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This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future (The Edge Annual Question... - 3 views

www.edge.org/q09_index.html edge future science technology
shared by Luís F. Simões on 28 Nov 10 - Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING? "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"
  • That's the question John Brockman, editor of the Web site edge.org, posed to about 160 cutting-edge minds in his 11th annual Edge Question. As in years past, they responded with bold, often thrilling, sometimes chilling, answers.
  • Luís F. Simões on 28 Nov 10
     
    And here's the same thing, but in dead-trees format: http://www.amazon.com/This-Will-Change-Everything-Future/dp/0061899674 Anyone else thinks that the ACT should buy us all a copy as a Christmas present? :)
  • LeopoldS on 29 Nov 10
     
    you are the ACT!!!
14More

STLport: An Interview with A. Stepanov - 2 views

www.stlport.org/...StepanovUSA.html computer science
shared by Francesco Biscani on 23 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Generic programming is a programming method that is based in finding the most abstract representations of efficient algorithms.
  • I spent several months programming in Java.
  • for the first time in my life programming in a new language did not bring me new insights
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • it has no intellectual value whatsoever
  • Java is clearly an example of a money oriented programming (MOP).
  • Francesco Biscani on 23 Mar 10
     
    One of the authors of the STL (C++'s Standard Template Library) explains generic programming and slams Java.
  • ...6 more comments...
  • Ma Ru on 24 Mar 10
     
    "Java is clearly an example of a money oriented programming (MOP)." Exactly. And for the industry it's the money that matters. Whatever mathematicians think about it.
  • Joris _ on 24 Mar 10
     
    It is actually a good thing that it is "MOP" (even though I do not agree with this term): that is what makes it inter-operable, light and easy to learn. There is no point in writing fancy codes, if it does not bring anything to the end-user, but only for geeks to discuss incomprehensible things in forums. Anyway, I am pretty sure we can find a Java guy slamming C++ ;)
  • Francesco Biscani on 24 Mar 10
     
    Personally, I never understood what the point of Java is, given that: 1) I do not know of any developer (maybe Marek?) that uses it for intellectual pleasure/curiosity/fun whatever, given the possibility of choice - this to me speaks loudly on the objective qualities of the language more than any industrial-corporate marketing bullshit (for the record, I argue that Python is more interoperable, lighter and easier to learn than Java - which is why, e.g., Google is using it heavily); 2) I have used a software developed in Java maybe a total of 5 times on any computer/laptop I owned over 15 years. I cannot name of one single Java project that I find necessary or even useful; for my usage of computers, Java could disappear overnight without even noticing. Then of course one can argue as much as one wants about the "industry choosing Java", to which I would counterargue with examples of industry doing stupid things and making absurd choices. But I suppose it would be a kind of pointless discussion, so I'll just stop here :)
  • Joris _ on 24 Mar 10
     
    "At Google, python is one of the 3 "official languages" alongside with C++ and Java". Java runs everywhere (the byte code itself) that is I think the only reason it became famous. Python, I guess, is more heavy if it were to run on your web browser! I think every language has its pros and cons, but I agree Java is not the answer to everything... Java is used in MATLAB, some web applications, mobile phones apps, ... I would be a bit in trouble if it were to disappear today :(
  • Dario Izzo on 24 Mar 10
     
