Video Distraction: Baby Octopus

Baby Octopus crawling around out of water.

Daily Links: December 14, 2011

Bfxr is a web app for creating sound effects for your game or own amusement.

Nerd Wallet is a credit card comparison site that helps you filter cards based on select criteria. You can also limit your search to credit cards from credit unions. See also: the Nerd Wallet blog, with credit card industry and rewards news, and an interview with Tim Chen, founder of Nerd Wallet. 

Slate's Negotiation Academy: a series of podcasts that teach you how to haggle with (among others) jerks & liars, the opposite sex, real estate agents and kids.

Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time

Tech: Exoskeletons Will Be the Eyeglasses of the 21st Century

Exoskeletons Will Be the Eyeglasses of the 21st Century:

Eyeglasses and contact lenses are one of the most prolific forms of medical augmentation on the planet. In many industrialized modern cultures, eyeglasses and contacts are also a major element of fashion. Thin, small glasses are out of fashion; big, chunky frames with large lenses are in. Tomorrow it might be different. But in every case, you have glasses because you have a medical problem that needs fixing.

But what about other medical devices? Canes and even artificial legs are occasionally not merely built to work but are designed and crafted to be fashionable. Could exoskeletons, robotic limbs, and cybernetic augmentations reach a point where they are beautiful? Furthermore, could they ever become so prolific as to be fashionable? More and more, the answer looks to be yes.

Source: Discovery Magazine

Tech Links: December 13, 2011

MorpHex is a hexapod robot that can transform into a sphere shape and back, created by Norwegian engineer Kåre Halvorsen. Still under construction… Featuring 25 servos.

Tech pundits and consultants agree; Amazon's Kindle Fire is a huge disaster (New York Times), good for almost nothing (Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper) and a disappointingly poor user experience (Dr. Jakob Nielsen, usability expert). It's the Apple Newton, the Edsel, New Coke and McDonald’s Arch Deluxe in tablet form. By all accounts it should be doomed. So why is it selling so well? And why are user reviews so high?

This month, Python won "Best Programming Language" in the Linux Journal's Reader's Choice Awards 2011. If you're not convinced, Python Facts explains little simple things that make Python great. Python is relatively easy to learn although if you wish you can learn it the hard way (videos). If you already have experience in programming, basically all you need to know is that Python is essentially pseudocode as a programming language. Of course, Python is way more than that. You can dive right into the documentation and browse through the thousands of packages written in Python.

News:
Games were the largest share of Android's first 10 billion downloads. Yes, this is from the department of 'duh', but it's a reminder of the power and size of that market share.


Microsoft can change/remove apps on Windows 8, at least that's the current plan. That should go over well (anyone remember the infamous Kindle glitch?)


Washington, DC, is funding a 100-gigabit network to be made available to universities, businesses, and anyone willing to resell the service

Daily Links: December 13, 2011

 

 

LAN-Party Optimized House

The house has twelve of these fold-out computer stations, six in each of two rooms (ideal for team vs. team games). The actual computers are not next to the monitors, but are all in a rack in a back room. The stations were built by a cabinet maker based on specs I created.

The 12 All-Time Ugliest Christmas Sweaters. And some are still available to buy!

Google Shoot View: Street View as a first-person shooter

Math artist Vi Hart has a triangle party. It sounds way more fun than geometry class.

The Right (and Wrong) Way to Die When You Fall Into Lava: Everyone is wrong about how people die when they fall into lava.

Try one of over 600 courses available through the Open University's Learning Space. Get to know the meaning behind the making of kente cloth of Ghana or learn the mathematical modelling involved in analysing skid marks. Lose yourself in art and design or simply learn a new old language. All you need is a device with a browser and internet access. Bonus: OU on the BBC's Frozen Planet series 

Overheard: Everyone Speaks Text Message

Everyone Speaks Text Message:

Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, is a choice made by 6-year-olds. And what makes a 6-year-old want to learn a language is being able to use it in everyday life. “Language is driven from the ground up,” says Don Thornton, a software developer in Las Vegas who specializes in making video games and mobile apps in Native American languages. “It doesn’t matter if you have a million speakers — if your kids aren’t learning, you’re in big trouble.” Of 6,909 catalogued languages, hundreds are unlikely to be passed on to the next generation.

Source: NYTimes

Tech: Robotic Cook

Owners of household robots may soon be able to issue orders such as "make me a sandwich" or "pop me some popcorn" and a robot will do the rest, as demonstrated by Technical University of Munich's robots James and Rosie in this video above.

"Giving robots the ability to take a complex task and autonomously infer all the intermediate tasks that it can then execute one at a time means that you'll be able to say, 'Make me a sandwich' … and the robot will just go and do it, no questions asked," notes IEEE's Automation blog.

