Winter’s Haven

Ars Techina reports:

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at IBM have presented a paper at the SC09 supercomputing conference describing a milestone in cognitive computing: the group’s massively parallel cortical simulator, C2, now has the ability to simulate a brain with about 4.5 percent the cerebral cortex capacity of a human brain, and significantly more brain [...]

Firstly, Ars Technica brings us the news that gyroscopes are the new training wheels. Every physics major in the world is undoubtedly kicking themselves for not having invented this sooner. I certainly am.
Secondly, Dan of XARK writes in defense of rule breaking generally, and in defense of cyclists breaking traffic laws in particular. I’d sign [...]

Today I am writing a check to my landlord, and wondering how America managed to lose its innovative edge to Kenya. Where, oh where did we go so wrong?

Anyone who has not already found it should immediately go look at There, I Fixed It. It is a hilarious photo blog documenting the world’s most jury-rigged fixes, most epic kludges, and finest disasters in the making.

I’ve been meaning to lay out my views on this question for a long time, but now Will Wilkinson has done it for me, and probably done a better job of it than I would have.
His post is a bit long, however, so let me summarize. Some very real market failures lead to underinvestment [...]

I stumbled across a prescient article on spam, written back in 2002. Paul Graham predicted that in the future the only spam that would be able to get by filters would consist of little more than a snippet of innocuous text and a link. The spam I’ve seen over the past year or so has [...]

Bryan Caplan ponders the possible consequences of safe and relatively inexpensive ectogenesis — that is, technology allowing one to grow a fetus in an incubation tank rather than a womb. I doubt this would have any big consequences. Although pregnancy is no doubt a diffcult experience, those difficulties are only very small portion of the [...]

I finally found a backup utility which meets my needs: Duplicity. It’s primarily intended for backing up data on a remote server, which is how I use it. Duplicity compresses and encrypts (using GnuPG) your data and uploads it using SSH/SCP (among other backend protocols), so it can backup data to any server you can [...]

Is there a cure for the condition where you are perpetually dissatisfied with your computer’s wallpaper image, no matter how many different images you try? Is there even a name for this condition?

This poor creature is one of the many cats who have been taken in by Canonical’s devious business practices. Free gets expensive quickly when your t-shirt becomes obsolete every six months.
(Yes, I am ashamed to say that this LOLcat is original. But publicly humiliating myself is a small price to pay for protecting feline consumer [...]