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Four Lessons on JavaScript

Inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers

Illuminating article about corporations trying to exploit "open source" and not getting what they want.

I like the red had definition: "To be the catalyst in communities of customers, contributors, and partners creating better technology the open source way."

yeah, it is the same with crowdsourcing in general, when some company "managers" see how much cheaper they could do it but don't understand where it comes from...

must view video from Nina ...

Did you know about this Weather Modification Office? Promising or dodgy?

Yes. In China it happens apparently quite often that weather is regionally modified, e.g. in order to have good weather conditions during certain events (like olympics in Beijing). But also in other countries weather modification is applied, for reasons of agriculture, pollution, skiing, etc. Obviously, one wonders on the environmental impact of such an artificial cloud feeding process with silver iodide. I just googled, stumbling upon this report http://www.weathermodification.org/AGI_toxicity.pdf which published the result: no environmentally harmful effects...

and w.r.t. ur question: I mean different weather conditions which we experience locally (like droughts or other extreme weather events) are (often) due to large-scale/global climatic changes. Hence, cloud seeding just describes a local, short-term mitigation of these events. However, there is a geoengineering proposal (so climate modification) which also suggests to seed clouds above the sea (i.e. increase cloud coverage, e.g. by using seaspray as cloud condesation nuclei), thereby increasing the planetary albedo (Earth reflectance) and reducing the energy reaching the Earth surface. If this idea is promising or not, I couldn't judge upon, but for sure it is worthwhile to take a closer look at.

"The Italian magazine WIRED asked us to draw a map based on the scenarios developed by the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto to help the reader in the net of ideas and hypothesis built by 7000 influencers from all over the world." Think Leo will like...

what to think about that? spoiling important ressources, smart idea?, and is it really cheap?

Chris Moore is a good guy and one very open minded to new ideas and concepts at NASA; the fact that this was picked up by fox news must be that they could relay this to "gas stations" :-)

In a surprise announcement earlier today (July 13), the European Southern Observatory said that monster black holes - those giants of millions or billions of solar masses, thought to lurk at the hearts of most galaxies - have a mechanism to become active other than galaxy collisions.

"A new study combining data from ESO's Very Large Telescope and ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory has turned up a surprise. Most of the huge black holes in the centers of galaxies in the past 11 billion years were not turned on by mergers between galaxies, as had been previously thought." and "The process that activates a sleeping black hole - turning its galaxy from quiet to active - has been a mystery in astronomy. What triggers the violent outbursts at a galaxy's center, which then becomes an active galactic nucleus? Up to now, many astronomers thought that most of these active nuclei were turned on when two galaxies merged, or when they passed close to each other and the disrupted material became fuel for the central black hole. Results of the new study indicate this idea may be wrong for many active galaxies." very interesting indeed

old idea with some new twists

Good to solve the Landing problem!!!! No skew due to perspective and gimballed by definition

Very very nice idea! Unfortunately samples show they still have quite some work to do on the image processing side... which is interesting because there are very good open-source solutions for stitching.

the only downside is that you have to launch it before it can run... :)

Hmm.. but how would you make it such that it can stand up? Maybe launch it somehow forward?

I can imagine a system with 2 retractable support legs to stand it up and raise it a bit above the floor. Then make it run and retract the legs abruptly.

This could become quite relevant in future control systems if the setup can be made simple to keep alive and stable. I was doing some follow-up on a story about people controlling aircraft with their brainwaves (through EEG) when I ran into this really cool story. The idea of growing the neurons in patterns is incidentally very similar to the Physarium slime-mold stuff that Dario and me were curious about a little while ago.

I think we already had a discussion on this during a wednesday meeting :P

Oh, I thought that was on the little robot that was controlled by rat neurons and bumped into EVERYTHING. The interesting thing here is that they add a surface patterning (with some kind of nutrient) to control the growth of cells. (Maybe that is not new either, though.)

In essence, the idea involves building a skeleton structure, wrapping it with elastic materials and then start filling it with concrete. A technique first tried in the 60's but now evaluated again with renewed interest as low-cost option for housing.

sort of reminds me of this thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb1pdvvoVoQ

A personal interest of mine that I want to explore a bit more in the future. I just bought a ZigBee electricity monitor and I am wondering whether from the signal of the mains one could detect (reliably) the oven turning on, lights, etc. Probably requires Neural Network training. The idea would be to make a simple device which basically saves you money by telling you how much electricity you are wasting. Then again, its probably already done by Google...

Randomly I found this: http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/consumer-electronics/gadgets/curb-startup-home-electricity-tracking Isn't it a similar kind of stuff Thijs?

haha, yep, that's it... but we can do better than that right! :)

Typically, we send rovers to our planetary neighbors one at a time -- but what if we sent a small team of smaller, less impressive robots instead? That's the idea NASA is exploring at Kennedy Space Center with Swarmies: a quartet of four autonomous robots designed to work together to complete a single mission.

Scientists have discovered how algae that survive in very low levels of light are able to switch on and off a weird quantum phenomenon that occurs during photosynthesis. The function in the algae of this quantum effect, known as coherence, remains a mystery, but it is thought it could help them harvest energy from the sun much more efficiently. Working out its role in a living organism could lead to advances such as better organic solar cells.

very very nice! we tried already a few years back to find an angle to see how we could study quantum phenomena occuring in plants and photosynthsis is one of the great examples since somehow plants manage to make the phenomena work for them at elevated temperatures, a feat in itself ... any good idea most welcome!!!

Anna maybe? Joe?

Bifurcations, patterns and other visualised mathematical problems for zen. Even found an oscillatory chemical reaction "Belousov-Zhabotinsky". Had no idea such a thing existed :-)

A good idea for a card in one of our ACT magic decks!!! In his words AI is "our biggest existential threat" - lol

the "even" in your comment is the key word

Edge.org recently had an interesting piece that ties into all of this recent AI fear mongering: http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai

New sensor to detect distances efficiently is based on the mixture chemistry, optics and physical principles.

No idea how it works, will need to digg into it.. Tom, shall we use Mixer?