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February 06 2010
The Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results
Shared by Kaleb HornsbySilverTooth writes "Often, when watching a science documentary or reading an article, it seems that the scientists were executing a well-laid out plan that led to their discovery. Anyone familiar with the process of scientific discovery realizes that is a far cry from reality. Scientific discovery is fraught with false starts and blind alleys. As a result, labs accumulate vast amounts of valuable knowledge on what not to do, and what does not work. Trouble is, this knowledge is not shared using the usual method of scientific communication: the peer-reviewed article. It remains within the lab, or at the most shared informally among close colleagues. As it stands, the scientific culture discourages sharing negative results. Byte Size Biology reports on a forthcoming journal whose aim is to change this: the Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results. Hopefully, scientists will be able to better share and learn more from each other's experience and mistakes."
It's not when scientists say "Eureka!" that science is advanced, but when they say, "I didn't expect that."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
February 05 2010
Google Voice Quick Reference Cheatsheet v2.0 Speeds Through Phone Menus [Cheatsheets]
A while back we highlighted a Google Voice Quick Reference cheatsheet you can keep near your phone that lays out Google Voice's voicemail menu tree so you can quickly skip to whatever action you want. The cheatsheet (above) just updated with a few more details here and there, so if you're a Voice user, it's worth grabbing. [Cool Geex]
Why the First Cowboy To Draw Always Gets Shot
Shared by Kaleb Hornsbycremeglace writes "Have you ever noticed that the first cowboy to draw his gun in a Hollywood Western is invariably the one to get shot? Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr did, once arranging mock duels to test the validity of this cinematic curiosity. Researchers have now confirmed that people indeed move faster if they are reacting, rather than acting first."
Slashdot, where the hell is the verb in the second sentence? What the heck?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
February 02 2010
Yo Dawg, I heard You Like Perl: Writing a Perl interpreter with Perl http://go.hornsby.ws/nvvgf
February 01 2010
I try my best not to be a bigot, but why are three kids with Java books in the Computer Science Lab?
Search term "Kaleb Hornsby" on Google Squared: http://www.google.com/squared/table/agtZbxHGRsVCZF8wfApaXSlA Cornmeal?
DRM Content Drives Availability On P2P Networks
Shared by Kaleb Hornsbyjgreco writes "The music industry once feared that going DRM-free would drive a massive explosion of copyright-infringing music availability on P2P networks. Now, a new study seems to suggest otherwise. The answer is obvious: if you can easily get inexpensive DRM-free content that works on your devices through legitimate channels, most people won't bother with the headache of P2P networks. It appears that users largely turn to P2P to acquire DRM-free versions of content that is distributed with DRM. The MPAA, of course, will not come away from this with the obvious conclusion."
That's what I've been doi... saying.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Students Failing Because of Poor Grammar
Shared by Kaleb Hornsbyinnocent_white_lamb writes "30% of freshman university students fail a 'simple English test' at Waterloo University (up from 25% a few years ago. Academic papers are riddled with 'cuz' (in place of 'because') and even include little emoticon faces. One professor says that students 'think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words.' At Simon Fraser University, 10% of students are not qualified to take the mandatory writing courses."
Biggest pet peaves: than, then; they're, their, there; your, you're
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Students Failing Because of Poor Grammar
innocent_white_lamb writes "30% of freshman university students fail a 'simple English test' at Waterloo University (up from 25% a few years ago. Academic papers are riddled with 'cuz' (in place of 'because') and even include little emoticon faces. One professor says that students 'think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words.' At Simon Fraser University, 10% of students are not qualified to take the mandatory writing courses."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
January 31 2010
Evolving Robots Learn To Prey On Each Other
Shared by Kaleb Hornsbyquaith writes "Dario Floreano and Laurent Keller report in PLoS ONE how their robots were able to rapidly evolve complex behaviors such as collision-free movement, homing, predator versus prey strategies, cooperation, and even altruism. A hundred generations of selection controlled by a simple neural network were sufficient to allow robots to evolve these behaviors. Their robots initially exhibited completely uncoordinated behavior, but as they evolved, the robots were able to orientate, escape predators, and even cooperate. The authors point out that this confirms a proposal by Alan Turing who suggested in the 1950s that building machines capable of adaptation and learning would be too difficult for a human designer and could instead be done using an evolutionary process. The robots aren't yet ready to compete in Robot Wars, but they're still pretty impressive."
The word is orient, not orientate.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Stop the Pipe Tobacco Tax | Stop the Pipe Tobacco Tax |
Source: www.rallycongress.com
Action Petition: Stop the Pipe Tobacco Tax
H.R. 4439, the Tobacco Tax Parity Act of 2010 was introduced on January 13, 2010 and would raise the tax on pipe tobacco 775% from $2.8311 to $24.78 per pound. Click here to sign the petition to stop this bill - it is ridiculous!
January 30 2010
Unofficial Qt Environment (and Sudoku) For the Kindle
An anonymous reader writes "I've just posted packages for installing a Qt-based platform on the Kindle 2 and DX devices, and a Sudoku game to go along with it. The Qt-based platform includes plugins I wrote for the e-ink display, the keyboard, and the five-way joystick thing — so it's a fully interactive and usable environment now. Soon I'll be adding a sample app with source code to go along with it."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
January 29 2010
Google To Pay $500 For Bugs Found In Chromium
Trailrunner7 writes to mention that a new program from Google could pay security researchers $500 for every security bug found in Chromium. Of course if you find a particularly clever bug you could be eligible for a $1337 reward. "Today, we are introducing an experimental new incentive for external researchers to participate. We will be rewarding select interesting and original vulnerabilities reported to us by the security research community. For existing contributors to Chromium security — who would likely continue to contribute regardless — this may be seen as a token of our appreciation. In addition, we are hoping that the introduction of this program will encourage new individuals to participate in Chromium security. The more people involved in scrutinizing Chromium's code and behavior, the more secure our millions of users will be. Such a concept is not new; we'd like to give serious kudos to the folks at Mozilla for their long-running and successful vulnerability reward program."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
View facebook friend list [hidden or not hidden]
$ lynx -useragent=Opera -dump 'http://www.facebook.com/ajax/typeahead_friends.php?u=4&__a=1' |gawk -F'\"t\":\"' -v RS='\",' 'RT{print $NF}' |grep -v '\"n\":\"' |cut -d, -f2
There's no need to be logged in facebook. I could do more JSON filtering but you get the idea...
Replace u=4 (Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook creator) with desired uid.
Hidden or not hidden... Scary, don't you?
by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)
Reported Obama Plan Would Privatize Manned Launches
couchslug writes with this excerpt from the not-yet-paywalled New York Times: "President Obama will end NASA's return mission to the moon and turn to private companies to launch astronauts into space when he unveils his budget request to Congress next week, an administration official said Thursday. The shift would 'put NASA on a more sustainable and ambitious path to the future' said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. But the changes have angered some members of Congress, particularly from Texas, the location of the Johnson Space Center, and Florida, the location of the Kennedy Space Center. 'My biggest fear is that this amounts to a slow death of our nation's human space flight program,' Representative Bill Posey, Republican of Florida, said in a statement." If true, this won't please the federal panel that recommended against just such privatization.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
January 26 2010
Thank you, Savannah.
Oooh Yeah! -The Kool-Aid Man
January 24 2010
Math Unicode Entities
Reposted by
krannix
krannix
January 23 2010
Creepy. http://phodroid.com/10/01/ym378r
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