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July 27, 2006
"Remember the spider that lived outside your window? Orange body, green legs. Watched her build a web all summer, then one day there's a big egg in it. The egg hatched..." "The egg hatched..." "Yea." "And a hundred baby spiders came out and they ate her."
The iLiad is the first usable ebook reader. It's pretty much Sony's Librie device, sans DRM.
Apple's now the #4 computer maker, and its laptop market share is up to 12%.
During World War II, statistics worked better than human intelligence for figuring out how many tanks the Nazis were producing. via
The statisticians had one key piece of information, which was the serial numbers on captured mark V tanks. The statisticians believed that the Germans, being Germans, had logically numbered their tanks in the order in which they were produced. And this deduction turned out to be right. It was enough to enable them to make an estimate of the total number of tanks that had been produced up to any given moment.
By using this formula, statisticians reportedly estimated that the Germans produced 246 tanks per month between June 1940 and September 1942. At that time, standard intelligence estimates had believed the number was far, far higher, at around 1,400. After the war, the allies captured German production records, showing that the true number of tanks produced in those three years was 245 per month, almost exactly what the statisticians had calculated, and less than one fifth of what standard intelligence had thought likely.
Emboldened, the allies attacked the western front in 1944 and overcame the Panzers on their way to Berlin.
Neil Armstrong's sleepless night on the Moon was commemorated recently.
Armstrong was particularly fascinated by moondust, which he kicked and scuffed with his boots. On Earth, kicking dust makes a little cloud in the air--but there is no air on the Moon. "When you kick the surface, [the dust goes out in] a little fan which, to me, is in the shape of a rose petal," recalls Armstrong. "There's just a little ring of particles--nothing behind 'em--no dust, no swirl, no nothing. It's really unique."
Seems that implanted memories can condition aversion reactions. via
Participants' memories were manipulated by telling them that a computer had generated a personal profile based on a questionnaire about past eating and drinking habits. They were told they had become sick on rum in the past and they were asked to elaborate on that experience.
About a quarter of the participants became more confident they had actually been sick on rum. "Between 30 and 40% increased their confidence for the item in comparison to a control group," he says. When asked to rate how much they liked rum they rated it less than before their memories were manipulated.
But prior bad experiences don't create an aversion to all foods and drinks, only those with a distinct or unusual flavour.
"With some drinks and some food you may have got sick but it doesn't seem to have this imprint, this lasting effect," he says.
He said his previous research managed to induce an aversion to strawberry ice cream, but didn't work when it came to chips. "We couldn't turn them off potato chips, we got a little rebound and they thought 'give me more!'"
The optic nerve has the same bandwidth as Ethernet, 10 megabits per second. via
The guinea pig retina was placed in a dish and then presented with movies containing four types of biological motion, for example a salamander swimming in a tank to represent an object-motion stimulus. After recording electrical spikes on an array of electrodes, the researchers classified each cell into one of two broad classes: "brisk" or "sluggish," so named because of their speed.
The researchers found that the electrical spike patterns differed between cell types. For example, the larger, brisk cells fired many spikes per second and their response was highly reproducible. In contrast, the smaller, sluggish cells fired fewer spikes per second and their responses were less reproducible.
But, what's the relationship between these spikes and information being sent? "It's the combinations and patterns of spikes that are sending the information. The patterns have various meanings," says co-author Vijay Balasubramanian, PhD, Professor of Physics at Penn. "We quantify the patterns and work out how much information they convey, measured in bits per second."
Calculating the proportions of each cell type in the retina, the team estimated that about 100,000 guinea pig ganglion cells transmit about 875,000 bits of information per second. Because sluggish cells are more numerous, they account for most of the information. With about 1,000,000 ganglion cells, the human retina would transmit data at roughly the rate of an Ethernet connection, or 10 million bits per second.
Printing on water using standing cylindrical waves as pixels. It looks like the bastard spawn of a ménage à trois among a typewriter, a kiddie pool, and the Stargate.
Posted by Jon Rubin at July 27, 2006 09:28 PM
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