think or thwim

A trailer for a documentary about Ray Kurzweil.

This month we’ve seen:

• A robot doing research on yeast enzyme genetics making observations, forming theories, devising experiments to test its theories, and successfully carrying out its experiments.
• A computer program deriving fundamental laws of physics from a dataset of pendulum measurements, and more importantly, not deriving any equations at all when it was tested with random data.
• The first circuit board created by a rapid prototyping machine to reproduce one of it’s own circuit boards.

I’m just sayin…

transcendentman.com

Avoid Tone Matrix if you need to be productive.

Update: The original seems to be down. Try this one: Hobnox

Remember how, in 3rd grade, we used to say “if you look up ’stupid’ in the dictionary, and there will be a picture of you”? Now that we have the internet, we can google ’stupid’ and find out who the collective consciousness has settled on to define the word. Mercifully, the first picture that comes up is not a real person:

Scanning down the list, the first portrait of a real person is this guy:

Hardly a surprise.

I told the missus about my discovery and asked her what picture she thought would define the word ‘awesome’. She suggested the grand canyon or the universe. While not the most creative ideas, solid reasoning indeed. However, they do not approach the awesome that I found:

My son’s guess was ‘a picture of Eeyore?’ Not a bad, but I think Tigger is slightly more awesome than Eeyore.

Breathingearth.net is a nice visualization of where people are coming in and out of the world. It also shows CO2 emissions.

It’s on the subgenious calendar

The Digg headline for this is “one of the best science talks you will ever see.” I agree.

Ball Droppings is a simple, mildly addictive line rider like game.

:: Kottke

If you’re interested in green building and/or energy efficiency you might want to sneak a look at my super-secret other project: thenauhaus.com. The rest of the site isn’t ready yet, but I believe the blog to be ready for human consumption. You are authorized to look at it.