Near Death by PowerPoint

Ever been stuck in an interminable meeting in which a speaker slogged through 101 frustrating PowerPoint slides?

Gah PPT! PowerPoint Is Evil

MSNBC – Black hole’s blast pushes a galaxy around

The largest explosion ever seen in space reveals black holes to be more influential than expected, perhaps sometimes throttling star formation in a galaxy while gobbling up trillions upon trillions of tons of gas.

The eruption has been continuing for 100 million years, astronomers said Wednesday.

Yahoo! News – Japanese team succeeds in stem cell therapy on monkeys with Parkinson’s

Japanese researchers said they had successfully treated monkeys with Parkinson’s disease (news – web sites) through a stem cell transplant, potentially paving the way for an ideal remedy to the intractable disease.

AMD’s New Alchemy Processor, In Depth

AMD is sampling a highly integrated MIPS32-based SoC (system-on-chip) targeting portable media players (PMPs) capable of displaying content from PCs and PVRs (personal video recorders). The Alchemy Au1200 supports embedded Linux, and comes with media player software that exploits low-level hardware acceleration for multiple media formats.

According to AMD, the Alchemy Au1200 can be used to build devices that download and display content directly from PCs and from PVRs, without the time-consuming need to “transcode” the content, or convert it to any particular format. This is possible, AMD says, because the Au1200 features hardware acceleration for MPEG, DivX, H.263, and WMV9, along with an integrated graphics controller support supporting “full D1 resolution.”

Science News Article | Reuters.com

The deadly Asian earthquake may have permanently accelerated the Earth’s rotation — shortening days by a fraction of a second — and caused the planet to wobble on its axis, U.S. scientists said on Tuesday.

Richard Gross, a geophysicist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, theorized that a shift of mass toward the Earth’s center during the quake on Sunday caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds, or 3 millionths of a second, faster and to tilt about an inch on its axis.

When one huge tectonic plate beneath the Indian Ocean was forced below the edge of another “it had the effect of making the Earth more compact and spinning faster,” Gross said.

Discovery Channel :: News :: ‘Star Trek,’ Math Inspire Calendar Reform

Two scientists who believe the current Gregorian calendar is outdated have each created proposals for calendars that they believe improve upon the current system.

Both of the new plans involve acceptance of universal time worldwide. Both also would place specific dates of the month on certain weekdays that never would change. For example, if January 1 were to fall on a Sunday in 2006, New Year’s Day would occur on a Sunday every year thereafter.

This sounds like a brilliant idea to me, but if we in the U.S. are so inept we are unable to switch to the metric system I fear the chances of us adopting a new calendar, regardless of how much more efficient it is, are slim.

Whew! Asteroid Won’t Hit Earth in 2029, Scientists Now Say

The world can exhale a collective sigh of relief. A newfound asteroid tagged with the highest warning level ever issued will not strike Earth, scientists said Monday.

The giant space rock, named 2004 MN4, was said on Dec. 23 to have an outside shot at hitting the planet on April 13, 2029. The odds climbed as high as 1-in-37, or 2.7 percent, on Monday, Dec. 27.

Researchers had flagged the object as one to monitor very carefully. It was the first asteroid to be ranked 4 on the Torino Scale, a Richter-like measure for potentially threatening space rocks. The asteroid is about a quarter mile (400 meters) wide, large enough to cause considerable local or regional damage were it to hit the planet.

There probably weren’t too many people in the general public who were even aware of this.

MindTouch is birthed by Aaron Fulkerson and Steve Bjorg.

A Peek Under Microsoft’s Secret ‘Bigtop’
Rather than attempting to tightly couple a few high-performance systems together, Microsoft is looking at the consequences of loosely coupling a larger number of moderately powerful computers to achieve a similar result.

Bigtop’s first commercial manifestation will likely be as some kind of large-scale project, most likely a distributed grid-computing operating system, the sources added.

Bigtop is one of Microsoft’s incubation projects. It falls under the domain of Craig Mundie, the Microsoft senior vice president and chief technical officer in charge of advanced strategies and policy, sources said.

Bigtop consists of three components, all written in C#, according developers who said they were briefed by Microsoft. These are:

• Highwire: Highwire is a technology designed to automate the development of highly parallel applications that distribute work over distributed resources, the aforementioned sources said. Highwire is a programming language/model that will aim to make the testing and compiling of such parallel programs much simpler and more reliable.
• Bigparts: Bigparts is code designed to turn inexpensive PC devices into special-purpose servers, according to the sources. Bigparts will enable real-time, device-specific software to be moved off a PC, and instead be managed centrally via some Web-services-like model.
• Bigwin: According to sources close to Microsoft, Bigwin sounds like the ultimate manifestation of Microsoft’s “software as a service” mantra. In a Bigwin world, applications are just collections of OS services that adhere to certain “behavioral contracts.” These OS services can be provided directly by the core OS or even obtained from libraries outside of the core OS.

Well, this sounds awfully familiar to me. I’m awfully surprised to see this in the news.

German archaeologists have discovered one of the world’s <a href="“>oldest known musical instruments — a 30,000-year-old flute finely carved from a woolly mammoth’s ivory tusk.