TIME.com

Wikipedia is in the vanguard of a whole wave of wikis built on that idea. A wiki is a deceptively simple piece of software (little more than five lines of computer code)

“Those must be some long lines.” – Urs

Science News Online, May 28, 2005

A geneticist armed with computer simulations of prehistoric populations says that only about 200 to 300 people crossed the ice age land bridge from Asia to become the founding population of North America. Of that pioneering group, there were just 70 adults of reproductive age, contends Jody Hey of Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J.

FT.com

The US military is developing miniature electronic sensors disguised as rocks that can be dropped from an aircraft and used to help detect the sound of approaching enemy combatants.

The devices, which would be no larger than a golf ball, could be ready for use in about 18 months. They use tiny silicon chips and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology that is so sensitive that it can detect the sound of a human footfall at 20ft to 30ft. The project is being carried out by scientists at North Dakota State University, which has licensed nano-technology processes from Alien Technology, a California-based commercial manufacturer of RFID tags for supermarkets.

The only thing surprising, to me, here is that this is being done at NDSU. What? At any rate, Sensor Networks are cool.

FactMe.com – Fact of the Day

Police said they were searching for a gunman who ran up to a woman while she was walking her dog Monday night and grabbed the bag she was holding.

It contained poop.

Question is: whose poop was it?

Where do babies come from?

It’s really a toss-up for most ridiculous Tom Coburn moment of his brief tenure in the U.S. Senate.

His warnings about rampant lesbianism in Oklahoma schools will always be the sentimental favorite, seeing as how it was the one that put him on the map.

But them came his enthusiastic support for breast implants, going so far as to offer his opinion that women with implants were healthier than women with their real babylons.

While those examples would be plenty for a man in just his fifth month in the Senate, Coburn’s latest entry makes a strong case for the top spot. From his “Revenge of the STDs” sex-ed lecture to Congressional staffers.

I find it unbelievable that this guy hasn’t been run out of office! I suppose it is just a sign of our very ignorant times. Is our national level of education diminishing? Or is the quality of our education in the U.S. decreasing? One of these two must be the case given the political climate in this country.

Ribbon

At Gel, Bruce Shapiro, artist in residence at the Science Museum of Minnesota, talked about his notion of “motion control” as an “emerging medium for artistic expression”…

…One of the machines he brought to demonstrate its artistic expression was Ribbon Dancer. The willowy one-armed robot performed a routine for us for a couple minutes to a classical piece of music. Near the end of the piece, the ribbon got hung up on the lower part of the apparatus while the arm kept going with the routine, tugging obliviously on the caught fabric. The crowd gasped. For a second there, we thought the arm was going to pull the whole thing over — not unlike the robot-like AT-AT that got tripped up by a Rebel harpoon on Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back — but Bruce stepped in to stop the machine and free the ribbon. Despite the mistake, the crowd’s emotional reaction to the dancer’s potentially hazardous misstep demonstrated the potential for the acceptance of artistic expression by machines.

(And in a somewhat more disturbing demonstration of the dancer’s representation of life, when Bruce stopped it at the end of the routine and began to walk off the stage, it began to twitch awkwardly from some stray electrical signals, a death rattle of sorts…

It seems like Jimmy Wales is everywhere these days. They guy has been at every conference I have noticed in the last 3 months. Rock on Jimmy, rock on brother.

Herald Sun

“With a critical shortage of [IT] workers projected in the coming
years, it’s crucial that university computer science departments do all they can to attract top students to the field, a local IBM official said Tuesday.
At IBM University Day in Research Triangle Park on Tuesday, leading IBM officials and university professors from across the region gathered to discuss new ways of marketing computer careers to up-and-coming students”

And yet…

Forbes

“Late Wednesday, IBM said it will cut between 10,000 to 13,000 jobs…The research firm had estimated that every 1,000 people represents per-share savings of 3 cents to 4 cents for IBM, assuming no loss in revenue”

I dont think this campaign is working…

Pete over at /dev/null/ and I were talking today about how great it would be to get professionals from the High Tech industry in Minneapolis-St. Paul together for a monthly gathering. Think alt2600, but for professionals (as Pete put it). Currently, I am really missing the thriving social network in my field that I had access to in Chapel Hill and would love to be able to connect with folks here in my new home that are interested in the same space as myself. So, I’m putting out a call to all Minneapolis-St. Paul professionals in High Tech and am suggesting that we form a loosely organized group that would get together for beers, whatever, once a month or so. Even you button down Accenture guys are welcome. 🙂 Feel free to ping Pete, or myself on this topic and let’s see if we can get something launched in the next 30 days. This would surely be useful for people, like myself, who are involved in young tech ventures who need a social network. Most importantly, it sure would be nice to get the same level of intellectual stimulus evidenced in the college towns I have resided in the past. Post a comment if you are interested and let’s get this started.

Stopping Spam – Sciam

In 1978 the first spam e-mail–a plug from a marketing representative at Digital Equipment Corporation for the new Decsystem-20 computer–was dispatched to about 400 people on the Arpanet.

Those guys at DEC were so innovative.

Has it ever occurred to anyone other than me that RealPlayer is a total piece of crap? Surely not. Everything about this product sucks. The simple fact that it takes me longer to install the stupid thing than it does to download the 10MB of glut code is offensive to me. Then you must pay careful attention not to allow it upset the careful balance between Windows Media, Quicktime, and Itunes. This space is just plain retarded. Of all these crappy products, RealPlayer is the pinnacle of shit. All the devs for these products, especially Real Networks for not allowing me something as trivial as a scaled down toolbar UI without buying their crappy product, should be drug into the street and beaten. At this point there is only one program that requires me to use RealPlayer: This American Life. Elizabeth, please start providing a different format! How is it that this company is still in business? They should be embarrassed. I did notice that, at least, now you don’t have to dig about their website for 10 minutes with a magnifier to find the ‘free’ download link.