January 2011
Move along, nothing to see here.
Surely one of the greatest absurdities of modern life is turning 18. The idea that this is the magic boundary between responsibility and childhood is in itself a practical mockery of the concept of personal growth. One day you are politically uninformed, irresponsible with money or ownership of company stocks, too physically and physiologically immature to handle alcohol, tobacco, riding unicorns,...
The Blue City →
There is a city in India with a serious love of the colour blue. Almost every building - voluntarily - has been painted blue, and it has been that way for centuries.
Just don’t tell the Smurfs.
Liver or let die. →
Steve Jobs had pancreatic cancer in 2004, a liver transplant in Tennessee 2008, and is now taking more sick leave, begging privacy from the media.
This raises questions:
If he was a survivor of cancer, why was he allowed a liver transplant?
Pancreatic cancer is highly metastatic, especially towards the liver. Seriously, why was he allowed a liver transplant?!
Why Tennessee? Why not Southern...
Batman Vs. The Internet →
What else is there to say?
Assange's Next Haircut →
BoingBoing reviews the results of a competition to decide Julian Assange’s next hair-do. Hairdo. Hairdoo.
However that word is spelt. Spelled. Whatever.
Blobitecture →
A loving look at “Blobitecture,” computer-designed super-expensive buildings that look like someone has inflated a glass balloon and put doors in it.
Does designing blobitecture buildings make you a blobitect?
I really hope so.
Prairie Doug →
“I do not like the cone of shame”
Professor Slobodchikoff studies the language of prairie dogs.
During his analysis, Slobodchikoff noticed something: Even though the human call was consistently different from the other calls, there was still significant variation between the individual human calls. He began to wonder whether the little rodents could possibly be describing their...
The Lunchtime Clock →
…speeds up at 11:00 by 20%, and slows down at 11:48 by 20%. The total effect of this is that you have an extra 12 minutes of lunch time every day, while the clock remains in time for the rest of the day.
Twelve minutes may not sound like much, but it’s an extra hour off every week.
Bruno Mars →
This is the kind of review that makes singer-songwriters end their careers. It is devastating.
Genetic algorithms in action →
This generates random collections of polygons and wheels and races them against each other. The top 50% of cars crossbreed and mutate to create a new generation, which is raced again.
The first generation of cars have the performance characteristics of a fetus in a swimming pool. The second will go roughly in a forward direction for about 5 metres. By the fourth, you’re pushing the 100...
Judging Faces →
You know how your parents always told you not to judge a book by its cover, and that you can never tell a person’s personality from their face? Well leaving aside the fact that you totally can, science people with an unhealthy fondness for chimpanzees have shown that you can tell the personality of a chimp with relative ease.
Which of these two is the more dominant do you think? Three...
Where have all the geniuses gone? →
Last night, in the State of the Union, President Obama emphasized the importance of innovation in “winning the future.” It’s clear that he wants to usher in a golden era of American ingenuity, to unleash the talent of everyone. But here’s a question that I couldn’t stop thinking about during the speech: What if we’ve become less talented? Ingenuity, after all, depends on geniuses. But what if...
Am I the only person on this site?
Haha! →
Cool! →
Dancers among us →
Dancers, in public, dancing, ignored.
How much faster can we go? →
There has been very little improvement in track and field record times since the eighties. The only improvements in swimming have come about through technological progress, like the LZR shark-scale suit. The exception is, of course, Usain Bolt, but that’s all he is: an exception.
So how much more progress can we squeeze out of the human body? When will the last record be set?
In Which I Sell My Soul
Every time HP:MoR updates, my heart skips a beat.
Alright, yes, its a Harry Potter fanfic, but its a HP fanfic in the way that a Terry Pratchett novel is a Lord of the Rings novel. It occupies a vaguely similar universe with an entirely different tone and an unmistakable increase in humour.
The plot is that Harry Potter is, for vaguely defined reasons, a fully trained rationalist autistic...
15 peculiar skyscrapers →
Including a sideways one, a wooden gangster fort, and several mushrooms.
The Mario Genome! « Kele's Science Blog →
illiterary:
Evolutionary algorithms can be used to solve problems that would take humans forever to do, but they can also be used to see if a computer can match what a human can do. A great example of this is “The Mario Genome,” a program developed by Oddball at the TIGSource forums. What it does is take a group of Marios with certain traits and uses evolution to navigate the course in as...
If Awesome Lunatics Ran an Airline →
From Cracked.