Overheard: Gold Standard

Since 1972 when Nixon went off the gold standard, the world reserve currency has been the US dollar, but what ultimately backs the US dollar? People say nothing, it’s ‘fiat money’ but I don’t think this is true. It’s a credit system based on the circulation of debt. Of course the US has the enormous advantage of being able to write checks that are never actually cashed: US treasury bonds have become the basic reserve currency for the central banks and as Michael Hudson originally pointed out, most of these American treasury bonds are never really cashed in. They’re rolled over year after year to buy new ones, and these holders are taking a loss on them as they pay interest lower than inflation. So why are they doing that? Well, if you look at the size of US deficit it corresponds almost exactly to the real saw military budget. If you look at graphs showing the growth of the US deficit, and the percentage of it held overseas, and the US military spending—basically, you see almost exactly the same curve. So basically, foreign governments and institutional lenders are buying US treasury bonds and paying for this enormous military spending. So, who are the guys doing it? Well during the cold war it was especially West Germany, now, apart from China, the most important are places like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Gulf states. What do these states have in common? They’re all covered in US military bases, or under US military protection. The US is borrowing the money to create these military bases from the very countries that the US military is sitting on top of. In the past, such arrangements were called ‘empires’ and the money sent over was referred to as ‘tribute.’ Now apparently your not allowed to use that language, so it’s called a ‘loan.’ Nonetheless, that link between the military and the core of the financial system remains, it’s the thing we’re not supposed to think about.

- David Graeber in "Interview with David Graeber"

News: Brain drain reverses course, flows away from America

The U.S. has traditionally skimmed the best minds from around the world in pursuit of the American Dream. Indeed, according to polling firm Gallup, which surveyed people in 135 nations around the world, the U.S. was the top desired destination of those who wanted to relocate permanently to another country.

But with unemployment hovering around 9 percent, the use of food stamps at record highs and the Great Recession continuing to punish the budgets of so many families, the American economy is much less of a magnet. To some young entrepreneurs, economic possibilities seem brighter in places like Brazil, Russia, China or Latin America. Indeed, the State Department now estimates that 6.3 million Americans are studying or working abroad, the highest number on record.

In fact, according to a survey by marketing consultants America Wave, the percentage of Americans aged 25 to 34 actively planning to relocate outside the U.S. has quintupled in just two years, from less than 1 percent to 5.1 percent. “Those numbers have shot through the ceiling,” says America Wave founder Bob Adams, who has run nine such surveys over the years. “They’re very surprising, and not something I anticipated. They’re looking for work because of the sluggish economy, and they’ve lost confidence that the U.S. is going anywhere.”

Via MSNBC

News: 8 Out of 10 Software Apps Fail Security Test

Desktop and web applications remain a wasteland of bugs and holes that only a hacker could love, according to a report released Wednesday by a company that conducts independent security audits of code.

In fact, eight out of 10 software applications fail to meet a security assessment, according to a State of Software Security report by Veracode. That’s based on an automated analysis of 9,910 applications submitted to Veracode’s online security testing platform in the last 18 months. The applications are submitted by both developers — in the government and commercial sectors — as well as companies and government agencies wanting an assessment of software they plan to purchase.

Via Wired

Tech Links: December 12, 2011

 
An Oregon judge has ruled that a Montana blogger is not eligible for the legal protections afforded to journalists, letting stand a $2.5 million defamation verdict. At the end of the Ars Technica article there's a link to a Forbes article that contains some more details and the text of an email that didn't help the blogger's case.

Google will now graph! Google Post description. Now... examples! sin(x), exp(x), x^2+2x+1. We're not nearly done...

Infographic: The Anatomy Of A Perfect Website


Mint is a Debian-based Linux distro that is now the fourth most popular Operating System after Windows, Mac and Ubuntu, focusing on usability for those without previous GNU/Linux experience. With Ubuntu declining in popularity since the introduction of the tablet-oriented Unity desktop interface, Mint may be taking its old place. 

MegaUpload is currently being portrayed by the MPAA and RIAA as one of the world’s leading rogue sites. But top music stars including P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg and Kanye West disagree and are giving the site their full support in a brand new song. TorrentFreak caught up with the elusive founder of MegaUpload, Kim Dotcom, who shrugged off “this rogue nonsense” and told us he wants content owners to get paid. “It works like an ad blocker but instead of blocking ads we show ads coming from Megaclick, our ad network,” says Kim. “This way we will generate enough ad revenue to provide free premium services and licensed content so that our users can have it for free.” 

The Personal Computer Is Dead Power is fast shifting from end users and software developers to operating system vendors.

MPAA chairman Chris Dodd compared Google to the getaway driver at a robbery — not stealing, but helping theft happen.

Why Google Is The Most Important Learning Tool Ever Invented

Why Spotify can never be profitable: The secret demands of record labels

News: U.S. Universities Feast on Federal Aid

The public is in a foul mood over increasing college costs and student debt burdens. Talk of a “higher education bubble” is common on the contrarian right, while the Occupy Wall Street crowd is calling for a strike in which in which ex-students refuse to pay off their loans.

