Archive for January, 2008
Legos turn 50
It’s the fiftieth anniversary of LEGO Group founder Ole Kirk Christiansen’s patenting of the now-iconic brick. This year is also the 30th anniversary of the minifig and 10th anniversary of LEGO MINDSTORMS.
(The company has actually been putting out toys since the ’40s but only settled on the perfect brick architecture in 1958.)
Who can doubt the huge impact of LEGO? The bricks have been used to create 3D printers, autopilots and buckyballs. Architects concept with LEGO bricks. It has inspired museum-quality works of art as well as more humble ones. There are an average of 62 legos per inhabitant of the Earth, with 2,400 different kinds of bricks in 53 colors. There are 55,600 LEGO videos on YouTube and over 170,000 pictures on Flickr.
To commemorate the anniversary, the LEGO Group is holding a series of building challenges around the world to determine the best builder in each country between the ages of 6 and 13. The finalists will be invited to Denmark to participate in a huge building bonanza. Details will be revealed in March on www.LEGO.com/Club.
Happy Birthday, Legos!
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Geek Love
My pal Todd sent an email along with a link to goodreads, a site that let’s you share what books you’re reading/have read with your friends online. a great idea, no doubt.
the only problem i have with such things is that i have to remember yet another miserable login for a site that does only one thing. there are sites that do multiple things, best of which are my own blogs, run on my own servers, which require only as much time as their value can balance.
still, no matter how you share your reads, it’s a fun thing to do and the gods know how much i enjoy talking about stories!
here’s what i’ve been reading lately : highly recommended!
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Machines learn to lie
Scientists in Switzerland have created learning robots that can lie to each other about food sources.
The team at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Federal Institute of Technology created the little experimental learning devices to work in groups and hunt for “food” targets nearby while avoiding “poison.” Imagine their surprise when one generation of robots learned to signal lies about the poison, sending opponents to their doom.
The little wheeled robots had neural circuitry with about 30 “genes” that determine their behavior, and how much they react to light in the environment. The food sources charged up the robots’ batteries while the poison drained them, and by using the genes of the most successful feeders in 50 successive generations, the team was hoping to select the fittest.
Three colonies of bots in the 50th generation learned to signal to other robots in the group when then found food or poison. But the fourth colony included lying cheats that signaled food when they found poison and then calmly rolled over to the real food while other robots went to their battery-death. Eerily wicked, to say the least. Saving the robots’ honor, luckily, there were also a few “hero robots” that signaled danger and then rolled to their death to save the others.
Will this culture make it into consumer robots? Imagine the possibilities. Security systems lying about whether or not kids snuck out in the middle of the night…
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Maddox : you are not a cuban dictator
“Fidel Castro hats were made to be worn by Fidel Castro. Not hipster losers trying to look ironic. Unless you have a beard and you led a coup in 1959 to establish a Marxist socialist state in Cuba, take it the fuck off. It wouldn’t even be so bad if you were Cuban, but you’re not. You live in a midwestern suburb and you shop at Hollister.”
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Once again, Maddox shows us the light.
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click on charles over there >>>>> another kind of tag
It would be an interesting first day on the job : sign the paperwork, W-2 and whatever else, and then roll up your sleeve for a microchip injection.
Sounds like sci-fi, but it’s happened, and now a handful of states are making sure their citizens will never be forced to have a microchip implanted under their skin.
No one’s quite sure how real a threat these forced implants might be or why states are feeling compelled to protect their residents from being physically tagged. Lawmakers are calling the legislation pre-emptive [isn't that a term used for bombing other countries?] while the industry that produces the technology sees the states’ action as fear mongering.
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags – tiny, data-storing microchips about the size of a grain of rice – are in passports, in Wal-Mart factory shipments and in subway passes in cities from New York to Taiwan. They are also in humans. On one less-than-likely episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” a paranoid actor Bob Saget even uses one to monitor his adulterous wife.
Unlike Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, which is used for constant, real-time tracking, RFID tags are scanned at close range [for now] – usually from a few feet to a few inches. The tags are tracked by scanners installed at checkpoints, such as office doors or warehouse loading docks. The systems are also commonly used in highway toll collection and as theft protection in car keys.
