The Anonymity Experiment. Is it possible to hide in plain sight? Privacy-minded people have long warned of a world in which an individual’s every action leaves a trace, in which corporations and governments can peer at will into your life with a few keystrokes on a computer. Now one of the people in charge of information-gathering for the U.S. government says, essentially, that such a world has arrived.
posted on Feb 16, 2008 - View this thread

The first Transhuman Conference On the Law of Transhuman Persons: Whether or not you believe humans are set to evolve into gods, or AI is destined to achieve self-awareness the idea of the Transhuman is a thought provoking concept. Philosophers have debated the nature of the self, of the human for millennia. Is it time to start drafting new laws to govern all possible sentient beings on this planet? or is it all just a science of fiction? a comfortable humanist illusion?
posted on Dec 13, 2005 - View this thread

A more efficient microbe genome. A more efficient sorting algorithm. A more efficient keyboard layout.
posted on Aug 26, 2005 - View this thread

According to the developmental spiral we are heading towards an unfathomable point in time known as singularity. Could the futurists and science fiction writers such as Vernon Vinge be right?
posted on May 6, 2005 - View this thread

Apparently monkeys cannot write Shakespeare.
posted on May 9, 2003 - View this thread

Prof. George W. Hart, of the Computer Science Department at SUNY Stony Brook, has an enviable web presence. His Encyclopedia of Polyhedra alone is worth the visit, his geometric sculptures make the nerd in me weep at their beauty, and his trilobite recipe looks mighty yummy.
posted on Dec 19, 2002 - View this thread

A computer aided simulation builds a spiral galaxy from its beginning. In all, 390,000 particles were placed in an arrangement similar to a newborn galaxy. The end result after three months is an event that is believed to take billions of years to occur. (animation)
posted on Aug 7, 2002 - View this thread

"The smartest scientist on the planet." [NYT reg req] "Conducting experiments on a computer, where he says he has logged 100 million keystrokes in the last 10 years, Mr. Wolfram wrote simple programs that generated odd and intricate patterns to test his ideas about complexity. He argues that natural phenomena can be explored as if they were, in fact, computer programs." Stephen Wolfram's own company (Wolfram Media Inc.) is now publishing his 1,197-page book - "A New Kind Science " - which was kept secret until now. They claim "..he is proposing a paradigm shift. A new twist on everything.." in explaining how the universe operates. Sounds big. Is it really?
posted on May 11, 2002 - View this thread

The iTunes article reminds me of an important lesson in computer work: always mount a scratch monkey.
posted on Nov 6, 2001 - View this thread

Brain Cells Used To Make Working Semiconductor "This is the first direct functional interfacing of a living neuronal network with an electronic semiconductor chip," said co-author Dr. Peter Fromherz of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich, Germany, in an interview with Reuters Health. "It is a further step on our road to combine the elements of brains and computers," he added.
posted on Aug 28, 2001 - View this thread

Future of computing - Light or Molecules?
posted on Jun 23, 2001 - View this thread