December 2011
You Don’t Live in the World You Were Born Into «... →
We all have the tendency to believe that we are living in a very advanced technological period. We get all excited about the new tech we got at Xmas and what we read about that will soon be available to us. In reality, everything we are excited about today is going to be incredibly old and boring much faster than we ever expect.
Computer hackers plan to protect the internet by... →
Forget science fiction — this one sounds like pure fantasy — but hackers at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin are dreaming of creating their own network of communications satellites and ground stations to forestall any attempt to control the internet.
7 Must-Read Books on the Future of the Internet |... →
We’re deeply fascinated by the evolution of media and the sociocognitive adaptations that go along with it, but perhaps even more so by the intellectual debates surrounding this ever-swelling topic of increasing urgency and controversy. The past year has been particularly prolific in varied takes on our shared digital future, contextualizing our current concerns in fascinating media history and...
Rare earth crisis: Innovate, or be crushed by... →
Rare earths — a block of seventeen elements in the middle of the Periodic Table (pictured below) — aren’t actually all that rare, but they tend to be very hard to commercially obtain. Generally, rare earth elements are only found in minute quantities in mineral deposits of clay, sand, and rock (earths!), which must then be processed to extract the rare metals — an expensive process, and also...
Air Defense: America Buys Into New Israeli Tech →
The U.S. has agreed to investanother $235 million in Israeli anti-missile efforts. The money is going to two systems. The less well-known one is the David’s Sling/Magic Wand air and missile defense system being developed as a replacement for the American Patriot system. The Magic Wand missiles have a longer range (300 kilometers) and better capabilities than Patriot. The American...
QR Code Malware Picks Up Steam - Dark Reading →
As mobile marketers have latched onto the convenience and cool-factor of QR codes, hackers are starting to take advantage of these square, scannable bar codes as a new way to distribute malware. Like all mobile attack vectors, it is a new frontier that security researchers say is not extremely prevalent but which has a lot of potential to wreak havoc if mobile developers and users stand by...
Ultimate webdev/power user tools for Mac (2011... →
I find this more comfortable than any normally-shaped mouse, and it has a super accurate laser sensor and a ton of buttons. It’s also a, uh, conversation piece.
Samoa to Skip Friday and Switch Time Zones -... →
The time change, officially decided in June, is meant to align Samoa with its Asian trading partners; it moves the islands’ work days further from the United States, which dominated its economy in the past.
The lost Van Jacobson paper that could save the... →
This gives a control system more like a set of loose springs with gaps in the middle. The transmitter increases the window size until congestion is encountered, probing the available bandwidth. Instead of the first excess packet being dropped, it gets queued somewhere. This happens to many of the packets, until the intermediate buffer is full. Finally, a packet gets dropped but it’s too late — the...
The Pros and Cons of Cloud Hosting →
My simple test is this – Do you use the cloud APIs to provision new servers automatically? If you don’t (and most startups I know don’t), then you are probably just wasting time and money on the cloud. If you are treating cloud infrastructure like EC2 as a replacement for traditional hosting where you have a bunch of servers running all the time at the same capacity, you would probably be much...
Tubalr automatically creates YouTube music video... →
Tubalr is a web service that allows you to punch in a band name, hit a button, and be presented with a clean and simple playlist of music videos from that band based on content pulled from YouTube. Originally created by Cody Stewart back in September 2010 and iterated quite a lot since then, it’s neither the first simplified YouTube interface we’ve seen (hello Quietube) nor is it...
InfoQ: Keynote: Predictability and Measurement... →
David J. Anderson explains how to use predictability, measurement and change management to balance the factors of observed capability, staffing, and delivery targets to achieve predictable outcomes.
Restructuring defense R&D | Bulletin of the Atomic... →
But much of what transpires in the name of military research and development is not research in the sense that it produces scientific and technical knowledge widely applicable inside and outside the Defense Department. A large part of defense R&D activity revolves around building very expensive gadgets that are often based on unsound technology and frequently fail to perform as required.
The History of MIT's Blatant Suppression of Cold... →
The question in the minds of representatives in Washington, DC would have been, “Why should the taxpayers finance the construction of giant reactors to experiment with hot fusion reactions that produce nuclear waste and lethal amounts of radioactivity, when cold fusion research only requires a small fraction of the funding, while producing no waste and little radioactivity?”
marquete/kibo - GitHub →
Kibo is a simple JavaScript library for handling keyboard events.
Visions of the Future: Isaac Asimov's Unrealized... →
We love iconic science fiction author and futurist Isaac Asimov, whose keen insights on creativity in education were a favorite last month. Two years before his death, Asimov recorded a pilot for a TV series synthesizing his visionary ideas about where humanity is going. When he passed away in 1992, the pilot for the series was adapted into a tribute documentary titled Visions of the Future, now...
creationix/nvm - GitHub →
Node Version Manager - Simple bash script to manage multiple active node.js versions
The Smart Fast Startup — How to Become a Must-Have →
On paper, in hindsight, those loops look like failures. In practice, in the trenches, it’s never so obvious. The loops always start off sounding like a good idea full of possibility. But before long, after development and launch, it becomes apparent that while interesting, the product is somehow not necessary enough, or useful enough, to really build a business around, even if it’s well designed. ...
Being the X of Y: Defining your place in the... →
It’s common practice to summarize most of these questions–probably not the metal band part–by comparing your startup to a similar company in a different space. “The X of Y approach,” as it’s sometimes called, wraps up the core idea of your company in one fell swoop, and applies it to a different audience or platform.
The Avtobaza Bonanza | Analysis Intelligence →
Over the last week, much has been written on Iran’s new electronic warfare capabilities. Iran first claimed that it was able to hijack the RQ-170 drone by jamming its GPS signal and landing it remotely. Now there is a new report that suggests that the Iranians may have blinded a US spy satellite. The report suggests that a laser may have been used to temporarily “blind” a satellite that was...
