1. 31 July 2007

    Out of Control

    Kevin Kelly

    493 days ago

    Out of Control, Kevin Kelly

    An interesting, slightly dated look at the future of technology from Kevin Kelly. Published in 1994, it has good reason to be lagging behind, and although it’s somewhat optimistic predictions haven’t fully propagated, for all I know they seem to still be accurate of the sorts of things that are out there, just starting to happen on the fringes of technology and computer science. A fun read, the kind that makes you wonder what you’re doing building dumb little websites when there’s fun shit like evolutionary computing happening…

    We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves Norbert Weiner, 20

    Patterns of cells, surely. Cells made up of patterns of DNA, made up of patterns of nucleotides, made up of patterns of molecules, made up of patterns of atoms, made up of various electrons, protons, and neutrons, of which protons and neutrons are in turn made up of something, we don’t quite exactly know yet. And that’s just jumping down the rabbit hole at the cellular level – skipping larger human subsystems. And you can go from individual up as well, to an immediate peer group, then local, regional, national, global… Where does the line get drawn? To us it’s at the individual level. To ants and bees it’s very likely above that level, colony or hive. Makes you wonder whether there are any organisms that can feel and understand and manipulate the workings of different sub-organisms within themselves?

    Much more likely, says [Daniel] Dennett, is that “meaning emerges from distributed interaction of lots of little things, no one of which can mean a damn thing.” A whole bunch of decentralized modules produce raw and often contradictory parts – a possible word here, a speculative word there. “But out of the mess, not entirely coordinated, in fact largely competitive, what emerges is a speech act.” 43

    I like this notion. I’ve always felt that the aggregation of everything in the world creates all the meaning, as opposed to some god creating all meaning in the world. Pantheism, I don’t exactly know what to call it. But it’s the only spiritual idea that really sticks for me, that makes me wide-eyed in contemplation of what the world really is.

    “To think is to act, and to act is to think,” said Heinz von Foerster, gadfly of the 1950s cybernetic movement. “There is no life without movement.” 49

    Left on its own, without a direct link to “outside,” a brainy network takes its own machinations as reality. A mind cannot possibly consider anything beyond what it can measure or calculate; without a body it can only consider itself. 52

    And here I am sitting on my ass, writing about a book I read. Sometimes I wish I’d actually do something big, but it hasn’t quite happened yet.

    When reduced to essentials, life is very close to a computational function. For a number of years, Ed Fredkin, a maverick thinker once associated with MIT, has been spinning out a heretical theory that the universe is a computer. Not metaphorically like a computer, but that matter and energy are forms of information processing of the same general class as the type of information processing that goes on inside a Macintosh. Fredkin disbelieves in the solidity of atoms and says flatly that “the most concrete thing in the world is information.” 107

    Going back to the first quote, it just depends on where you draw the lines. From far above, absolutely. When you bring the line down to an individual level that individual acts absolutely nothing like a computer, but its constituent parts (the nucleic acids) do. Drop it down to their level, and they don’t, but here I lost out because I really have no idea what levels are below them and how they work.

    Where does self come from? The perplexing answer suggested by cybernetics is: it emerges from itself. It cannot appear any other way. Brian Goodwin, an evolutionary biologist, told reporter Roger Lewin, “The organism is the cause and effect of itself, its own intrinsic order and organization. Natural selection isn’t the cause of organism. Genes don’t cause organisms. There are no causes of organisms. Organisms are self causing agencies.” Self, therefore, is an auto-conspired form. It emerges to transcend itself, just as a long snake swallowing its own ail because Uroborus, the mythical loop. 124

    This also resonates at a spiritual level for me. Up along with meaning emerging from small distributed parts it’s always something that’s sort of sat right behind my actual conscious thoughts, me being able to sit there and know it’s back there but never pull it out and twist it around to think about it. It’s the spirit. That the sum of the parts is somehow greater than the parts themselves. Divide me out into carbon and whatever other atoms and I’m no longer me, I’ve lost my self/identity/soul whatever. Not that I ever physically possessed anything other than those atoms. But in concert they made me more than just themselves, and that’s tremendous.

