Showing their colors once again, Billy Tauzin and a gaggle of GOP lawmakers exhibit an irrational phobia of the HIV-positive muppet.
Category: Science
Heirs of Toumai.
Archaeologists discover a surprising new ancestor in the Djurab desert.
He Blinded Me With Science.
Mathematics professor Jordan Ellenberg explains why the media is so taken with Stephen Wolfram’s recent tome.
Dig the Mobius Strip.
Oh, shut up already.
Normally, I just stay out of the computer wars, since (a) Mac people tend to be so vehemently evangelical and since (b) – even though I’ve been using ’em since my dad bought a TRS-80 back in the day (on which I used to play the hell out of a game called “Sword of Zedek,” which for some reason I can’t find anything on the web about )- I’ve never been much more than a moderately informed user (which, in blog circles, makes me ridiculously uninformed.) That being said, every time I catch one of these annoying new Apple ads, I become ever deeper entrenched in my fondness for PC’s. “Using my PC was like being stuck in a bad relationship?” Please. Like I want to wait an extra eighteen months for new games to get a Mac port.
While I did have an Apple IIc as a kid (Mmmm…”Old Ironsides,”) I didn’t really use Macs until I was forced to in high school and, to cut to the quick, I thought they were crappity crap. When a PC goes down, even a rudimentary user like myself can try to ascertain the problem in DOS. When a Mac went down…well, you were stuck looking at that stupid icon. It’s a glorified calculator. It’s no doubt true that the Windows OS is and has been a complete facsimile of the Macintosh, but I’m kinda hoping we move past GUI’s eventually. Ok, I’ve probably betrayed my ignorance a few times over in this post already, so I’ll close it up. Suffice to say, those Apple ads irk me to no end.
Schroedinger’s Universe.
Discover interviews physicist John Wheeler about the quantum nature of reality. “Wheeler conjectures we are part of a universe that is a work in progress; we are tiny patches of the universe looking at itself – and building itself. It’s not only the future that is still undetermined but the past as well. And by peering back into time, even all the way back to the Big Bang, our present observations select one out of many possible quantum histories for the universe.” (Via Anil Dash.)
Soldiering On.
A report from the Sixth Annual Webby Awards.
Genius or Hubris?
Scientists line up for and against former boy genius Stephen Wolfram’s paradigm-busting paean to algorithms.
Beam me up, Scotty…
one measly laser beam at a time. But, hey, it’s a start.
What are you doing, Dave?
Researchers come ever closer to teaching common sense to Cyc, the thinking computer. In 1986 Cyc asked whether it was human. That same year it asked whether any other computers were engaged in such a project. Shades of Douglas Adams‘ Deep Thought.