I've never been able to solve a Rubik's Cube. It's a personal failing I chalk up to mild ADD, horrible spatial organization skills, and the desire to not get beaten up in middle school. Somehow, none of that gets in the way of my interest in reading a 10-page paper proving that all formations of a Rubik's Cube can be solved in 25 moves or less.
Ah, for the salad days of hiding my nerdery.
Continue reading 'Rubik's Cubes just got a whole lot easier - by one move' >
The last couple weeks have been filled with news on Microsoft. Microsoft attempts to acquire Yahoo! Microsoft invests $3 million in the development of healthcare applications. Microsoft gives away high-end software development tools to college students. Microsoft takes sides in the high-def DVD format war. Microsoft may partner with Netflix.
Microsoft was famously late to the Internet business, and has always lagged behind one online giant or another, whether it be Google, AOL, Yahoo!, take your pick. Now, as many people begin shifting their digital lives from their desktops to their homepages, online applications of the Google Docs variety have the potential to eat away at the supremacy of Office. Now, the European Union has slapped Microsoft with a $1.3 billion fine for noncompliance with a 2004 antitrust ruling.
Is there no end to the wonder that is a carbon nanotube? The things can be used to make really black bulletproof objects and slow, tiny computers!
Those computers are hard to make, though. Nanotubes are, well, small and sometimes hard to work with, resulting in a lot of failure. IBM has a different take, though. Instead of arranging the nanotubes to replace traditional circuits by hand (or, more likely, traditional tools), Big Blue is stringing them together with DNA molecules. Once it's all put together, you slip the DNA out, and--ta dah!--you've got a grid of nanotubes
Continue reading 'IBM builds nanotube chips out of DNA; HAL waves hello to Deep Blue' >
Just a note to say that Internet law scholar John Palfrey and friends have begun a campaign to get Lawrence Lessig to...campaign. For Congress. They want the man behind the alternative copyright system, Creative Commons, and the book/online social movement, Free Culture, to run for a seat, rather than merely criticizing Congressional decisions (which he does quite well—his blog shows him to be a master of the political flame).
Actually, the chances for wiretapping immunity are probably a good deal higher. We mentioned the AT&T wiretapping scandal back in November with a handy-dandy introduction to the ongoing vote over granting telecom companies immunity from lawsuits for their complicity. Now it appears to be less of a scandal, and it seems like that whole voting thing may be winding down as well.
On Tuesday the Senate voted 68-29 to keep a provision in the current spy bill that would grant retroactive immunity to any of the network providers who happily looked the other way or encouraged the NSA to use their services to eavesdrop on American citizens.
For those of you interested in what your candidate thinks about science, you might want to take a gander at how they feel about tech: Obama voted to strike immunity, McCain to preserve it, and Clinton couldn't be bothered to show. Bush is pressing the House to follow suit.
In an attempt to measure how social media affects the music biz (a different take than the constant attempts to just shut down the Interwebs), NYU Stern Professor Vasant Dhar looked at how the number of blog items about an album posted before its release could predict its sales. Looking at 108 albums released in early 2007, he found that it worked out pretty well.
With more than 40 "legitimate" blog posts prior to the album's drop, the artist could expect three times as many sales as the average. If that album was associated with a major label, the artist could expect five times as many sales. So, you know, there go the hopes of tastemakers everywhere looking for the next indie band out of Omaha.
San Francisco is getting to be a pain to fly in and out of, which, sadly, I'll be doing within the week. At the end of January, the local TSA authorities started asking fliers to remove each individual gadget or piece of electronics they happened to be carrying. After some of the major blogs picked the story up, the TSA investigated and then issued an apology (sort of, while still managing to be both head-patting and self-congralatory) on its own blog yesterday.
Today the Washington Post reports that things are even worse: "A few months earlier in the same airport, a tech engineer returning from a business trip to London objected when a federal agent asked him to type his password into his laptop computer. "This laptop doesn't belong to me," he remembers protesting. "It belongs to my company." Eventually, he agreed to log on and stood by as the officer copied the Web sites he had visited, said the engineer, a U.S. citizen who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of calling attention to himself."
Other passengers have had their laptops seized and unreturned.
My girlfriend plays video games--it's awesome. She likes to joke that somewhere inside of her is trapped the mind of a 16-year-old boy, just trying to express himself (video games, jamming on the drums, wearing awesome pageboy hats, gender studies)--it can be weird. Guess what, honey? Things just got more awkward.
A Stanford study has shown that video games activate the reward zone in men's brains more intensely than in women's, which I suppose means I'm more likely to get cancer, but learn a lot more about physics. So... it's a wash?
Continue reading 'It's official: Guys like video games (and territory) more than girls' >
File this under "Very big news in technology that's just not as exciting as gadget-laden power suits."
Early this morning Microsoft made an offer of $44.6 billion in stock and cash to acquire Yahoo! That's a 62% premium over where Yahoo's stock closed last night. That's a nice way of saying, "Hi!" Less nice is Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's open letter that went out across the newswire: " A year has gone by, and [your] competitive situation has not improved." Ouch.
Continue reading 'Microsoft issues $44.6 billion "Screw You!" to Google' >
Stanford engineers have produced a silicon chip built on carbon nanotube wires that conduct digital information at the speed of commercial computers.
"This is the first time anyone has been able to show digital signals going through nanotubes at 1 gigahertz [a billion times a second]," Stanford professor of electrical engineering H.-S. Philip Wong said in a statement "There had been a lot of expectations that nanotubes could do this, but no experimental proof so far."
I know, I know, my old, decrepit work computer is already chugging along at 3.2Ghz and I still can't stand it. So what's the big deal?
Well, for starters, they're really, really black.
Continue reading 'Nanotube wires run at speed of slowish, everyday computers' >
Anybody who's played through the mind-bendingly brilliant, first-person puzzle game Portal came to a final confrontation with the devious AI computer who taunted you throughout your tasks, GlaDOS. If you haven't played, stop whatever you are doing and buy it, steal it or otherwise get your hands on it.
OK, now that that's out of the way: The Japanese (of-freaking-course) have invented a pollen-monitoring robot (pictured left) that bears a striking resemblance to your final enemy in the game. 200 of these ball-headed 'Pollen Robots' will hang outside volunteers' homes in Tokyo, monitoring pollen levels and sending the data back to headquarters of the Weathernews, Inc., where an online pollen map can notify hay fever sufferers of the most affected areas in town. Creepiest of all, a pair of eyes will glow white, blue, green, red or purple to indicate the level of Japanese cedar and cypress pollen in the air.
Earlier this month, President Bush signed the classified National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 ordering the NSA to monitor the computers and networks of all federal agencies. While the directive makes it sound like the NSA is simply out to check up on its federal neighbors, the goal is significantly less creepy than the directive sounds--that's the way it usually works, though. Government computers have experienced a rise in attacks over the last year and a half with officials laying blame on Chinese websites for large attacks that targeted nuclear labs and defense contractors.
Of course, if your city's government employees are looking at porn 95-100 times per day, there's bound to be some security issues somewhere inside the Beltway.
Continue reading 'NSA to monitor the rest of the government; creepiness factor rises by 10' >
Criminal hackers have been taking over the utilities systems of various cities and then demanding money from them to turn the power back on.
"We have information, from multiple regions outside the United States, of cyber intrusions into utilities, followed by extortion demands," US Central Intelligence Agency senior analyst Tom Donahue told a group of international security experts from the utility industry last week.
No wonder my utility bills are all skyrocketing. It couldn't possibly be my freakishly cold Texas winter.
Continue reading 'Cold this winter? Maybe the hackers are stealing your power.' >
It's no secret that I've always wanted Terminator eyes — you know, the kind where a head-up display pops into your field of vision, updating you about your surroundings via head-up display and instructing you how to say things like a normal human, and not a killing machine.
My dream is one step closer to reality, now that engineers at the University of Washington have built flexible, biologically safe contact lenses that incorporate lights and circuits. These prototypes contain electrical circuits as well as red-light emitting diodes for the display; when tested on rabbits for 20 minutes, the animals showed no adverse effects, except a sudden desire to search for and eliminate John Connor.
A full-fledged display isn't available yet, but basic displays with a few pixels of info could be readied for applications in the very near future.
I got star legal-scholar-type-person Cass Sunstein's new book, Republic.com 2.0 as a stocking stuffer this Christmas. Sunstein's a leading advocate of the idea of "cyberbalkanization" —the notion that the Internet may one day do in democracy. He suggests the presence of an exploding number of interest-based online communities, personalized search, personalized news, Amazon-style book recommendations, and such, which seem to offer something for everyone, will ultimately encourage Internet users to wall themselves into ever-smaller interest-based groups.
You've probably heard of this idea. It's the notion that the more personalized our information universe gets, the less likely we are to encounter points of view unlike our own, the more comfortable we'll get that we're right in everything we think, and the more fragmented and polarized our society will become. It's sort of the antidote to early Utopian visions of the Internet that painted it as the future home of perfect democracy—a place where class divisions, gender and racial stereotyping, and all other forms of prejudice would magically disappear. The real Net isn't so simple, of course, but neither does it seem to mesh so well with Sunstein's version of events. He laments the decline in influence of the mass media, saying that un-personalized sources of information are ultimately what holds us together as a democratic society, exposing Democrats to Republican arguments, cat-lovers to televised dog shows, and football fans to baseball championships.
Continue reading 'Something for everyone? A review of Republic.com 2.0' >
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