Dyson: In some creation myths, life arises out of the earth; in others, life falls out of the sky. The creation myth of the digital universe entails both metaphors. The hardware came out of the mud of World War II, and the code fell out of abstract mathematical concepts. Computation needs both physical stuff and a logical soul to bring it to life. These were young kids who had just come through World War II, who could repair the electronics on airplanes and get them flying the same day, and von Neumann put them together with mathematical logicians who could imagine a universe created entirely out of 0s and 1s.

"Imag­ing you'd sim­ply hold your smart­phone be­sides your PC's mon­i­tor a NFC (near field com­mu­ni­ca­tion) sys­tem in phone and mon­i­tor de­tects the rel­a­tive po­si­tion, and flick the email ed­i­tor over to the PC al­low­ing you to con­tin­ue your ed­it there. Now imag­ine that this hap­pens ab­so­lute­ly trans­par­ent to the pro­grams in­volved, that this is some­thing man­aged by the op­er­at­ing sys­tem. This is where I want to go. Not that cheap ef­fects lol­lipop desk­tops Ubun­tu/Canon­i­cal, In­tel, Red­Hat/Fe­do­ra and Gnome(3) aim for."

"...in the end, culture is a more powerful tool in dealing with drinking than medicine, economics, or the law."

My uncle, John Arthur Stump, who was my father’s youngest brother, died on January 20, 2006.  His memorial service was held at a Vedanta monastery in Hollywood, where my other uncle (known there as “Jnana Chaitanya,” but to me as Uncle Dave) serves as a monk.  I was not at the ceremony, but my family brought back some memorabilia from the service and from Uncle John’s “estate,” including a large piece of paper densely printed with musical notation.

N-Control has hired an independent consultant, Austin, Texas-based Moisés Chiullan, to field press inquiries and oversee sales and marketing operations going forward. ... "We have to move forward and take care of Avenger’s customers," Chiullan said. "I can't worry about the fact that there isn’t a bus big enough for me to throw Paul Christoforo under. The internet did that for me. I think they set him on fire too."

"Winning the Iowa caucuses would change all that instantly. Undoubtedly the movement that Paul inspired has moved far beyond the race-baiting it engaged in two decades ago. Young people from college campuses aren't lining up to hear him speak because of what appeared in those newsletter about the 1992 L.A. riots. Rand Paul tried his hardest to place Paul-style libertarianism into the context of the Tea Party. And he will likely carry on the movement without this 1990s baggage.

"But the questions remain. If Ron Paul is so libertarian that he won't even police people who use his name, if his movement is filled with incompetents and opportunists, then what kind of a president would he make? Would he even check in to see if his ideas are being implemented? Who would he appoint to Cabinet positions?"

"Fairy Bridge (Xian Ren Qiao) is a meander natural bridge carved through limestone karst by the Buliu River. It is located about 40 km (as the crow flies) northwest of Fengshan in northwestern Guangxi Province, China. ... Estimates using Google Earth and other photos suggested that the span might be the largest in the world."

"With Whitehouse, the way you get around the 'noise issue', if we can call it that, is through the use of language. There I'd apply the same principles linguistically, where you're overloading the brain with very complex linguistic structures very fast - too fast for the brain to cope with. ... I remember there was one concert in Vienna, and there was this barrage of abuse and loud abrasive noise, for an entire hour, but at the end it was extraordinary - the entire audience had these huge, silly grins on their faces, and their hands were in the air like some sort of exaltation."

"This post isn’t really about Scrabble. It’s about taking a load of ugly data and hacking around with some scripts to refine it into something I can commit to memory. Then its about Scrabble. Winning at Scrabble."

"That's right, Doctor," nodded Ersheim, and then, as if to confirm that fact, he began counting, moving his head from side to side: "one, two, three, bleem, four . . ."

"The Commission proposes to update the 2003 Directive on the re-use of public sector information by: Making it a general rule that all documents made accessible by public sector bodies can be re-used for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, unless protected by third party copyright; Establishing the principle that public bodies should not be allowed to charge more than costs triggered by the individual request for data (marginal costs); in practice this means most data will be offered for free or virtually for free, unless duly justified. Making it compulsory to provide data in commonly-used, machine-readable formats, to ensure data can be effectively re-used. Introducing regulatory oversight to enforce these principles; Massively expanding the reach of the Directive to include libraries, museums and archives for the first time; the existing 2003 rules will apply to data from such institutions."