This week, President Barack Obama held a summit with a dozen higher-education leaders “to discuss rising college costs and strategies to reduce these costs while improving quality.” The administration plans to introduce some policy proposals in the run-up to the presidential campaign.

Any serious policy reform has to start by considering a heretical idea: Federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable may have encouraged rapidly rising tuitions.

It’s not as crazy as it might sound.

Via Bloomberg

Daily Links: December 12, 2011

Filipino designer creates World’s 1st Biodegradable car

World renowned Filipino product designer Kenneth Cobonpue has created the world’s first and only biodegrable car made out of bamboo and rattan called the Phoenix.

The 25 Funniest Autocorrects of 'Damn You Autocorrect!' to celebrate the site's First Year anniversary.

The 99% Declaration. Anyone who says the protesting portion of the U.S. has no specific goals should read carefully. Everyone should.

Check out MedlinePlus' advice on preparing for winter weather emergencies

“Construction of Language and Identity in LOLspeak“: An actual presentation from an actual academic conference.

Energetic consequences of thermal and nonthermal food processing. Or, as discussed by Discover Magazine, Why Calorie Counts Are Wrong: Cooked Food Provides a Lot More Energy.

The History and Future of Computing an interactive timeline from the New York Times which crowdsources predictions.

Infographic: Earth is Now Home to 7 Billion People

The Light Bulb Conspiracy is a documentary about disposable printers, light bulbs and everything else, investigating the implications of the business model and industrial design philosophy of Planned Obsolescence that drives and shapes our economy.  


WonderHowTo is a great site devoted to do-it-yourself instructional videos. Check out how to build your own electromagnetic railgun weapon, electric shock taser, stun darts for a blowgun, and more.

Overheard: Patents

Patents like this are a logical consequence of the extension of patentable matter to software and business methods but extending patents to software and business methods has created huge legal costs without any increase in innovation.

Most importantly, patents can reduce innovation and are especially likely to do so in fields where innovations build on innovations. In fields of cumulative innovation, previous patents owners become veto players who can threaten to holdup the new innovation unless they are granted a share of the proceeds. In theory, bargaining can result in an efficient outcome. In practice, it means lawsuits, delay, waste and reduced innovation.

-  Tyler Cowen on why "Medical patents must die"

Tech: Twine

Twine : Listen to your world, talk to the Internet from Supermechanical

Twine, “the simplest possible way to get the objects in your life texting, tweeting or emailing.” This 2.5” square, created by a duo of MIT Media Lab graduates, offers wifi connectivity, internal and external sensors, and two AAA batteries that keep it running for two months. John Pavlus has more.

Tech: Flying Robotic Builders

They’re for “building things.”  Certainly not for hunting down the last few rogue survivors of a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  Of course, I’d still be a bit nervous to enter a structure built by these things.  I mean, I realize that a lot of the stuff we use is made by robots anyway, but…I don’t know.  It just weirds me out a little.

Dec. 2 - A team of scientists has demonstrated that a coordinated group of pre-programmed, autonomous robots can do the job of building workers, constructing a six meter high tower without any human intervention. Architects say this new technology paves the way for new methods of engineering buildings of the future. Georgina Cooper reports.

Infographic: Portable Game Revenue

“The days of paying $25, or more, for a cartridge at a retail store may soon end,” says Flurry. Bad news for Nintendo & Sony, but great news for hot mobile games companies like the one I work for, Backflip Studios. Backflip is a small, 30-person, highly profitable company with over 150 million downloads, about 30 million active players per month, and we’re growing like crazy thanks to distribution through Apple and Android devices.

Tech: 10 000-Year Clock

The 10 000-Year Clock

The year is 12011. Two hikers cut through a stretch of cactus-filled desert outside what was once the small town of Van Horn, near the Mexican border, in West Texas. After walking for the better part of a day under a relentless sun, they struggle up a craggy limestone ridge. Finally they come to an opening in the rock, the mouth of what appears to be a long, deep tunnel.

Infographic: Facebook IPO

Who would win big if Facebook goes public? The company is notoriously tight-lipped about who owns what, but here is our educated guess compiled from various news reports and David Kirkpatrick’s book “The Facebook Effect.”

Science: New Laser will tear the fabric of Space

New laser will tear the fabric of space:

Plans are underway in Europe to build a new laser which would be the most powerful in the world. The laser will be 200 times more powerful than the current top lasers, and would be equivalent to the power received by the Earth from the sun focused onto a speck smaller than a tip of a pin.

Contrary to popular belief, a vacuum is not devoid of material but in fact fizzles with tiny mysterious particles that pop in and out of existence, but at speeds so fast that no one has been able to prove they exist.
The Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility would produce a laser so intense that scientists say it would allow them to reveal these particles for the first time by pulling this vacuum “fabric” apart.
They also believe it could even allow them to prove whether extra-dimensions exist.

The £1 billion project is due to be completed by the end of this decade.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk