This is probably the first really tangible benefit of any form of nanotechnology. It won’t be the last. I expect that replacements for most body parts will be able to be fashioned and seeded this way within a decade, and that it will become common practice within twenty years.
So much for the SF/horror scenario of growing clones for spare body parts. 😉
I used to play some computer logic games, and really enjoyed them, but I got good enough at the ones that I liked that they weren’t a challenge anymore, so I quit. I decided a couple weeks ago to try to find something comparable, and the ever-helpful Google provided me with a long list of possibilities. The first one that looked really good was logic-puzzles.org, so I gave it a whirl.
Nice.
The logic part is, of necessity, very similar to the aforementioned games. There are far fewer clues to work with, which makes things more interesting. It took me nearly an hour to solve the first puzzle, because I was trying to figure out the setup and some rules without looking at any hints. The second and third took me about 21 minutes each, the fourth and fifth about twelve. We’ll see how things go from there.
If you’re interested in that sort of thing, give it a try.
While researching a programming problem yesterday, I found a wonderful signature block on a message from someone named Alf P. Steinbach:
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is it such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?
Once I got to the bottom line and figured out what it was, it gave me a geek laugh the likes of which I haven’t had in weeks. 🙂 I know that most businesspeople prefer top-posting, and when communicating with them I’ll often go with it, but as an old-school e-mail user (I started in the late eighties), I find it ridiculously annoying.
Fun bit of trivia: Phineas Taylor Barnum (better known as P. T. Barnum) was born exactly two hundred one years ago today. Just about any American kid who watches any TV probably still knows his name, by way of the touring circus he founded, now known as Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. “The Greatest Show on Earth,” which he named it in some of its early days, is still used in its advertising.
Although he’s best known today for his circus, there was a lot more to him. I never realized just how much until I ran across his Wikipedia page yesterday. If you’ve got the time, give it a read.
I try to keep this blog away from politics, but for issues of sufficient magnitude and importance, I have to bend that rule on occasion.
If you’re American (and maybe even if you’re not), you’ve probably heard by now about the Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which ruled that money was speech, and since corporate persons (i.e. corporations) are people, and freedom of speech is guaranteed to all people by the constitution, corporations must be allowed to contribute any amount of money they wish to political campaigns.
The ruling isn’t necessarily wrong. The Supreme Court’s job is to interpret the law, and the law is clear: corporations are considered people, and all forms of expression (by long and valid precedent) must be considered equivalent to speech for legal purposes. The ruling just said that corporate contributions to political campaigns are a protected form of expression and cannot be limited, which does have internal logic.
But if it’s not wrong, it’s still very wrong-headed. Large corporations are ludicrously powerful compared to essentially any physical person. They can’t be put in jail, and in fact have never been effectively punished in the US for anything. And by definition, the public ones aren’t allowed to have consciences: they must do anything and everything they can get away with to make the most money they can for their shareholders, whether it’s moral or conscionable or not. Now this ruling effectively gives them carte blanche to buy elections. It’s a recipe for a capital-D-Disaster.
I’m not the only one to see this, I’m happy to say. The ruling has galvanized people across the country, and resulted in Move to Amend, an organization dedicated to getting a Constitutional amendment stating that legal fictions like a “corporate person” are not entitled to the Constitutional rights of real people.
It won’t be easy, but it can be done. I urge all American citizens to sign the petition, as I have, and I urge everyone to support Move to Amend in any way that they can. I plan to encourage Stephen Colbert (of the comedy news show “The Colbert Report”) to use his newly-formed Colbert SuperPAC to endorse it as well, to help get the word out — it’s perfectly aligned with its purpose.
If the Citizens United ruling is allowed to stand, we all stand to lose.
(Via BoingBoing)
As promised in yesterday’s post, this article includes a section on backups in Linux. It also has a lot of other useful stuff for Linux-users, especially newer ones, and some of the information there might just tempt Windows users (at least) to want to take Linux for a run. 🙂
I expect most of my readers already have at least a minimal backup system in place (you do, don’t you?), but for anyone else who stumbles onto this blog, here’s a good primer for Windows and Mac systems. (People running Linux, have patience, it’s coming. EDIT, 2011-07-03: it’s here.)
Believe me, if you don’t have a backup system in place, you will regret it.
Wow… three new battery technologies that sound awesome. If they all pan out, rechargeable batteries could charge up to 90% capacity in two minutes, have three times their current battery life (six times for “mobile gadgets”!), and be lighter as well!
Imagine a full-powered laptop that’s lighter and would last several work days on a single charge. Or the most likely alternative, one with the same battery life as today but that’s much smaller and lighter.
These may even open up ways to use batteries that aren’t currently feasible. They’re not Shipstones — yet — but combined with recent solar energy breakthroughs, we may see good, cheap solar energy systems becoming a reality in the near future.
This is a really good time to be a geek. 🙂
I wonder how this plays out in peoples’ politics?
(No I don’t, I know exactly how it plays out. And if you think about it, so do you. But I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader, along with the corollary of what it says about a those who subscribe to a particular political persuasion — and just what they so yearn to do, and are so afraid of.)
I like this idea, at least for learning musical instruments. I almost hope that it doesn’t advance much further for now though, I’d hate to see the result of getting a virus in the controlling computer. 😉