"So, since you live in Russia and not North Korea, you make the turnout 98%."

“It’s not a real body; it is completely virtual and made by the computer,” H&M press officer Hacan Andersson told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet in an article questioning the company’s picture-perfect online models.

"The proposed settlement bars Facebook from making any further deceptive privacy claims, requires that the company get consumers' approval before it changes the way it shares their data, and requires that it obtain periodic assessments of its privacy practices by independent, third-party auditors for the next 20 years."

“No valiant showdown between a small number of larger-than-life geniuses. The battle was lost six months ago, against human fallibility."

"...for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

"Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not"

"While canoeing on the Rifle River in Michigan, Boomer fell overboard letting forth a fuck or two. As if his day wasn't bad enough, the nearby sheriff gave him a ticket ... for violating an 1897 statute forbidding cursing within earshot of women and children. Then he was convicted.

"Amazed that this could happen in the twenty-first century, my curiosity about the legal implications of fuck was rekindled. I decided to dedicate one of my research assistants to exploring the area."

"One Cup a Day project is an experiment on creativity and rapid manufacturing, by ideating, designing, modeling and making available for production and purchase a coffee cup within 24 hours, everyday during one month."

"Spectrograms of various file formats that you would encounter as a DJ/Producer/Audio Enthusiast. This test was done using a WAV purchased on Beatport, then converting it into MP3 using the LAME encoder in foobar2000 and AAC using the Itunes converter."

"For those who do not know, 747's are big flying Unix hosts. At the time, the engine management system on this particular airline was Solaris based. The patching was well behind and they used telnet as SSH broke the menus and the budget did not extend to fixing this. The engineers could actually access the engine management system of a 747 in route. If issues are noted, they can re-tune the engine in air."

"So what did Ofcom do? Naturally, it listened to the public, ignored the uncompetitive rent-seeking proposals from the commercial sector, adhered to EU law, and rejected the proposal. Well, that's what they did in a parallel universe. In this universe, Ofcom accepted the self-serving arguments of the companies they're meant to be regulating, ignored the public whose interests they were meant to be safeguarding, and gave the BBC what it asked for. Why did it do this? It's a secret. But not any more."

"People are capable of any sexual thing. To ban their marriage because someone doesn’t like the idea of them both being the same sex, that’s ridiculous."

"The advice we give others is the advice that we ourselves need. Since it is too late for me to learn these lessons, I will discharge my unfulfilled duty by dishing them out to you. They will be stated in order of increasing controversiality."

"SaaS: It's a web site!
PaaS: It's a framework!
IaaS: It's a VM!"

"Joel Spolsky brilliantly created "The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code, a 12-question "highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate the quality of a software team". I've come up with my own test for system administrators. It is 32 yes/no questions. It is equally sloppy and irresponsible."

"In its fourth quarter earnings report released last week, Apple Computer revealed that 2/3 of its on-hand cash – some $54 billion — is squirreled away outside the boundaries of the United States, presumably to avoid paying its fair share of taxes. In the meantime, reports Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), a Hong Kong-based group, Apple’s major manufacturing contractors routinely subject employees to forced overtime, wage theft and no breaks — and even unprotected exposure to toxins."

"As you can see in the image below, the glass on the right really is nearly invisible to the naked eye. It could drastically improve the viewing experience of displays in the future as well as in other situations where glass is used, such as for windows."

"At times the air was so saturated with suspended water that an intake of breath caused him to sputter and choke. He began to worry about the very strange—but very real–possibility of drowning in the sky."

"We propose a method to realistically insert synthetic objects into existing photographs without requiring access to the scene or any additional scene measurements."

"But whether [Apple] Siri becomes the model for how humans interact with computers in the future or whether it gets laughed off the stage of technical innovation like so many AI systems that have come before hinges on whether it can tell the difference between “Andrew” and “Andrea”—especially when I’m in a crowded coffee shop, speaking with a Southern drawl, with a stuffed-up nose from a bad cold."

