Chinese artist Li Wei from Beijing started off his performance series ‘Mirroring’ and later on took off attention with his ‘Falls’ series which shows the artist with his head and chest embedded into the ground. His work is a mixture of performance art and photography that creates illusions of a sometimes dangerous reality. Li Wei states that these images are not computer montages and works with the help of props such as mirror, metal wires, scaffolding and acrobatics.
So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21,
2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question
came about as a result of a five dollar bet over highballs, and it happened
this way:
Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of
Multivac. As well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the
cold, clicking, flashing face — miles and miles of face — of that giant
computer. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays
and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single
human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole.
One of the simplest examples of stellar engine is the Shkadov thruster (named after Dr. Leonid Mikhailovich Shkadov who first proposed it), or a Class A stellar engine.[1] Such an engine is a stellar propulsion system, consisting of an enormous mirror/light sail - actually a massive type of solar statite large enough to classify as a megastructure, probably by an order of magnitude - which would balance gravitational attraction towards and radiation pressure away from the star. Since the radiation pressure of the star would now be asymmetrical, i.e. more radiation is being emitted in one direction as compared to another, the ‘excess’ radiation pressure acts as net thrust, accelerating the star in the direction of the hovering statite.[2] Such thrust and acceleration would be very slight, but such a system could be stable for millennia. Any planetary system attached to the star would be ‘dragged’ along by its parent star. The sun: power = 3.85*1026 W, force = 1.28*1018 N, mass = 1.99*1030 kg, acceleration = 6.45*10-13 m/s2. 1000000 years = 3.16*1013 s, velocity = 20 m/s.
Nice! Barring the current issues with human “death,” this would make it a lot easier to communicate with other life forms. Simply drag your star, and the solar system with it, to a reasonably small light-distance near to the life to communicate with. …Time dilation… The act of taking a long nap - what’s several hundred million years? The sun has a good - what - 2 or 4 billion left before it goes “red giant,” right? “We” can just find another stellar engine when the current one (Sol, “the Sun”) is used up.
For this trick of the mind I have chosen someone who is convinced by New Age philosophies and alternative medicine. There’s nothing wrong in being open-minded about claims that crystals, spells or psychic phenomena have the power to heal, as long as you’re prepared to test them. If not, you could find yourself being conned.
I start by establishing an atmosphere which will convince the woman that I have supernatural powers. To do this, I take her to Epping Forest, a wild and natural place, full of ancient trees. I have a doll, which, I tell her, contains a ring that belongs to her. When I tie up the doll’s legs, she finds she cannot move her legs. When I tie up the doll’s arms, she can’t move her arms. I tie string round the doll’s mouth and she finds she cannot speak. This fits in so well with her beliefs about how the world works that she is happy to accept that by putting her ring into the doll, I have given it her soul. As a result, her body mimics what I do to the doll.
In reality, the doll does not contain her ring and I have no supernatural powers. When I give the woman permission to question my powers, she finds she can move and speak.
Through this trick I wanted to illustrate the power of unquestioning belief and show how it can leave people open to being used and manipulated.
This is a fantastic trick…. you need real player to view the movie, but it’s worth it.
Which is why she was hoping that the venture capitalist would just leave her alone. He wasn’t a paying customer, he wasn’t a fellow artist - he wanted to buy her, and he was thirty years too late.
“You know, I pitched you guys in 1999. On Sand Hill Road. One of the founding partners. Kleiner, I think. The guy ate a salad all through my slide-deck. When I was done, he wiped his mouth, looked over my shoulder, and told me he didn’t think I’d scale. That was it. He didn’t even pick up my business card. When I looked back as I was going out the door, I saw his sweep it into the trash with the wrapper from his sandwich.”
The VC - young, with the waxy, sweaty look of someone who ate a lot of GM yogurt to try to patch his biochemistry - shook his head. “That wasn’t us. We’re a franchise - based here in LA. I just opened up the Inglewood branch. But I can see how that would have soured you on us. Did you ever get your VC?”
Very cool short science fiction - it’s audio, so you don’t even need to read.