    Life is the ultimate technology. Machine technology is a temporary surrogate for life technology. As we improve out machines they will become more organic, more biological, more like life, because life is the best technology for living. 165

    John Perry Barlow, 184. (Barlowettes, consider me I don’t know what, but a little impressed. Maybe some combination of you being cute and me having a science-man crush upon your father lead me to an undeserved idea of your merits. I would just like for you to know we may be near in age, depending on how recently certain sites prominently mentioning your ages have been updated. I also understand how I have revealed myself to be a total creep by just making this note, but it’s not like I’ll ever meet you or you’ll ever read this anyway. Take that.)

    Teilhard de Chardin, 201

    There are many reasons to create. But what we create is always a world. I believe we may be unable to create anything less. We can create hurriedly, in fragments, in thumbnail sketches, and streams of consciousness, but always we are filling in an unfinished world of out own. […] In essence, every creative act is no more or less than the reenactment of the Creation. 236

    Or, we may be very surprised to find that nothing unifies the selection criteria. It may be that any highly evolved form is beautiful. We find beauty in all biological creatures, although individual people have individual favorites. My suspicion is that the beauty of nature resides in the process of getting there by evolution and by the important fact that the form must work biologically as a whole. 276

    This is a tremendous notion.

    Ethology, study of animal behavior, 323

    Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more – it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforth bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow – this is what evolution is. Theodosius Dobzhansky, 363

    Where other people see the hand of God, we see evolution. Bob Crosby, 363

    Evolution as a Religion, Mary Midgley 364

    Postdarwinism suggests that other forces are at work in evolution in the long run. These lawful mechanisms of change reorganize life into new fitnesses. These unseen dynamics extend the Library in which natural selection may operate. These deepened evolution need not be any more mystical that natural selection is. Think of each dynamic – symbiosis, directed mutation, saltataionism, self-organization – as a mechanism that will foster evolutionary innovation over the long term in complement to Darwin’s ruthless selection. 371

    This is the first place that I’ve ever heard that there may be more to it than just Darwin. I figure that we as humans really don’t know anything all of our science is just crude approximation of whatever forces actually permeate the universe, good enough to do cool shit like fly airplanes and make computers, but bad enough to make us dangerously overestimate our merits as a race of beings. But although I haven’t taken that many biology courses, I’m surprised that the notion of post-darwinism hasn’t popped up for me sooner.

    Hall found some directed variations so complex they required the mutation of two genes simultaneously. He called that “the improbable stacked on top of the highly unlikely.” 375

    Walter Fontana, coproducing (lap game) mathematical functions 395. The idea of a set of functions interacting with each other in such a way that there is no clear, direct causation from one to the next, but they’re all tied together. Self organizing. Some system just pops into existence from any number of parts. A -> B -> C -> A. Everything depends on the next thing. I can’t find much on the web about Fontana, but he’s a part of an eponymous lab at Harvard, so he must be doing all right.

    “If you write something about this,” Kauffman says softly, “make sure you say that this is only something crazy that people are thinking about. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if somehow there are laws that make laws that make laws, so that the universe is, in John Wheeler’s words, something that is looking in at itself!? The universe posts its own rules and emerges out of a self-consistent thing. Maybe that’s not impossible, this notion that quarks and gluons and atoms and elementary particles have invented the laws by which they transform one another.” 398

    Yep, that’s fascinating too. God is everything somehow working together to what end nobody has any idea.