"Look, I’m not going to go into great detail about what I’ve been doing with Siri during my testing period, but I will tell you this — Siri says some crazy stuff.

Hit the gallery below for a look at a number of bizarre items the AI-powered / voice-recognizing “intelligent assistant” lays on you on the new iPhone 4S."

"After you've marveled at the platform offerings of Microsoft and Amazon, and Facebook I guess (I didn't look because I didn't want to get too depressed), head over to developers.google.com and browse a little. Pretty big difference, eh? It's like what your fifth-grade nephew might mock up if he were doing an assignment to demonstrate what a big powerful platform company might be building if all they had, resource-wise, was one fifth grader."

"Whereas Stonehenge was orientated towards the sun, the more then 100 meter width burial mound of Magdalenenberg was focused towards the moon. ... This archaeo-astronomic research resulted in a date of Midsummer 618 BC, which makes it the earliest and most complete example of a Celtic calendar focused on the moon"

"The concept: In realtime you get to remix Rick Astley's legendary 'Never Gonna Give You Up'. You do it simply by pushing a bunch of buttons on a physical, custom built controller. You can change all the elements of the song and for example make a nice mashup of black metal, rap, gospel, gameboy sounds and Spanish vocals. You can also change the intensity and mood of the mix. It's just about as weird and fun as it sounds."

"That way you'll have a truly roflscale Fibonacci web service."

"In other words, your ears aren't deceiving you: Spaniards really do sprint and Chinese really do stroll, but they will tell you the same story in the same span of time."

"this raises a number of questions: Q: though i wouldn't be surprised if it's true for most articles it can't be true for all articles. can it? Q: what's the distribution of distances (measured in "number of clicks away") from 'Philosophy'?
Q: by this same measure what's the furthest article from 'Philosophy'? Q: are there any other articles that are more common than 'Philosophy'? Q: what are the common paths to 'Philosophy'?"

"Procrastination has nothing to do with disciplining yourself or 'just doing it' This is the most common misconception about procrastination and will instead achieve exactly the opposite of what you want. Let me explain:"

"In the years of IE 90% dominance there was nothing much to do but regard the browser as a "black box", but now, with open source browsers having more than half of the usage share, it's a good time to take a peek under the engine's hood and see what's inside a web browser. Well, what's inside are millions of C++ lines..."

"Today Ken and I want to talk about a different kind of special sentence, one that is self-defeating. A self-defeating sentence is one that ensures it cannot achieve its desired end, which in this instance is to illustrate a self-defeating sentence."

"One of the interesting things that sets even superficially similiar genres of music apart is their lyrical content. Last.fm tags can overlap to a great degree, but we were interested to see what the words can tell you about the subtler shades of meaning that go along with those tags. As usual around here, the best way to answer questions like these is by asking the data."

"If you want to be a game programmer, or for that matter any sort of programmer at all, here’s the secret to success in just two words:  Ship it.  Finish the product and get it out the door, and you’ll be a hero.  It sounds simple, but it’s a surprisingly rare skill, and one that’s highly prized by software companies.  Here’s why."

"In one thin sign of good news for Sony, the attack comes 12 days after the company’s last breach, the longest interval since May and a sign that the Sony-hacking meme may be finally wearing thin for the hacker community."

One question remains: how do you celebrate finishing a 750,000-word novel? Moore pauses. "I'll probably have a bit of a lie down."

"So clearly at least one of the sellers was setting their price algorithmically in response to changes in the other’s price. I continued to watch carefully and the full pattern emerged."

"It is without a doubt the Mail Rail sits at the throne, laughing maniacally at the puny adventurers unable to even stare it in the eyes without bursting into flames, the pinnacle of exploration in London, if not England. There is, and will never be anything like it again, its uniqueness "forever unrivalled, London’s final unconquered “Grail” now a slain beast.

"More than 400 people have pledged to join tonight’s demonstration, while 600 say they will attend a similar protest at the pub next Wednesday. Attendees are being urged to order nothing more than tap water to prevent the bar making money."

"We had 8 teams of hacks and hackers digging around the Scottish data beat. ... With this special digger, fire incidents, planning applications, public-owned property and gifts councillors’ received have been mined."

