Wednesday, December 26, 2001

Is NASA Building an Antigravity Machine?

Superconductive Components of Columbus, Ohio is scheduled to finish a prototype of the device for NASA this coming May. ?To say this is highly speculative is probably putting it mildly,? admits Ron Koczor, assistant director for science and technology at NASA?s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. Despite this, NASA has awarded a $600,000 contract to the company.
http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=1109

Sunday, December 23, 2001

Coolest Space Science Images of 2001

In 2001, amateurs got in on the game in an unprecedented way, as two near-space spectacles provided rare and compelling opportunities to enjoy and record the night sky.
http://space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/coolest_2001_011221.html

Friday, December 21, 2001

Just Reached 3000 Seti@Home Workunits

Your credit:
Results Received 3000
Total CPU Time 4.597 years
Average CPU Time per work unit 13 hr 25 min 22.4 sec
Last result returned: Sat Dec 22 16:47:35 2001 UTC
Registered on: Sat May 15 17:43:17 1999 UTC
View Registration Class
SETI@home user for: 2.608 years
Your rank: (based on current workunits received)
Your rank out of 3442266 total users is: 22605th place.
The number of users who have this rank: 30
You have completed more work units than 99.342% of our users.

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?email=marduk@cyber-rights.net&cmd=user_stats_new

Thursday, December 20, 2001

Funniest Joke Found

An online humor experiment found that men and women have much different tastes in humor. Men prefer aggressive jokes and women favor wordplay...
Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are going camping. They pitch their tent under the stars and go to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night Holmes wakes Watson up. "Watson, look up at the stars, and tell me what you deduce." Watson says, "I see millions of stars and even if a few of those have planets, its quite likely there are some planets like Earth, and if there are a few planets like Earth out there, there might also be life." Holmes replied: "Watson, you idiot, somebody stole our tent!"
http://www.cosmiverse.com/science12210104.html

Wednesday, December 19, 2001

Intelligent Space Suits

Astronauts of the future could receive text, graphics and even video through a wearable computer built into their space suits. At present, during space walks, astronauts get their instructions via radio. But the American space agency (Nasa) reckons the way to maximise information exchange is to send it visually into the astronauts helmet.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1717000/1717075.stm

IBMs Quantum Hacking

IBM researchers said on Wednesday they have demonstrated a calculation that could be used to break complicated codes, marking a small step in the advance of quantum computing, a technology based on quantum mechanics. IBM scientists will publish details in the scientific journal Nature on Thursday of the demonstration of "Shors Algorithm," a method of factoring numbers that was developed in 1994 by AT&T scientist Peter Shor. It was that algorithm, and the promise it holds for its ability to break large encryption codes, that spurred interest in quantum computing in the 1990s.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,49268,00.html

Tuesday, December 18, 2001

Jaron Lanier: The Central Metaphor of Everything?

One of the striking things about being a computer scientist in this age is that all sorts of other people are happy to tell us that what we do is the central metaphor of everything, which is very ego gratifying. We hear from various quarters that our work can serve as the best understanding - if not in the present but any minute now because of Moores law - of everything from biology to the economy to aesthetics, child-rearing, sex, you name it. I have found myself being critical of what I view as this overuse as the computational metaphor. My initial motivation was because I thought there was naive and poorly constructed philosophy at work. Its as if these people had never read philosophy at all and there was no sense of epistemological or other problems.
http://www.edge.org/documents/day/day_lanier.html

Coming Soon: Hollywood Versus the Internet

...And if theyre programmers, trying to come up with the next great version of the Linux operating system, for example, they may find their development efforts put them at risk of criminal and civil penalties if the tools they develop are inadequately protective of copyright interests. Indeed, their sons and daughters in grade-school computer classes may face similar risks, if the broadest of the changes now being proposed becomes law.
http://cryptome.org/mpaa-v-net-mg.htm

/. Thread on the Prevalance of Water in the Solar System

Alchohol was detected in interstellar clouds, making obsolete the theory that drunken, rowdy crowds were a Terran phenomina. Oceans are believed essential for life, but so was the habitable zone. It is the height of "optimism" to believe that if one is wrong, the other must be even more right than before. There is life on Earth which exists in deep, oceanic trenches, near hot volcanic vents. Since that life could not exist prior to the volcanic vent opening, it can be assumed that the formation of life, at its most basic, is occuring on a regular basis. These life-forms may or may not have any nucleic structures we would recognise. For this reason, until such extreme life-forms on Earth are better understood, and the range of conditions in which they can form are better quantified, only the very brave, or very stupid, could claim that "factor X will make life more/less abundant in our Universe". All we really know is that the picture is a hell of a lot more complicated than it used to be.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/19/1419200

Suspect Claims Al Qaeda Hacked Microsoft

Oh, man, join the list.
During interrogation, Afroze, 25, also claimed that a member or members of Osama bin Ladens Al Qaeda network, posing as computer programmers, were able to gain employment at Microsoft and attempted to plant "trojans, trapdoors, and bugs in Windows XP," according to Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad, a New Delhi information systems and telecommunication consultant.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/173039.html

Thursday, December 13, 2001

Case Made for Life on Jupiter Moon

Are the Red Spots Alive?Brad Dalton is the first to admit his theory is far-fetched: that bacteria could account for odd light emissions, as well as the reddish hue, of Jupiters ocean-bearing moon, Europa.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20011210/europa.html

Water: First finding for Mars Odyssey

The Mars Odyssey (MO) spacecraft has made its first significant discovery: it has detected large deposits of hydrogen - possibly water - near the Red Planets poles.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1708000/1708420.stm

Popular Posts

Like us on Facebook