    I personally do not believe in interoperability :)
  • Ma Ru on 24 Mar 10
     
    Well, I bet you'd notice an overnight disappearance of java, because half of the internet would vanish... J2EE technologies are just omnipresent there... I'd rather not even *think* about developing a web application/webservice/web-whatever in standard C++... is it actually possible?? Perhaps with some weird Microsoft solutions... I bet your bank online services are written in Java. Certainly not in PHP+MySQL :) Industry has chosen Java not because of industrial-corporate marketing bullshit, but because of economics... it enables you develop robustly, reliably, error-prone, modular, well integrated etc... software. And the costs? Well, using java technologies you can set-up enterprise-quality web application servers, get a fully featured development environment (which is better than ANY C/C++/whatever development environment I've EVER seen) at the cost of exactly 0 (zero!) USD/GBP/EUR... Since many years now, the central issue in software development is not implementing algorithms, it's building applications. And that's where Java outperforms many other technologies. The final remark, because I may be mistakenly taken for an apostle of Java or something... I love the idea of generic programming, C++ is my favourite programming language (and I used to read Stroustroup before sleep), at leisure time I write programs in Python... But if I were to start a software development company, then, apart from some very niche applications like computer games, it most probably would use Java as main technology.
  • Francesco Biscani on 24 Mar 10
     
    "I'd rather not even *think* about developing a web application/webservice/web-whatever in standard C++... is it actually possible?? Perhaps with some weird Microsoft solutions... I bet your bank online services are written in Java. Certainly not in PHP+MySQL :)" Doing in C++ would be awesomely crazy, I agree :) But as I see it there are lots of huge websites that operate on PHP, see for instance Facebook. For the banks and the enterprise market, as a general rule I tend to take with a grain of salt whatever spin comes out from them; in the end behind every corporate IT decision there is a little smurf just trying to survive and have the back covered :) As they used to say in the old times, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". "Industry has chosen Java not because of industrial-corporate marketing bullshit, but because of economics... it enables you develop robustly, reliably, error-prone, modular, well integrated etc... software. And the costs? Well, using java technologies you can set-up enterprise-quality web application servers, get a fully featured development environment (which is better than ANY C/C++/whatever development environment I've EVER seen) at the cost of exactly 0 (zero!) USD/GBP/EUR... Since many years now, the central issue in software development is not implementing algorithms, it's building applications. And that's where Java outperforms many other technologies." Apart from the IDE considerations (on which I cannot comment, since I'm not a IDE user myself), I do not see how Java beats the competition in this regard (again, Python and the huge software ecosystem surrounding it). My impression is that Java's success is mostly due to Sun pushing it like there is no tomorrow and bundling it with their hardware business.
  • Joris _ on 24 Mar 10
     
    OK, I think there is a bit of everything, wrong and right, but you have to acknowledge that Python is not always the simplest. For info, Facebook uses Java (if you upload picture for instance), and PHP is very limited. So definitely, in company, engineers like you and me select the language, it is not a marketing or political thing. And in the case of fb, they come up with the conclusion that PHP, and Java don't do everything but complement each other. As you say Python as many things around, but it might be too much for simple applications. Otherwise, I would seriously be interested by a study of how to implement a Python-like system on-board spacecrafts and what are the advantages over mixing C, Ada and Java.
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Exotic matter : Insight : Nature - 5 views

www.nature.com/...index.html nan phy
shared by jmlloren on 03 Aug 10 - Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • jmlloren on 03 Aug 10
     
    Trends in materials and condensed matter. Check out the topological insulators. amazing field.
  • ...12 more comments...
  • Luzi Bergamin on 03 Aug 10
     
    Aparently very interesting, will it survive the short hype? Relevant work describing mirror charges of topological insulators and the classical boundary conditions were done by Ismo and Ari. But the two communities don't know each other and so they are never cited. Also a way to produce new things...
  • jmlloren on 04 Aug 10
     
    Thanks for noticing! Indeed, I had no idea that Ari (don't know Ismo) was involved in the field. Was it before Kane's proposal or more recently? What I mostly like is that semiconductors are good candidates for 3D TI, however I got lost in the quantum field jargon. Yesterday, I got a headache trying to follow the Majorana fermions, the merons, skyrnions, axions, and so on. Luzi, are all these things familiar to you?
  • Luzi Bergamin on 04 Aug 10
     