"State Administration for Radio, Film & Television said that TV dramas that involve characters traveling back in time “lack positive thoughts and meaning.” The guidelines discouraging this type of show said that some “casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation.”"

"The Tech Herald has seen Barr’s research. [PDF] While there is plenty of information, several operation names and dates are out of order, and many of the names associated with membership are incorrect. When it comes to the ten “most senior people”, they are actually network administrators."

"So, just a suggestion: if you want a relationship that lasts, don't rely on god, lawyers, and social pressure to force it to work. Love and reciprocal trust are the only chains that last, and the only ones that make you feel happy while wearing them."

"So Node is neither The New Rails nor The New PHP. It's something else entirely."

Hunton & Williams, the middleman law firm in all this (and the middleman between a major US bank and Team Themis' similar plan to take down WikiLeaks), has steadfastly refused to comment on the whole story. But it too may find itself in trouble after a professional conduct complaint (PDF) was lodged against it last week in Washington, DC"

"There are fascinating implications for a world of probabilistic resource use: for one thing, it points up the importance of "signal amplification" through retweets, reposts, and other recycling of interesting tit-bits – these are critical to the successful use of a medium that can't be consumed by any one person from tip to tail."

"I can't tell you that fetish has no sexual dimension because to do so would be a lie. What I can tell you is that the purpose of the Collared page was to support and communicate to people with a fetish interest in a non-sexual way, much the same as countless other groups - which is more than can be said about the countless drool pages on FB dedicated to hottest guys and hottest women. Does the Review Team concern itself over whether people masturbate over these postings and images? Or does the Review Team believe people exercise a purely academic interest over Jodie Foster's thighs?"

"Jimmy Skillings, who spotted the prank and took a photograph, said: "I know petrol prices are a joke but this is funny."

"Students from Stanford and Finland's Aalto University have developed a prototype laptop that can be disassembled in less than three minutes without the use of any tools. Once it's taken apart, the laptop's materials can easily be recycled."

"NOM is a group whose major function is lobbying against gay marriage. They were made notorious for this video. They seem to have construed the comic to have some stance in favor of traditional sexuality. Apparently they don’t read my comics regularly."

"Over the last week, I've talked to some of those who participated in the HBGary hack to learn in detail how they penetrated HBGary's defenses and gave the company such a stunning black eye—and what the HBGary example means for the rest of us mere mortals who use the Internet."

"This book is both practical and philosophical. Some parts are aphoristic and general, others will examine specific case studies in Unix development. We will precede or follow general principles and aphorisms with examples that illustrate them: examples drawn not from toy demonstration programs but rather from real working code that is in use every day."

"He transformed a machine retired from a Chinese production line into a large scale, low-res 3D printer."

"Putting those together, one can take the depth image from the Kinect and turn it in to a metric point cloud with real distances. Then, those points can be projected back to the RGB camera centre to determine which RGB pixel corresponds to each depth point, and hence arrive a colour for each point in the cloud."

"Formulating a unified theory of the built environment may require that the built environment be understood as a complex social-ecological system, where multiple-related metabolisms interact at different scales."

"That also lets me measure the number of spirals — roughly five — and calculate the size of this object: about a third of a light year across, or more than 3 trillion kilometers! Coooool."

"You can infuse flavors into liquor (and water based things, too) almost instantly with nothing more than an [nitrous] Cream Whipper. You can use seeds, herbs, spiced, fruits, cocoa nibs, etc. Here’s how:

Put room-temperature booze into the cream whipper. Add herbs, seeds, whatever. Close the whipper and charge it with nitrous oxide (N2O –the regular whipped cream chargers). Swirl gently 30 seconds and let stand 30 seconds more. Quickly vent the N2O out of the whipper, open it, and strain out the infusion. Done."