    Are the laws of the universe evolvable? If the laws governing the universe arose from within the universe, might they be susceptible to the forces of self-adjustment? Perhaps the very foundational laws upholding all sensible laws are in flex. Are we playing in a game where all the rules are constantly being rewritten? 460

  2. 10 February 2007

    663 days ago

    The automobile works honestly. Long before its birth, when it is still just layers of metal and piles of drawings, it diligently murders Malayan coolies and Mexican laborers. It is born in agony! It shreds flesh, blinds eyes, eats lungs, destroys minds. At last, it rolls out of the gates into the world which, before its existence, was known as “bright.” Instantly, it deprives its supposed owner of his old-fashioned peace of mind. Lilac withers, chickens and dreamers dash away in terror. The automobile laconically runs down pedestrians. It gnaws into the side of a barn or else, grinning, it flies down a slope. It can’t be blamed for anything. Its conscience is as clear as Monsieur Citroen’s conscience. It only fulfills its destiny: It is destined to wipe out the world.

    Ilya Ehrenburg - The Life of the Automobile

  3. 15 December 2006

    A Guide for the Perplexed

    E.F. Schumaker

    720 days ago

    EF Schumacher was a british economist, here he goes off into philosophy. He has a bone to pick with scientific dogma, calling for a more holistic view of the world than the materialstic Scientism that goes on in modern western society today

    In short, the whole base of our society is deteriorating under what our prevalent beliefs have become and we need a new way to look at things, which is of course, provided. Good stuff to think about – I’m not sure what I think of it yet – but it’s nice to have some controversy of idea.

    Materialistic Scientism

    Thus Cartesian evidence goes straight to mechanism. It mechanizes nature; it does violence to it; it annihilates everything which causes things to symbolize with the spirit, to partake of the genius of the Creator, to speak to us. The universe becomes dumb. 9, Jacques Maritain

    Levels of being, m being matter, x life, y consciousness, and z self-awareness. 18:

    • mineral (m)
    • plant (m + x)
    • animal (m + x + y)
    • man (m + x + y + z).

    A person, for instance, entirely fixed in the philosophy of materialistic Scientism, denying the reality of “invisibles” and confining his attention solely to what can be counted, measured, and weighed, lives in a very poor world, so poor that he will experience it as a meaningless wasteland unfit for human habitation. Equally, if he sees it as nothing but an accidental collocation of atoms, he must needs agree with Bertrand Russell that the only rational attitude is one of “unyielding despair.” 35

    I’m pretty sure I’m with his views on religion. I don’t know what god is, and can’t claim to be christian or of any other religion. To me religion is a way of explaining things and dealing with the world just the same as science.

    Knowledge comes about insofar as the object known is within the knower. 39, St. Thomas Aquinas

    As a materialistic scientist, he believes that life, consciousness, and self-awareness are nothing but manifestations of complex arrangements of inanimate particles – a “faith” which makes it perfectly rational for him to place exclusive reliance on the bodily senses, to “stay in the head,” and to reject any interference from the “powers” situated in the heart. For him in other words, higher levels of Reality simply do not exist, because his faith excludes the possibility of their existence. 45

    Faith chooses the grade of significance at which the search for knowledge and understanding is to aim. 45

    We must shut the eyes of sense, and open that brighter eye of our understandings, that other eye of the soul, as the philosopher calls our intellectual faculty, ‘which indeed all have, but few make use of.’ 47, John Smith

    These two quotes say the exact same thing, the first is from the book and the second is from my memory. Just a fun thing to notice.

    For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone sees the invisible. 47, Richard of Saint-Victor (d. 1173)

    on ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. (One can only see well with the heart, the essential is invisible to the eyes.) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, d.1944

    Science for understanding/manipulation

    The change of Western man’s interest from “the slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things” (Thomas Aquinas) to mathematically precise knowledge of lesser things – “there being nothing in the world the knowledge of which would be more desirable or more useful” (Christian Huygens) – marks a shift from what we might call “science for understanding” to “science for manipulation.” The purpose of the former was the enlightenment of the person and his “liberation”; the purpose of the latter is power. “Knowledge itself is power,” said Francis Bacon, and Descartes promised men they would become “masters and possessors of nature.” In it’s more sophisticated development, “science for manipulation” tends almost inevitable to advance from the manipulation of nature to that of people. 53

    The old science looked upon nature as God’s handiwork and man’s mother; the new science tends to look upon nature as an adversary to be conquered or a resource to be quarried and exploited. 54

    Ishmael anyone?