    Ismo Lindell described in the early 90's the mirror charge of what is now called topological insulator. He says that similar results were obtained already at the beginning of the 20th century... Ismo Lindell and Ari Sihvola in the recent years discussed engineering aspects of PEMCs (perfect electro-megnetic conductors,) which are more or less classical analogues of topological insulators. Fundamental aspects of PEMCs are well knwon in high-energy physics for a long time, recent works are mainly due to Friedrich Hehl and Yuri Obukhov. All these works are purely classical, so there is no charge quantisation, no considerations of electron spin etc. About Majorana fermions: yes, I spent several years of research on that topic. Axions: a topological state, of course, trivial :-) Also merons and skyrnions are topological states, but I'm less familiar with them.
  • LeopoldS on 04 Aug 10
     
    "Non-Abelian systems1, 2 contain composite particles that are neither fermions nor bosons and have a quantum statistics that is far richer than that offered by the fermion-boson dichotomy. The presence of such quasiparticles manifests itself in two remarkable ways. First, it leads to a degeneracy of the ground state that is not based on simple symmetry considerations and is robust against perturbations and interactions with the environment. Second, an interchange of two quasiparticles does not merely multiply the wavefunction by a sign, as is the case for fermions and bosons. Rather, it takes the system from one ground state to another. If a series of interchanges is made, the final state of the system will depend on the order in which these interchanges are being carried out, in sharp contrast to what happens when similar operations are performed on identical fermions or bosons." wow, this paper by Stern reads really weired ... any of you ever looked into this?
  • jmlloren on 04 Aug 10
     
    C'mon Leopold, it's as trivial as the topological states, AKA axions! Regarding the question, not me!
  • LeopoldS on 04 Aug 10
     
    just looked up the wikipedia entry on axions .... at least they have some creativity in names giving: "In supersymmetric theories the axion has both a scalar and a fermionic superpartner. The fermionic superpartner of the axion is called the axino, the scalar superpartner is called the saxion. In some models, the saxion is the dilaton. They are all bundled up in a chiral superfield. The axino has been predicted to be the lightest supersymmetric particle in such a model.[24] In part due to this property, it is considered a candidate for the composition of dark matter.[25]"
  • jmlloren on 04 Aug 10
     
    Thank's Leopold. Sorry Luzi for being ironic concerning the triviality of the axions. Now, Leo confirmed me that indeed is a trivial matter. I have problems with models where EVERYTHING is involved.
  • Luzi Bergamin on 04 Aug 10
     
    Well, that's the theory of everything, isn't it?? Seriously: I don't think that theoretically there is a lot of new stuff here. Topological aspects of (non-Abelian) theories became extremely popular in the context of string theory. The reason is very simple: topological theories are much simpler than "normal" and since string theory anyway is far too complicated to be solved, people just consider purely topological theories, then claiming that this has something to do with the real world, which of course is plainly wrong. So what I think is new about these topological insulators are the claims that one can actually fabricate a material which more or less accurately mimics a topological theory and that these materials are of practical use. Still, they are a little bit the poor man's version of the topological theories fundamental physicists like to look at since electrdynamics is an Abelian theory.
  • jmlloren on 04 Aug 10
     
    I have the feeling, not the knowledge, that you are right. However, I think that the implications of this light quantum field effects are great. The fact of being able to sustain two currents polarized in spin is a technological breakthrough.
  • LeopoldS on 04 Aug 10
     
    not sure how much I can contribute to your apparently educated debate here but if I remember well from my work for the master, these non-Abelian theories were all but "simple" as Luzi puts it ... and from a different perspective: to me the whole thing of being able to describe such non-Abelian systems nicely indicates that they should in one way or another also have some appearance in Nature (would be very surprised if not) - though this is of course no argument that makes string theory any better or closer to what Luzi called reality ....
  • Luzi Bergamin on 04 Aug 10
     