"CAUTION: DO NOT COMPLETELY UNSCREW DOOR CLOSER HYDRAULIC ADJUSTMENT SCREWS OR YOU WILL RUIN THE CLOSER AND VOID THE WARRANTEE. Also, hydraulic fluid will leak out of the closer and make a mess. This will make you unpopular. "

"I wanted to see how much intel you could gather from a person just by lurking on a social networking site. I [also] wanted to see who was most susceptible to clicking. I wanted to see how fast this thing would propagate. One of the things I found was that MIT and St. Paul's [prep school] were very cliquey. If they don't remember seeing you, they are not going to click. You had less of a chance of penetrating those groups than the actual intel and security communities."

"When you're out in the field," said Dr Thornton, "if you're studying certain groups, you always set your alarm a bit later because they're consistently lazy." The new study revealed that this laziness or liveliness has a "cultural basis".

"The last few years, possibly since the introduction of Europe-wide televoting, it is being suggested that the voting results of the Eurovision Songcontest are (getting) more related to geographical location or common history than to the songs performed by the artists on the event. This page is dedicated to a modest analysis at Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) about the extend to which these suspicions are genuine."

"Near downtown, fruit trees and vegetable farms would replace neighborhoods that are an eerie landscape of empty buildings and vacant lots. Suburban commuters heading into the city center might pass through what looks like the countryside to get there. Surviving neighborhoods in the birthplace of the auto industry would become pockets in expanses of green."

Facebook and Twitter empower all groups—not just the pro-Western groups that we like. To put it in a more formal framework: not all social capital created by the Internet is bound to produce "social goods"; "social bads" are inevitable as well. The political scientist Robert Putnam, who was instrumental in promoting the notion of "social capital" in popular discourse, was not blind to such possibilities. In "Bowling Alone," his most famous book, he explicitly cautioned against the "kumbaya interpretation of social capital," stating that "networks…are generally good for those inside the network, but the external effects of social capital are by no means always positive."

"As the ship of New Labour tilts precariously in the waters, and the Conservatives struggle to define what they stand for other than a change of personalities at the top, various attempts are being made to define a new politics to fill the void.

This post makes a stab at trying to map the new ideological terrain that is opening up. Needless to say, ideological positions are fluid and imprecise things, and any effort of this kind is going to risk some oversimplification. In addition, by no means all interesting thinking going on at the moment can be fitted into categories like those I am about to use. But, caveats aside, here goes…"

"11:57 AM - The first comment to put it together: “This is what happens when people use Google to enter sites instead of typing it on their address bar… Damn you all Farmville users…” This is comment number 50

Ah. So it turns out that there was a (perhaps small) present minority who, rather than using the address bar, use Google to get around on the web. Since Google put this post near the top, at least a certain number of these people had no idea the site they just entered was not Facebook. The results are this mess."

"We've lived with and loved the distinctly 'web 2.0' design for a while now and it's done us proud. However, time's moved on, and in autumn last year we decided it was time to resurrect the project."

"You have simply declared your faith to be immune to rational challenge. As you didn't come to believe in God by taking any state of the world into account, no possible state of the world could put His existence in doubt. This is the very soul of dogmatism."

"In the hopes of shrinking this education gap, Google sent Bisciglia back to his alma mater, the University of Washington, where he taught a course on "working with big data." And Hadoop was the teaching model.

Google ended up hiring about half the students who took the class. And after the company open-sourced the curriculum, the same course was picked up by several other universities, including MIT and Berkeley. "In the past, it took three to six months to get hires up to speed with how to work with [Google] technology," Bisciglia says. "But if schools are teaching this as part of the standard undergraduate curriculum, Google saved that three to six months - multiplied by thousands of engineers.""

"It is heard to believe, yet a true story. A pregnant woman in Iowa (USA) had been jailed for "attempted feticide" because she told hospital staff that she once thought about having an abortion."

"In Berlin alone, hundreds of complaints are made each year about noise levels in kindergartens and children's playgrounds. Some day-care facilities have even been forced to close after local residents have gone to court in search of a quiet life. Now Berlin's local government, the senate, has passed a law giving children the right to be noisy, the first law of its kind in Germany."

"We took some time to play around and get used to the dynamics of the clay print process. ... After some calibrating I decided to print a test design that would be hard to make using conventional techniques: a double walled vessel with fins connecting in- and outside."

"It is hard to imagine a better resurrection for a country that has been devastated by financial corruption than to turn facilitating transparency and justice into a business model."