Photographer’s Request for Critique
–Shane Willis
MC Mechanic - Hand Fixing HandA homage to M.C. Escher - VIEW LARGER FOR BEST IMAGE - Comments are
most welcome
A hurricane’s “hot towers” can increase its intensity by adding power to boost the storm’s heat engine. For the first time, research meteorologists have run complex simulations of these phenomena using a very fine temporal resolution. They have combined this new simulation data with satellite observations to study the innerworking of the “hot towers” in never-before-seen detail.
Okay - this one takes a moment to parse. Say it with me now: さんの作品（ニコニコ動画から転載）
^_^
As I understand it, this video is a cover of a Japanese pop song. What’s remarkable is that the vocals are entirely synthesized. There’s probably not a single organic sound in the thing.
Cool cover of Strauss, but if anyone can answer this for me… which came first: this, or Phish’s cover? …or, a third-party (e.g. Mannheim Steamroller/Hooked on Classics or some crazy shit). They’re uncannily similar. This video looks 80s-tastic, but that’s no measure. I’m going to default to Phish.
Totally sweet. I use Ubuntu, which is derived from and roughly parallels Debian. However, you really can’t lower the barrier to entry any more, at this point. There isn’t a one-click, browser-delivered installer for Windows XP or Mac OS X. Try Linux.
This stunning close-up view shows mountainous terrain that reaches about 10 kilometers (6 miles) high along the unique equatorial ridge of Iapetus. The view was acquired during Cassini’s only close flyby of the two-toned Saturn moon.
Above the middle of the image can be seen a place where an impact has exposed the bright ice beneath the dark overlying material.
The image was taken on Sept. 10, 2007 with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 3,870 kilometers (2,400 miles) from Iapetus. Image scale is 23 meters (75 feet) per pixel.
Last week a CSIRO telescope near Coonabarabran NSW was used simultaneously with one near Shanghai, China, and five in Europe to observe a distant galaxy called 3C273. “This is the first time we’ve been able to instantaneously connect telescopes half a world apart,” Dr Tasso Tzioumis, VLBI operations and development manager at CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility said. “It’s a fantastic technical achievement, and a tribute to the ability of the network providers to work together.” Data from the telescopes was streamed around the world at a rate of 256 Mb per second - about ten times faster than the fastest broadband speeds available to Australian households - to a research centre in Europe, where it was processed with a special-purpose digital processor. The results were then transmitted to Xi’an, China, where they were watched live by experts in advanced networking at the 24th APAN (Asia-Pacific Advanced Network) Meeting.
In short: previous, very long “exposure” snapshots can be taken in real-time.
Los Angeles (CA) The inventor of the KillaCycle electric motorcycle almost killed himself during a demonstration at the Wired NextFest conference. Bill Dube, a government scientist during the day and electric bike builder at night, did a burn out in front of the Los Angeles Convention Center, but accidentally accelerated too much and crashed into a Minivan.
Freaky video. It’s totally shocking how quickly this motorcycle accelerates. I’m glad the guy was conscious and talking at the end of it, but shit. The worst part is that I can see this happening to myself - killed by my own invention… classic.
Poverty Point State Historic Site
Eight centuries after Egyptian slaves dragged huge stones across the desert to build the Great Pyramids, and before the great Mayan pyramids were constructed the Poverty Point inhabitants set for themselves an enormous task as they built a complex array of earthen mounds and ridges overlooking the Mississippi River flood plain in what is now northeastern Louisiana.
Yes. In Louisiana. Your civilization is completely unprecedented, suburban United States.
Plankalkül was an attempt by Konrad Zuse in the
1940’s to devise a notational and conceptual system for
writing what today is termed a program. Although this
early approach to a programming language did not
lead to practical use, the plan is described here because
it contains features that are standard in today’s programming
languages. The investigation is of historical
interest; also, it may provide insights that would lead
to advancements in the state of the art. Using modern
programming terminology, the Plankalkül is presented
to the extent it has been possible to reconstruct it from
the published literature.
Standing on the shoulders of giants. Turing this and Turing that…
Ken Thompson’s 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM admitted the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. In this scheme, the C compiler contained code that would recognize when the login command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him.
Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to use the compiler so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would recognize when it was compiling a version of itself, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled login the code to allow Thompson entry and, of course, the code to recognize itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources.The Turing lecture that reported this truly moby hack was later published as “Reflections on Trusting Trust”, Communications of the ACM 27, 8 (August 1984), pp. 761–763
“We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy! We’re scum! We suck!” –Wayne and Garth