    Well, electrodynamics remains an Abelian theory. From the theoretical point of view this is less interesting than non-Abelian ones, since in 4D the fibre bundle of a U(1) theory is trivial (great buzz words, eh!) But in topological insulators the point of view is slightly different since one always has the insulator (topological theory), its surrounding (propagating theory) and most importantly the interface between the two. This is a new situation that people from field and string theory were not really interested in.
  • Dario Izzo on 04 Aug 10
     
    guys... how would you explain this to your gran mothers?
  • jmlloren on 05 Aug 10
  • LeopoldS on 07 Aug 10
     
    *you* tried *your* best .... ??
1More

Google - Moscow-Vladivostok: virtual journey on Google Maps - 1 views

www.google.ru/...en.html Google trans-siberian journey Russia railway maps
shared by nikolas smyrlakis on 18 Feb 10 - Cached
  • nikolas smyrlakis on 18 Feb 10
     
    the whole trans-siberian journey recorded from a camera, a bit too long to watch everything nevertheless
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Espra and Plexnet - 0 views

www.24weeks.com/...24_concepts.pdf web2.0
shared by ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09 - Cached
  • ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09
     
    "weapons for mass construction" - they want to solve everything with a new type of internet. including "swarm awareness" and "hive intelligence"
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Tikitag promises to bring RFID tags to everything - Engadget - 0 views

www.engadget.com/...-bring-rfid-tags-to-everything rfid INF NAN wireless
shared by ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09 - Cached
  • ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09
     
    we need to get one of these packages as soon as they are out ... putting them on our cups? LS;
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cool site - 0 views

posterous.com sharing blog
shared by nikolas smyrlakis on 04 May 09 - Cached
  • nikolas smyrlakis on 04 May 09
     
    no registration, you just send an email to post@posterous.com and automatically creates a blog with your link, check my test one e.g. http://nikolis1.posterous.com/ Read more: "Posterous - The place to post everything. Just email us. Dead simple blog by email." - http://posterous.com/#ixzz0EYUFIaWX&A
  • Dario Izzo on 11 May 09
     
    bullshit
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Everything you always wanted to know about Google... - 0 views

www.techcrunch.com/...ys-wanted-to-know-about-google internet economics google strategy business research
shared by ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09 - Cached
  • ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09
     
    Actually quite interesting and in-depth
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Dumb eco-questions you were afraid to ask - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...ns-you-were-afraid-to-ask.html ecology recycling green environment
shared by ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09 - Cached
  • ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09
     
    Everything you wanted to know about se... um... ecology. Very interesting, myth-busting article.
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Bio-Mimetic Approaches in Management Science, Book - Barnes & Noble - 1 views

search.barnesandnoble.com/...9780792349938 bio mimetic CMS
shared by nikolas smyrlakis on 02 Dec 09 - Cached
  • nikolas smyrlakis on 02 Dec 09
     
    Oh yes somebody seems to have found a link between CMS and Biomimetics. Everything is possible now, even Fundamental physics !
  • Luzi Bergamin on 02 Dec 09
     
    Neural networks = biomimetics. That's the conclusion from the TOC. It seems that biomimetics becomes the worse usurper than string theory.
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Everything You Wanted to Know about Space Tourism but Were Afraid to Ask | Space Safety... - 3 views

www.spacesafetymagazine.com/...wanted-space-tourism-afraid space
shared by Marcus Maertens on 04 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Marcus Maertens on 04 Feb 13
     
    "chances are that if 700 passengers are flown annually, up to 10 of them might not survive the flight in the first years of the operations." most remarkable also the question who is to blame if a dead and burned space tourist corps comes crashing down from the sky into your car.
  • ...3 more comments...
  • dejanpetkow on 07 Feb 13
     
    How sure is the information that a human body would not completely burn / ablate during atmospheric re-entry? I am not aware of any material ground tests in a plasma wind tunnel confirming that human tissue would survive re-entry from LEO.
  • Marcus Maertens on 07 Feb 13
     
    Since a steak would not even be cooked by dropping it from very high altitudes (http://what-if.xkcd.com/28/) I would doubt that a space tourists body would desintegrate by atmospheric re-entry.
  • dejanpetkow on 07 Feb 13
     
    Funny link, however, some things are not clear enough: 1. Ablation rate is unknown 2. What are the entry conditions? The link suggests that the steak is just dropped (no initial velocity). 3. What about the ballistic coefficient? 4. How would the entry body orientation? It would be a quite non-steady state configuration I guess with heavy accelerations. 5. How would vacuum exposure impact on the water in the body/steak and what would be the consequence for ablation behaviour? 6. Does surface chemistry play a role (not ablation, but catalysis)? My conclusion: the example with the steak is a funny and not so bad exercise, not more.
  • LeopoldS on 09 Feb 13
     
    This calls for some we serious simulations by the Petkow code it seems to me ...
  • dejanpetkow on 09 Feb 13
     
    I still would need some serious input data...
3More

The Emerging Revolution in Game Theory - Technology Review - 2 views

www.technologyreview.com/...ging-revolution-in-game-theory game theory evolution cooperation
shared by Luís F. Simões on 21 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • The world of game theory is currently on fire. In May, Freeman Dyson at Princeton University and William Press at the University of Texas announced that they had discovered a previously unknown strategy for the game of prisoner's dilemma which guarantees one player a better outcome than the other. That's a monumental surprise. Theorists have studied Prisoner's Dilemma for decades, using it as a model for the emergence of co-operation in nature. This work has had a profound impact on disciplines such as economics, evolutionary biology and, of course, game theory itself. The new result will have impact in all these areas and more.
  • Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1208.2666: Winning isn't everything: Evolutionary stability of Zero Determinant strategies
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Artificial Braneworlds Made to Collide In Lab - Technology Review - 4 views

www.technologyreview.com/...27537 metamaterials cosmology PHY
shared by santecarloni on 31 Jan 12 - No Cached
pacome delva liked it
  • santecarloni on 31 Jan 12
     
    Physicists have simulated two universes colliding inside a metamaterial--  Now, this is cool (if it is true...)
  • ...1 more comment...
  • LeopoldS on 01 Feb 12
     
    we... the article is a bit overblown in my view ... except maybe the last paragraphs: "The collision between universe's is a variation on this theme. "The "colliding universe" scenario can be realized as a simple extension of our earlier experiments simulating the spacetime geometry in the vicinity of big bang," he says. He simulates an expanding universe using concetric rings of gold separated by a dielectric. "When the two concentric ring ("universe") patterns touch each other ("collide"), a Minkowski domain wall is created, in which the metallic stripes touch each other at a small angle," he says. Being able to recreate these exotic events in the lab is certainly interesting but it is beginning to lose its novelty. The problem is that this work is not telling us anything we didn't know--the universe behaves the same way inside a metamaterial as it does outside. What Smolyaninov needs is a way of using his exotic materials to do something interesting. In other words, he needs a killer app. Any ideas? "
  • Luzi Bergamin on 05 Feb 12
     
    Hm, they use more or less everything I don't especially like. They are nonmagnetic, so the relation materialGR is already rather weak. Usually, experimentalists prefer nonmagnetic media, since they are cheaper and broadband. At least the broadband is no argument here, since the frequency defines the "mass", which I find a rather strange point of view. And finally, they use strong anisotropy as a model of "time", which is rather problematic. Of course, the spatial direction with eps<0 appears in the wave equation with the same sign as time. But this does not mean that it behaves like time. But to teach material physicists that time is more than just a different sign in the wave equation seems to be as hopeless as to teach them that a black hole is more than something that absorbs all light... SIGHHH
  • LeopoldS on 10 Feb 12
     
    Luzi I miss you ...
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How Long until We Have the Superhuman Exoskeletons from Elysium ?: Scientific American - 3 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm technology fun science
shared by Wiktor Piotrowski on 07 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 08 Aug 13
     