In humans they’ve been used to store medical information, to track movement and to gain access to locked rooms. To date, roughly 2,000 RFID chips have been sold for implantation in humans, says VeriChip Corp., the only manufacturer with a Food and Drug Administration-approved implantable chip.
The company is focusing its technology on medical patient identification, and about 400 patients, including those with Alzheimer’s disease, have RFIDs implanted. Other VeriChip human implants have been used by a Spanish nightclub to allow VIPs with implanted chips to bypass entrance lines and by the Mexico attorney general’s staff to safeguard identity information at a time when the kidnapping of government officials there is not uncommon.
Some customers are using them as high-tech keys. Ohio security firm CityWatcher.com raised eyebrows in 2006 when it requested that some of its employees be “chipped,†or implanted with tags for access to certain rooms. According to published reports, only two employees got the implants before the company dropped the program. CityWatcher.com has since shut down.
But forced chipping has been a rare practice, leading some industry spokespeople to decry regulation as “scare tactics.â€Â
Wisconsin enacted the first RFID ban in May 2006, and North Dakota in April. Colorado and Ohio have bills in committee, and Oklahoma and Florida saw theirs die. Except for one U.S. House proposal to use RFID tags to track prescription drugs, Congress has not widely addressed the technology.
Yet.
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don’t forget : spore is coming soon
From the mind of Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, comes SPOREâ„¢, an epic journey that takes you from the origin and evolution of life through the development of civilization and technology and eventually all the way into the deepest reaches of outer space.
Tide Pool Phase
Fight with other creatures and consume them to adjust the form and abilities of your creature. It’s survival of the fittest at the most microscopic level.
Creature Phase
Venture onto land and help your creature learn and evolve with forays away from your nest. The only way to grow is by taking chances!
Tribal Phase
Instead of controlling an individual creature, you are now caring for, giving tools to and guilding the interactions of an entire tribe.
Civilization Phase
Once your city is established, your creatures begin seeking out and interacting with other cultures. Make contact with an olive branch or a war cry. The goal for your creatures is to conquer the planet.
Space Phase
The time has come to move on to other worlds in your solar system. Make contact, colonize, or terraform, then venture further to find other solar systems. A ‘mission’ structure provides new goals in your quest for galactic dominance.
So, enough already : check it out :
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if you give a mouse a cookie…
hiyas…
some changes have been made to waxieus.net!
since i moved all my shtuff to a new host, i figured might as well perform some upgrades as the site had been running quite well since this last incarnation but that was a long time ago. 2 years! that led to making some accurate backups, which led to tidying up the filesystem and what happens when you give a mouse a cookie? well, next thing i knew i was doing more than a little general spiffin up — special thanks to Jez who originally made the theme this one is modified from. if you really really really like it you can have the css right here.
so, here’s hoping you enjoy the new face of waxieus.net – oh, and please note that now only the last two posts will appear on the index [homepage] so if you’re looking for something else, be sure to use the search function over there in the upper-left — just type in what you’re looking for and click the “go” button. try it! it’s FUN! weeeeeeeee!!!
happy new jeers everybody.
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bluehost is the most
i’ve been loyal to the same host for years. when i first got into external hosting it was way more expensive than it is now. since there are tons of affordable options out there now, i decided it was time to look for a new, more affordable host with the kind of digs i like, such as linux, shell access, multiple domains, mysql and all that good junk geeky types love.
fortunately for me, my pal and geek idol ryness had just switched all his external hosting to bluehost and raved about them to me. at first glance i was sold. ry’s got the eye for quality.
three days and some finagling later all my sites [including this one] are running off of it and i couldn’t be happier with not only the savings but also the features and ease of use for pennies a day.
thanks for the tip, ry.
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Good and Bad
Orexin A is a promising candidate to become a “sleep replacement” drug. For decades, stimulants have been used to combat sleepiness, but they can be addictive and often have side effects, including raising blood pressure or causing mood swings. The military, for example, administers amphetamines to pilots flying long distances, and has funded research into new drugs like the stimulant modafinil and orexin A in an effort to help troops stay awake with the fewest side effects.
Certainly, there are pros and cons to this. Tricking the brain into believing it is well-rested is not the same as the whole body getting solid, good rest. There is simply no substitute. Therefore, we can presume that the potential abuses of this drug will be great as it becomes more and more readily available.
What could some of the implications of this new drug be?
Well, here’s just one of a slew of them.
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