor yesterday, in response to the assertion that this incompetent Bush administration can't find the Gonzo's emails."They say they have not been preserved. I don't believe that!" Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy shouted from the Senate floor."You can't erase e-mails, not today. They've gone

2007-03-09T20:15:00.000-08:00

Everything There IsClick on pic for bigger imageThis is our best image so far [taken using the WMAP satellite] of what this universe's plasma sphere looks like after cleaning out Galactic radio noise from the WMAP satellite observations.Our entire observable universe is inside this sphere, with a radius of 13.3 billion light years, with us at the center. Space continues outside the sphere, but an

Profits are up, and you're down

2006-10-31T12:41:00.000-08:00

Corporate profits are up, but my wages are down and I'm a little under the weather Slavery ... was justified on humanitarian grounds, not entirely without reason: owners of property tend to treat it more carefully than those who merely rent and can discard it without loss. "Under slavery, after all, the native is bought as an animal," a senior administrator in Portuguese Angola argued. "His owner

Mind over matter

2006-07-12T21:13:00.000-07:00

Brain-implant enables mind over matter * 18:00 12 July 2006 * NewScientist.com news service * Celeste BieverA man paralysed from the neck down by knife injuries sustained five years ago can now check his email, control a robot arm and even play computer games using the power of thought alone.Matt Nagle's extraordinary abilities were first reported in March 2005. Now details of the technology

From One Thought To One Hundred Megatons, Pt One

2006-06-05T02:22:00.000-07:00

The Matrix - Is It Conscious? orFrom One Thought to One Hundred MegatonsIn our previous chapter, The Matrix - Is All In Our Heads?, we pointed out that the Matrix is everything that there is, and hinted delicately at exploring the subject of consciousness as a subset of how Matrix-stuff manifests itself in everyday life.We'll get there eventually, but first, let us jump into the Wayback

The Matrix - All In Our Heads?

2006-05-22T18:54:00.000-07:00

The Matrix:Is It All In Our Heads?Part OneWhat Is This Matrix and Where Did It Come From?The universe that we sentient entities (mostly humans, but not all humans) presently find ourselves in, is a manifestation of an entropic yet occasionally self-organizing, and at first glance, a seeming anti-entropic force. The resultant organized material structure (the cosmos) that we apprehend by our

Cassini

2006-05-10T23:15:00.000-07:00

Cassini flyby of Saturn & Jupiter Saturn's moon DioneMimas to the left, Tethys lower rightMimas (click here for detail)Photo credits: Paid for by the U.S. Taxpayer

Snakes on a motherfucking plane!

2006-04-29T00:28:00.000-07:00

Snakes on a motherfucking plane!The video preview has been pulled from the Web, probably due to all usmotherfuckers linking to it, so you'll just have to be happy with this poster that I ripped off.For some Real Hollywood, do click on the link below:Josh Friedman: The author who almost wrote the screenplay

Out of Gas

2006-03-30T15:35:00.000-08:00

Out of gas, civilization as we know itis about to sputter to a halt"No way to delay, there’s trouble comin' everyday" … Frank ZapaNormally, I’m not a doom-and-gloom kind of guy, but I couldn’t help but lie down a few moments to stop my head from spinning after I finished reading some really bad news on this site, LifeAfterTheOilCrash.net. Combining the aftershocks of Peak Oil with the

to see a world

2006-03-21T17:05:00.000-08:00

to see a world in a grain of sand ...Looking down on a silicon crystal in the direction <112>, the atoms line up in closely-spaced pairs of columns with just 0.78 angstrom between each column in a pair. Matt Chisholm, with processing by Albina Borisevich and Andy Lupini, and aberration correction by Pete Nellist et al., Nion Co. Thermal vibration anamoly E. Abe et al., Nature 421, 347 (2003)

The Clock of the Long Now

2006-03-12T17:13:00.000-08:00

The Clock of the Long Now STEWART BRAND: In a sense what we're doing with the clock is to do even more for time what the photograph of the Earth did for space. Like understanding of the earthly environment as one whole thing - we're trying to understand a period of time reaching 10,000 years into the past and 10,000 years into the future as one containable thought. Brian Eno, one of our board

2006-03-08T14:00:00.000-08:00

Conciousness "Day and Night" by M.C. Escher "It comes out from no source; it goes back in through no aperture. It has reality yet no place where it resides; it has duration yet no beginning or end. Something emerges, though through no aperture - this refers to the fact that it has reality. It has reality yet there is no place where it resides - this refers to the dimension of space. It has

A brief history

2006-03-02T16:44:00.000-08:00

A Brief History of Western Civilization,From the Fall of the Roman EmpireChristianity supplants the old Gods in European religious thought and practice, but as Roman Catholicism is authoritarian, the people of the countryside cling to their fairies, gnomes, trolls, and suchlike in secret. Council of Nicea orders confiscation, burning of all ancient books of philosophy and science, inaugurates the

Is this a prank?

2005-12-20T20:35:00.000-08:00

Is this masochism, or a fraternity prank? Foxhole, Iraq, 2005The photograph above was taken of members of the US Marines 82nd Battalion in Iraq recently. Close inspection reveals five young Americans, soaked to the skin, cold and miserable. Why are they where they are? They all appear to be heavily armed, so they can’t have been forced to sit in the mud, could they?Perhaps they’re camping out,

Art impulse

2005-12-20T20:27:00.000-08:00

The impulse to declare one’s presence in the world, to create, is intrinsic to man, and a defining characteristic of humanity. Men use whatever materials fall to hand to create objects, from things found in garbage dumps to their own excrement. The resulting works are judged artistic on their merits of spontaneity, originality, unexpectedness, uniqueness and craftsmanship. High art is considered

What Illuminati?

2005-12-20T20:11:00.000-08:00

Conspiracy? Which Conspiracy? orWhere Is The Illuminati, Now That We Need Them?There are those who will tell you that the Illuminati are a splinter group of Freemasons who reject personal humility leading to salvation in the next life for secular power in this one, following the line of Lucifer (“the Light Giver”). To borrow a movie cliché, they have Gone Over to the Dark Side, and they are bent

Peak Oil citations

2005-12-19T18:19:00.000-08:00

Resources for Peak Oil and Global WarmingNote: Some links are broken; we are working on that-METHANE MADNESS: A NATURAL GAS PRIMER, by Randy Udall & Steve Andrews, 04/13/2001- Analysis of the IEO2001 Non-OPEC Supply Projections, by Roger D. Blanchard, Northern Kentucky University,4/9/2001- Emergy Accounting, April 2000, Howard T. Odum, Environmental Engineering Sciences,University of Florida,