Technology: Print me a Stradivarius | The... →
THE industrial revolution of the late 18th century made possible the mass production of goods, thereby creating economies of scale which changed the economy—and society—in ways that nobody could have imagined at the time. Now a new manufacturing technology has emerged which does the opposite. Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands and thus...
How to setup Stripe payments with node.js - good... →
This is going to be a super quick tutorial on how to accept payments with Stripe payment processor and node.js. At Browserling we’re moving to Stripe right this very moment so I thought I’d write this quick post. Stripe is the most incredible payment processor - it took me like 30 minutes to figure everything out. Everything is well documented and works like a charm!
http://package.json.nodejitsu.com/ →
This is an interactive guide for exploring various important properties of the package.json packaging format for node.js applications.
Fault tolerant applications in nodejs -... →
hook.io is a distributed input/output framework for node.js. It allows you to seamlessly link together several processes and start sending messages between them. hook.io also provides a rich network of stand-alone hook libraries for adding additional i/o sources. In a sense, hook.io can be described as a next generation enterprise service bus.
The End of Free Will? | Think Tank | Big Think →
The field of neuroscience evolved so rapidly in the past twenty years that it will pose unprecedented challenges to the legal system in the decades to come, changing the way we understand crime and punishment, says neuro-pioneer Joy Hirsch, director of the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Center at Columbia.
New Type Of Entanglement Allows 'Teleportation in... →
If you imagine the present as the origin of this graph, then the future (ie the space you can reach at subluminal speeds) forms a wedge that is symmetric about the y-axis. Your past (ie the space you could have arrived from at subluminal speeds) is a mirror image of this wedge reflected in the x-axis
Is There Really Such A Thing As Brain Food? : The... →
Those who tested high in omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D, which are commonly found in fish, and in vitamins C, E and B, which are often found in vegetables, were less likely to have their brains shrink, and were more likely to score higher on the memory and thinking tests, the researchers report in the Dec. 28 issue of the journal Neurology.
Francis Hwang: That $2800 Rails class →
On the other hand! The PragStuds never ever come to New York City so you have to take that into account. There’s a significant premium you can charge for a service that is the exact same as somewhere else, only you don’t have to leave New York City. My beloved Gotham Ruby Conference being one example. Because New Yorkers don’t like the rest of the country. It scares and confuses...
The Warm Attic Workspace →
This workspace looks like a comfy yet energizing place to think or work, with warm brick-colored walls coupled with dark wood surfaces. TierOne Photography’s Steve Norcup remodeled his attic to design his ideal space.
Holographic 3-D looks tantalizingly closer in 2012 →
Applications like holographic TV have long been relegated as the next big thing in the distant future but a Leuven, Belgium-based R&D lab for nanoelectronics has come up with a process that might bring holographic images closer to realtime.
Huge portions of the Web vulnerable to hashing... →
Researchers have shown how a flaw that is common to most popular Web programming languages can be used to launch denial-of-service attacks by exploiting hash tables. Announced publicly on Wednesday at the Chaos Communication Congress event in Germany, the flaw affects a long list of technologies, including PHP, ASP.NET, Java, Python, Ruby, Apache Tomcat, Apache Geronimo, Jetty, and Glassfish, as...
How Mistakes Can Set You Free | Tiny Buddha:... →
Well, the little blue line was undeniable, and the circumstances unforgettable.
BBC News - British teenage designer of Summly app... →
“I thought that what I needed was a way of simplifying and summarising these web searches. Google has Instant Preview but that is just an image of the page. What I wanted was a content preview,” he says.
2011: What We Learned →
The most important change we made in 2011 was to introduce processes for giving ourselves feedback. Our code review system now ensures that poor programming practices are squeezed out, and best practices dispersed through our development team.
So You Want to Save the World - Less Wrong →
So you want to save the world. As it turns out, the world cannot be saved by caped crusaders with great strength and the power of flight. No, the world must be saved by mathematicians, computer scientists, and philosophers.
Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford... →
Stanford “free” classes aren’t free. Stanford students have to pay for them. The fact that I’m paying for them doesn’t bother me, the fact that people who aren’t paying for them have changed the class more than the ones who have, does. I’m sorry, but if I’m going to have to pay $50,000 a year to go to Stanford then the classes should be tailored to fit the students – not a working professional who...
MetroChange Kiosks Would Enable New Yorkers to... →
In reality, the unused MetroCard amounts, which don’t quite add up to a full fare, total up to $52 million a year. That’s $52 million that New Yorkers have spent, that basically goes into the garbage (but really goes to the MTA). Students at NYU’s Interactive Teleommunications Program thought that these monies could be distributed better- to needy New Yorkers, rather than back in the pockets of...
Research shows ocean bacteria glow to attract... →
From these simple experiments it appears clear that the bioluminescent abilities of the ocean bacteria tested help it to move more easily around in the ocean - using other organisms as a transport vehicle. In so doing the bacteria not only get a free ride, but get a meal along the way as they feast on other material inside the bellies of those that have eaten them.
Warplanes: Avenger B Morphs Into MQ-X →
The U.S. Air Force has decided to take a shortcut in developing its next generation tactical reconnaissance UAV (MQ-X) and simply adopt a beefed up version of the existing Avenger (“Predator C”). This jet powered aircraft was developed privately by the firm that makes the Predator and Reaper UAV that MQ-X will replace.
Japan scientists hope slime holds intelligence key →
He says the cells appear to have a kind of information-processing ability that allows them to “optimise” the route along which the mold grows to reach food while avoiding stresses — like light — that may damage them.