    Interesting to see that almost everything in sci-fi that looks pretty cool requires a power source that has not been invented yet. Imagine what would be possible if you would have a table top high power source available.
2More

Worlds smallest autopilot (yet) - 1 views

diydrones.com/...worlds-smallest-autopilot-yet technology science
shared by Guido de Croon on 28 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Guido de Croon on 28 Aug 13
     
    The most tiny autopilot in the world was introduced yesterday by the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands. Named Lisa/s, she comes in at the scales with just a mere 1.9 grams, the 2*2 cm board has everything that a multirotor needs. Among the sensors are a 3 axle gyroscope, compass, barometer and a gps module.
  • johannessimon81 on 29 Aug 13
     
    Also hardware and software are open source!
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NASA Brings Earth Science 'Big Data' to the Cloud with Amazon Web Services | NASA - 3 views

www.nasa.gov/...cloud-with-amazon-web-services big data
shared by Dario Izzo on 12 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Dario Izzo on 12 Nov 13
     
    NASA answer to the big data hype
  • Athanasia Nikolaou on 13 Nov 13
     
    "The service encompasses selected NASA satellite and global change data sets -- including temperature, precipitation, and forest cover -- and data processing tools from the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX)" Very good marketing move for just three types of selected data (MODIS, Landsat products) plus four model runs (past/projection) for the the four greenhouse gas emissions scenarios of the IPCC. It looks as if they are making data available to adress a targeted question (crowdsourcing of science, as Paul mentioned last time, this time climate evolution), not at all the "free scrolling of the user around the database" to pick up what he thinks useful, mode. There is already more rich libraries out there when it comes to climate (http://icdc.zmaw.de/) Maybe simpler approach is the way to go: make available the big data sets categorized by study topic (climate evolution, solar system science, galaxies etc.) and not by instrument or mission, which is more technical, so that the amateur user can identify his point of interest easily.
  • Thijs Versloot on 13 Nov 13
     
    They are taking a good leap forward with it, but it definitely requires a lot of post processing of the data. Actually it seems they downsample everything to workable chunks. But I guess the power is really in the availability of the data in combination with Amazon's cloud computing platform. Who knows what will come out of it if hundreds of people start interacting with it.
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#Wired: When We Lose #Antibiotics, Here's Everything Else We'll Lose Too - 2 views

www.wired.com/...end-abx bio health
shared by johannessimon81 on 21 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • johannessimon81 on 21 Nov 13
     
    This is seriously scary. Basically the only thing that hospitals could still help you with are broken arms and alcohol poisoning... :-\
  • Thijs Versloot on 21 Nov 13
     
    And the scary part is antibiotics use for human medicine is dwarfed by antibiotics use in livestock, at least in most countries I think.
1More

Hydrocoating - water transfer painting - 1 views

sploid.gizmodo.com/ic-hydrocoating-wat-1476116127 technology
shared by Thijs Versloot on 04 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 04 Dec 13
     
    Never knew they could paint this way
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Graphene #nantennas for power transfer and communication between tiny devices - 0 views

electroiq.com/...able-networks-of-tiny-machines graphene technology
shared by Thijs Versloot on 16 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 16 Dec 13
     
    Known technically as a surface plasmon polariton (SPP) wave, the effect will allow the nano-antennas to operate at the low end of the terahertz frequency range, between 0.1 and 10 terahertz - instead of at 150 terahertz With this antenna, we can cut the frequency by two orders of magnitude and cut the power needs by four orders of magnitude," said Jornet. "Using this antenna, we believe the energy-harvesting techniques developed by Dr. Wang would give us enough power to create a communications link between nanomachines." As always, graphene seems to be the answer to anything, but steady progress is being made although one needs to find out first an easy method of generating high quality graphene layers (btw that is also one of the reasons to do the supercapacitor study...)
  • Isabelle Dicaire on 17 Dec 13
     
    Well plasmonics is also the solution to everything it seems...
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