Simulation results show that while lower degrees of separation allow a population to quickly converge on an easy-to-find solution, networks with higher degrees of separation perform better in the long run.
Month: June 2008
Meteoritic Nucleobases
“We believe early life may have adopted nucleobases from meteoritic fragments for use in genetic coding which enabled them to pass on their successful features to subsequent generations.”
panspermia is kinda stupid considering that all elements were formed in star furnaces.
Carrotmob
What’s so important about Carrotmob is the coordination, because it reduces an inefficiency in other, uncoordinated socially-conscious shopping: “mobbing” lets a business know exactly why the gods of good fortune have smiled upon it. Let a business know which proactive green steps to take, then reward their progressive actions with business–and lots of it.
Refactoring HTML
the biggest refactoring job in the world
Fusion propulsion
1200 people on Mars for the cost of a few Apollo landings
The path forward is to use regenerative (breeding) of isotopes that emit more protons for positron emissions. This regenerative approach will enable full scale antimatter catalyzed deuterium fusion propulsion. The Deuterium fusion propulsion will be able to achieve performance like other deuterium fusion rocket designs which is up to 10% of lightspeed and 100K+ ISP to millions of ISP

Linux Audio
Why is it so hard to get basic sound working on Linux? And by basic I mean I want to be able to play iTunes inside a windows VMware VM and hear my mail notifier on my host tell me that one of you has written another asshat comment.
And don’t tell me “it works now!” Because it doesn’t. I just tried it.
The number of moving parts in Linux’s audio stack is just plain inexcusable. OSS, ALSA, dmix, esd, arts, pulseaudio, jack, nas. On top of that you have libraries that that can talk to one or many of these systems: libaio, libasound, phonon, gstreamer. And why have KDE and Gnome for the past 10 years not been able to agree on how to play sound, or configure sound? Linux is about choice right? What if I choose something other than KDE or Gnome? do I lose? Is my only choice to have someone earfuck me so hard that I go deaf and I don’t have to worry about it anymore? Maybe Linux is only ready for my grandma, because she can’t hear anything anyway?
amen. actually, amen to the whole blog and subscribed. See also Linux audio: it’s a mess. another example
Petaflop
An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.
that’s 5% of a human mind, or 5% towards the singularity 🙂
Sabotage manual
- Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
- Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of per sonal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.
- When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideraÂtion.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than 5.
- Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
- Haggle over precise wordings of comÂmunications, minutes, resolutions.
- Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
- Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonÂable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
- Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the juris diction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
everyone from unionized workforces to goverments everywhere has picked this up
The Sky, From Above

One of the best features of the space program has always been astronaut photography, and I will take this opportunity to share some of the best photographs of Earth’s skies, taken from above – way above
this made me mist up.
Spare the rod
The US is the only country, along with Somalia, which has failed to ratify a United Nations convention on children’s rights which since 1990 has protected children from “all forms of physical or mental violence”.