Push for Portal
AI scientists want to make gods. Should that worry us? Nah! It turned out all right in all those Asimov novels, didn't it?
It's 1 year 1 month and 11 days until the end of the Aztec
Calendar. Which makes a few too many 1's, so sit back and watch
this clock turn to 11:11:11.
The Socialbot Network - A
UBC study
suggests that many Facebook users will friend total strangers.
Researchers said they collected 250 gigabytes of information from
Facebook users by using socialbots — fake Facebook profiles created and
controlled by computer code (sic).
What should you drink? Take your cues from the tunes. That's the premise behind
Drinkify,
a scrappy little webapp that recommends drinks based on what you're
listening to. Their motto? "Never listen to music alone again."
You have certainly seen a
Tree of Life at some point
(not the movie; the diagram of the evolution of species). Originally conceived of
by Lamarck (though there is
some interesting debate on this), it was Darwin himself who popularized the concept,
first in his notebook, and next as the
only image in
The Origin of the Species. Though they have inspired
beautiful illustrations, and a
large and fascinating web project to map the tree, trees of life remain problematic since
taxonomy can be complicated. One truly stunning way of redrawing the tree is the
Hillis Plot, which maps 3,000 species by genetic similarity.
You can print out the amazing illustration here,
but, even though the Plot only contains 0.18% of named species, it
needs to be 1.5 meters square to be legible. The Hillis Plot has been
appearing in art, notably (and meta-rifficly)
this one carved into an English oak, and, of course,
tattoos.