    The progressive elimination of “science for understanding” – or “wisdom” – from Western civilization turns the rapid and ever-accelerating accumulation of “knowledge for manipulation” into a most serious threat. As I have said in another context, “We are now far too clever to be able to survive without wisdom,” and further expansion of our cleverness can be of no benefit whatever. 55

    It is however important for us to realize that mankind is doomed to live more and more under the spell of a new scientific, social, and political mythology, unless we resolutely exorcise these befuddled notions whose influence on modern life is becoming appalling… For when gods fight amongst themselves, men have to die. 59, Etienne Gilson

    Religion is the reconnection (re-legio) of man with reality, whether this Reality be called God, Truth, Allah, Sat-Chit-Ananda, or Nirvana.

    I’d even add science into the above mix. But:

    Reality, Truth, God, Nirvana cannot be found by thought, because thought belongs to the level of being established by consciousness and not to that higher level which is established by self-awareness. 71

    Heart, life, science

    The term “heart” is of particular significance in the Orthodox doctrine of man. When people in the west today speak of the heart, they usually mean the emotions and affections. But in the Bible, as in most ascetic texts of the Orthodox Church, the heart has a far wider connotation. It is the primary organ of man’s being, whether physical or spiritual; it is the center of life, the determining principle of all our activities and aspirations. As such, the heart obviously includes the addictions and emotions, but it also includes much else besides: it embraces in effect everything that goes to compromise what we call a “person.” 73

    This one of my ideas about God, something within everything roughly analogous to spirit. Also evocative of Chris Alexander’s Wholeness.

    Mathematics, after all, is far removed from life: At its heights it certainly manifests a severe kind of beauty and also a captivating elegance, which may even be taken as a sign of Truth; but equally certainly, it has no warmth, none of life’s messiness of growth and decay, hope and despair, joy and suffering. This must never be overlooked or forgotten: Physics and the other instructional sciences limit themselves to the lifeless aspect of reality, and this is necessarily so if the aim and purpose of science is to produce predictable results. Life, and even more so, consciousness and self-awareness, cannot be ordered about; they have, we might say, a will of their own. 105

    Anti-evolutionism

    I can’t say that I agree with this, but it’s nice to think about.

    And lo! there is the cell, and once the cell has been born there is nothing to stop the emergence of Shakespeare, although it will obviously take a bit of time. There is therefore nor need to speak of miracles or to admit any lack of knowledge. It is one of the great paradoxes of our age that people claiming the proud title of “scientist” dare to offer such undisciplined and reckless speculations as contributions to scientific knowledge, and that they get away with it. 113

    Evolutionism is not science; it is science fiction even a kind of hoax. It is a hoax that has succeeded too well and has imprisoned modern man in what looks like an irreconcilable conflict between “science” and “religion.” It has destroyed all faiths that pull mankind up and has substituted a faith that pulls mankind down. [...] Evolutionism… is the most extreme product of the materialistic utilitarianism of the nineteenth century. The inability of twentieth-century though to rid itself of this imposture is a failure which may well cause the collapse of Western civilization. For it is impossible for any civilization to survive without a faith in meanings and values transcending the utilitarianism of comfort and survival. 115

    ...descriptive science becomes unscientific and illegitimate when it indulges in comprehensive explanatory theories which can be neither verified nor disproved by experiment. Such theories are not “science” but “faith.” 115

  4. 14 December 2006

    King of the Vagabonds

    Neal Stephenson

    721 days ago

    Another Stephenson, supremely good stuff. The book ends in a real rut, can’t wait to get at the next one.

  5. 04 November 2006

    Quicksilver

    Neal Stephenson

    761 days ago

    There isn’t really much that I can say. Here’s some previous stuff on Stephenson, who’s hands down my favorite fiction writer.

    I’m pissed that the last 35 pages of Quicksilver are the first chapter from the next in the series. The ending just ran up behind me and bashed me over the head. Not that it was stunning (a fault lots of people find with Stephenson’s books), but there was still a good chunk of pages between my right thumb and forefinger that threw me.

