This project studies a new mission concept for planetary exploration, based on the deployment of a large number of small spherical mobile robots over vast areas of a planet’s surface and subsurface, including structures such as caves
Month: October 2006
Archimedes Palimpsest
arrgh. when you listen to what people did to the only known manuscript from archimedes.. made it into a prayer book, painted on it, etc.. oh the humanity awesome presentation though, including a “scriptospatial approach” ala mashups / pushpins to annotate
Untrioctium
the heaviest element possible, without violating relativity. any element with an atomic number of greater than 138 would require 1s electrons to be traveling faster than c, and as such would not have stable electron orbitals.
Image Search
presents the concept of semantic query by example, which seems a useful extension of QBE
Plazes XML
would be nice of plazes to make make all my plazes available as georss, not just the last 10 or so. no interest on their part, so far. business model issues?
Medicine is Primitive
The practice of modern medicine is surprisingly primitive. My doctor only recently started to provide printed prescriptions instead of the usual scrawl. Incorrectly filled prescriptions can be serious and computer printed prescriptions are an obvious response yet even today only 25% of physicians use some form of electronic health records and only 10% really use electronic records to follow a patient’s entire history. My credit card company knows far more about my shopping history than my physician knows about my medical history.
the last area of artisanal production needs standardization, measurement
The Malcolm Gladwell Problem
All of Gladwell’s tics are on display in service of an article that mostly feels bottom-drawer, like something rejected twice and then run out of sympathy.
An example: Gladwell cheerfully quotes Platinum Blue CEO (Mike McCready) on the wonderful job his software does separating hits from flops in the music business. His evidence? McCready claims to have ID-ed Norah Jones “Come Away with Me” album back in 2002 as a monster. How do we know McCready did this? He says he did, and Gladwell quotes him saying “a local newspaper in Barcelona” interviewed him then and he told them. But we are not told which newspaper, which day, etc.
Where gladwell is taken down a notch for his crappy analysis
Holy Fire
life extension haves and havenots
The 21st century is coming to a close, and the medical industrial complex dominates the world economy. It is a world of synthetic memory drugs, benevolent government surveillance, underground anarchists, and talking canine companions. Power is in the hands of conservative senior citizens who have watched their health and capital investments with equal care, gaining access to the latest advancements in life-extension technology. Meanwhile, the young live on the fringes of society, eking out a meager survival on free, government-issued rations and a black market in stolen technological gadgetry from an earlier, less sophisticated age.
NUMB3RS
a show where a math “genius” is the star. will presumably do good things for math enrollment ala CSI, but their idea of genius is so sad. simple combinatorics and trigonometry problems are portrayed as “hard”. geez
Oink
looks like a sorely needed advance in static analysis for C++. the flow checking is especially nice.
Oink aims to be
- industrial-strength for immediate utility in finding bugs,
- extensible for ease in adding backends, and
- composable for ease in combining existing backends.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 