    The second I got done with it I hopped onto amazon to order the next two. It’s been awhile since I’ve really read at a good pace, much less stuff as good as Stephenson. They pull you through just like pulp/trash novels do, but after reading a Dan Brown or a John Grisham you feel almost guilty because reading the book doesn’t really get you anything. I’ve read a few, and they all just blur together. (If you want, you can switch the pronoun you for me in the rest of this…)

    Stephenson won’t just blow you away for the few days it takes to get through the book (I read 80 pages thursday, ~250 yesterday, and 100 today), but you can actually tell one of his novels from another. Which is a plus. I take it as a sign that they didn’t just rot my brain.

    If I had to describe Quicksilver (I can’t), I’d say it was history/science/fiction. All three about balanced. Its going on in mid 17th century england, featuring scientists at the genesis of the Royal Society in London. Daniel Waterhouse makes friends with Netwon, Liebnitz, and plenty of other bigwigs; not to mention sails through a flotilla of pirates in the second, temporally distant plot line. I’m not describing any more than that, you should read it.

  6. 18 March 2006

    992 days ago

    Another World Is Here

    we’ve already screwed up pretty badly, and much of the evidence seems to suggest that no matter what we do now, we’ve already committed ourselves to profound climate change, species loss and ecosystem degradation. We can still head off the worst of it, but we can’t avoid big problems now. We’ve bought the ticket, and we’re going to take the ride.

    we as a culture need to serve an apprenticeship with nature, and we need to do it now. We don’t know much about the world, really. We’re learning quickly, but ecological knowledge is an ocean, and we’ve only just left the shore.

    My take? Humans are disillusioned and foolish. Assume that the body of human knowledge today is an atom. What humans don’t yet know amounts to the infinity of the entire universe. But don’t let my cynicism get to you.

    via Kjell Olsen992 days ago

  7. 22 November 2005

    1108 days ago

    This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis

    If the top is convinced, the bottom level of data will be overruled.

    The top being your higher sensory ability, the bottom being the raw input data coming in from your nerves.

    When I was a kid I bought a book from the How to do Hypnosis genre, and really liked it. I taught myself self-hypnosis, which is really just meditation, I never tried to hypnotize anyone else. For awhile I did a bit of hypnosis/meditation each night before bed, in fact it got to be the only way for me to get to sleep.

    I still do it every once in a while, but not as often as I’d like. I use breathing calming techniques to get to the point that I can use visualization to further relax myself, and once I start to feel relaxed enough I climb down some stairs into my room, which surprisingly hasn’t changed a bit in the five or so years I’ve played with it.

    Sometimes I go off into spectacular dreams, sometimes I just sit and think, and being that I most often did it before going to bed lots of times I’d fall asleep before I got into any real sort of hypnosis. But no doubt something goes on up there.

    via Kjell Olsen1108 days ago

  8. 08 November 2005

    1122 days ago

    Kansas school board redefines science

    This is a sad day. We’re becoming a laughingstock of not only the nation, but of the world, and I hate that. Janet Waugh, Kansas City Democrat and member of the school board

    via Kjell Olsen1122 days ago

  9. 11 October 2005

    1150 days ago

    Bone of Hobbit-like species uncovered

    LoTR was REAL!

    I think it’s funny how floresiensis got turned into hobbit, they really aren’t at all similar.

    via Kjell Olsen1150 days ago

  10. 26 August 2005

    1197 days ago

    Open Letter (Flying Spaghetti Monster)

    This is getting out of hand. Really. But it’s so spectacularly nerdy.

    via Kjell Olsen1197 days ago

  11. 18 August 2005

    A Short History of Nearly Everything

    Bill Bryson

    1204 days ago

    A delightful trek through the development of the world we live on. A broad and deep look at science from a non scientists point of view.

  12. 07 August 2005

    Einstein for Beginners

    Joseph Schwartz & Michael Mcguinness

    1215 days ago

    A quick primer on Einstein’s life and ideas, and what all that Relativity stuff really means.

  13. 27 June 2005

    1256 days ago

    Boffins create zombie dogs | The Other Side | Breaking News 24/7 - NEWS.com.au (27-06-2005)

    Resurrection! by Science!

    Apparently by replacing the blood in dead dogs with another solution, the dogs ability to function is retained although it’s heart and brain stop functioning. Then a few shocks to get things going again, and the blood gets pumped back in…

    via Kjell Olsen1256 days ago

  14. 20 June 2005

    1264 days ago

    Summer Moon Illusion

    I saw this last night and it was mondo impressive.

    via Kjell Olsen1264 days ago

  15. 08 June 2005

    1275 days ago

    Japan unveils "robot suit" that enhances human power - Yahoo! News

    The 15-kilogram (33-pound) battery-powered suit, code-named HAL-5, detects muscle movements through electrical-signal flows on the skin surface and then amplifies them.

    Bioengineering, I have a friend going to Michigan Tech to study it. Wow. When do we get electrical systems in our brains to record what we’ve been thinking?

    via Kjell Olsen1275 days ago

  16. 16 May 2005

    1298 days ago

    Guardian Unlimited | Life | 'This is how science is done'

    The sky was lit up with a bright yellow light — the earth appeared white. The yellow gradually became darker, turning gradually to orange. In the sky I saw white clouds from above the gadget caused by the sudden expansion following the blast wave — the expansion cools the air and fog clouds form — we had expected this. The orange got deeper, but where the gadget was, it was still bright, a bright orange, flaming ball-like mass. This started to rise, leaving a column of smoke behind, below looking much like the stem of a mushroom. The orange mass continued to rise, the orange to fade and flicker. A great ball of smoke and flame three miles across it was, like a great oil fire billowing and churning, now black smoke, now orange flame. Soon the orange died out and only churning smoke, but this was enveloped in a wonderful purple glow.
    Another after-image I thought, but on closing my eyes it did disappear, and appeared on opening them again. Others said they saw it too, probably caused by ionised air produced in the great heat. Gradually this disappeared, the ball of smoke rising majestically slowly upward, leaving a trail of dust and smoke. Richard Fenyman, on the detonation of one of the first atom bombs in the New Mexico desert.

    At almost 13 I dropped out of Sunday school just before confirmation because of differences in religious views but mainly because I suddenly saw that the picture of Jewish history that we were learning, of a marvellous and talented people surrounded by dull and evil strangers was far from the truth.The error of anti-Semitism is not that the Jews are not really bad after all, but that evil, stupidity and grossness is not a monopoly of the Jewish people but a universal characteristic of mankind in general. Most non-Jewish people in America today have understood that.The error of pro-Semitism is not that the Jewish people or Jewish heritage is not really good, but rather the error is that intelligence, good will, and kindness is not, thank God, a monopoly of the Jewish people but a universal characteristic of mankind in general.
    Therefore, you see at 13 I was not only converted to other religious views but I also stopped believing that the Jewish people are in any way “the chosen people”.

    I am glad that I am not so teased because I am sure of nothing, and find myself having to say “I don’t know” very often. After all, I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there. It is fun to find things you thought you knew, and then to discover you didn’t really understand it after all.

    via Kjell Olsen1298 days ago

  17. 30 April 2005

    1315 days ago

    Science Toys

    Great toys to build on a nice saturday morning. My favorites: the railgun and the solar hotdog cooker.

    via Kjell Olsen1315 days ago

  18. 30 March 2005

    1345 days ago

    Wired 13.04: La Vida Robot

    Undocumented immigrant teenagers kick ass in a NASA sponsored robotics competition.

    The teachers had entered the club in the expert-level Explorer class instead of the beginner Ranger class. They figured their students would lose anyway, and there was more honor in losing to the college kids in the Explorer division than to the high schoolers in Ranger. Their real goal was to show the students that there were opportunities outside West Phoenix. The teachers wanted to give their kids hope. ??1??

    [Installing their battery on board, instead of tethering it from above] was a bold idea. If they didn’t have to run a power line down to the bot, their tether could be much thinner, making the bot more mobile. Since the competition required that their bot run through a series of seven exploration tasks – from taking depth measurements to locating and retrieving acoustic pingers – mobility was key. Most of the other teams wouldn’t even consider putting their power supplies in the water. A leak could take the whole system down. But if they couldn’t figure out how to waterproof their case, Cristian argued, then they shouldn’t be in an underwater contest. ??2??

    Cristian had hacked together off-the-shelf joysticks, a motherboard, motors, and an array of onboard finger-sized video cameras, which now sent flickering images to black-and-white monitors on a folding picnic table. Using five small electric trolling motors, the robot could spin and tilt in any direction. To move smoothly, two drivers had to coordinate their commands. The first thing they did was smash the robot into a wall. ??2??

    The Carl Hayden teammates tried to hide their nervousness, but they were intimidated. Lorenzo had never seen so many white people in one place. ??3??

    Now that they were focused on the mission, both pilots relaxed and made almost imperceptibly small movements with their joysticks. Oscar tapped the control forward while Cristian gave a short backward blast on the vertical propellers. As Stinky floated forward a half inch, its rear raised up and the sampling pipe sank perfectly into the drum.
    “Díos mío,” Oscar whispered, not fully believing what he saw. ??4??

    “Why don’t you have a PowerPoint display?” he asked.
    “PowerPoint is a distraction,” Cristian replied. “People use it when they don’t know what to say.”
    “And you know what to say?”
    “Yes, sir.” ??4??

    Still, both teachers were in a good mood. They had learned that the team placed third out of 11 in the seven underwater exercises. Only MIT and Cape Fear Community College from North Carolina had done better. The overall winner would be determined by combining those results with the engineering interview and a review of each group’s technical manual. Even if they did poorly on the interview, they were now positive that they hadn’t placed last. ??4??

    “And the overall winner for the Marine Technology ROV championship,” Merrill continued, looking up at the crowd, “goes to Carl Hayden High School of Phoenix, Arizona!”
    [...]
    They hope to see all four kids go to college before they quit teaching, which means they’re likely to keep working for a long time. Since the teenagers are undocumented, they don’t qualify for federal loans. And though they’ve lived in Arizona for an average of 11 years, they would still have to pay out-of-state tuition, which can be as much as three times the in-state cost. They can’t afford it. ??5??

    You can send your donations to a fund set up by the phoenix school system, if ya like.

    via Kjell Olsen1345 days ago

  19. 13 February 2005

    1391 days ago

    The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: God and Evolution

    How ironic. Too bad it’s probably true.

    Granted, that’s not very encouraging news for the secular left. Imagine if many of us are hard-wired to be religious. Imagine if, as a cosmic joke, humans have gradually evolved to leave many of us doubting evolution.

    via Kjell Olsen1391 days ago

  20. 1391 days ago

    RedNova News - Can This Black Box See Into the Future?

    Wow, this is interesting:

    But then on September 6, 1997, something quite extraordinary happened: the graph shot upwards, recording a sudden and massive shift in the number sequence as his machines around the world started reporting huge deviations from the norm.

    That was the day of Princess Diana’s funeral. It’s also “sensed” other big worldly events, like 9/11 and last decembers tsunami. The graph referenced above refers to the deviance of a number of random number generators hooked together through the internet, which normally over the course of time generates as many 1’s as 0’s, resulting in a flat graph.

    I’ve always had an inkling that scientific theory these days couldn’t possibly all be “right,” I’ve thought along the lines that the theories explain things that go on, and help us better understand them, but only barely scratch the surface of what actually goes on. This could be another very interesting discovery.

    via Kjell Olsen1391 days ago

  21. 05 December 2004

    1460 days ago

    Free Programming and Computer Science Books

    Wow – a collection of books available for free over the greatness which is the internet. All kinds of interesting books.

    Kjell Olsen1460 days ago

  22. Also somewhat recently

      |