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Luís F. Simões

Higgs Boson Particles being sold on eBay ! - 0 views

www.ebay.com.au/...251100388854

PHY FUN

shared by Luís F. Simões on 05 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Luís F. Simões on 05 Jul 12
     
    "Higgs Boson partices - guaranteed to satisfy! Need mass in your objects? Get some Higg Bosons!" "The Higgs Boson particles are SOLD WITH THE JAR! You may not be able to SEE the Higgs Boson particles unless you use a large hadron collider." "Q: Since it is, after all, the god particle; can you observe closely and tell use what religion it is?"
pacome delva

Royal Society Fellows Question Body's Climate Change Statements - 1 views

news.sciencemag.org/...ociety-fellows-question-b.html

phy environment global_warming climate_change climato_sceptics

shared by pacome delva on 01 Jun 10 - Cached
  • The Royal Society has released a statement acknowledging that its climate guide is being updated and noting: "The new guide has been planned for some time but was given added impetus by concerns raised by a small group of Fellows of the Society that older documents designed to challenge some of the common misrepresentations of the science were too narrow in their focus."
  • pacome delva on 01 Jun 10
     
    The "climatosceptics" are more and more powerful, in France it's crazy how much they are in newspaper and television... Before it was fancy to fear the global warming, now it's fancy to fight the "dictat" of the Science, as if Science was a religion with its dogma !
Francesco Biscani

The Semicolon Wars » American Scientist - 2 views

www.americanscientist.org/...issue.aspx

inf

shared by Francesco Biscani on 07 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Francesco Biscani on 07 Jan 11
     
    Pretty interesting piece on computer languages.
  • Luís F. Simões on 07 Jan 11
     
    Yes, very good, but I don't get what all the fuss is about... everyone knows Python is the ultimate programming language! :) Follow up reading: If programming languages were religions... (quite accurate actually) Great quote from the article you linked to: In 1975 Edsger W. Dijkstra, a major figure in the structured-programming movement, wrote a memo titled "How Do We Tell Truths that Might Hurt?" The "truths" were mostly Dijkstra's opinions of programming languages; how he told them was very bluntly. Fortran is "an infantile disorder," PL/I "a fatal disease," APL "a mistake, carried through to perfection." Students exposed to COBOL "are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration," he said. "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."
  • Francesco Biscani on 07 Jan 11
     
    Fool! You can pry my templates from my cold dead hands!
Luís F. Simões

Bitcoin P2P Currency: The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen - 10 views

launch.is/...dangerous-project-weve-ev.html

bitcoin p2p money disruptive

shared by Luís F. Simões on 16 May 11 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • After month of research and discovery, we’ve learned the following:1. Bitcoin is a technologically sound project.2. Bitcoin is unstoppable without end-user prosecution.3. Bitcoin is the most dangerous open-source project ever created.4. Bitcoin may be the most dangerous technological project since the internet itself.5. Bitcoin is a political statement by technotarians (technological libertarians).*6. Bitcoins will change the world unless governments ban them with harsh penalties.
  • The benefits of a currency like this:a) Your coins can’t be frozen (like a Paypal account can be)b) Your coins can’t be trackedc) Your coins can’t be taxedd) Transaction costs are extremely low (sorry credit card companies)
  • An individual with the name -- or perhaps handle -- of Satoshi Nakamoto first wrote about bitcoins in a paper called Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • * We made this term up to describe the “good people” of the internet who believe in the fundamental rights of individuals to be free, have free speech, fight hypocrisy and stand behind logic, technology and science over religion, political structure and tradition. These are the people who build and support things like Wikileaks, Anonymous, Linux and Wikipedia. They think that people can, and should, govern themselves. They are against external forms of control such as DRM, laws that are bought and sold by lobbyists, and religions like Scientology. They include splinter groups that enforce these ideals in the form of hacktivism, such as the takedown of the Sony Playstation Network after Sony tried to prosecute a hacker for unlocking its console.
  • Ma Ru on 17 May 11
     
    Sounds good!
  • ...9 more comments...
  • pacome delva on 18 May 11
     
    wow it's frigthening! it's the dream of every anarchist, every drug, arm, human dealer! the world made as a global fiscal paradise... the idea is clever however it will not replace real money because 1 - no one will build a fortune on bitcoin if a technological breakthrough can ruin them 2 - government never allowed parallel money to flourish on their territory, so it will be almost impossible to change bitcoin against euros or dollars
  • Nicholas Lan on 18 May 11
     
    interesting stuff anyone read cryptonomicon by neal stephenson? similar theme.
  • Luís F. Simões on 18 May 11
     
    :) yes. One of the comments on reddit was precisely drawing the parallels with Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash / Diamond Age / Cryptonomicon. Interesting stuff indeed. It has a lot of potential for misuse, but also opens up new possibilities. We've discussed recently how emerging technologies will drive social change. Whether it's the likes of NSA / CIA who will benefit the most from the Twitters, Facebooks and so on, by gaining greater power for control, or whether individuals are being empowered to at least an identical degree. We saw last year VISA / PayPal censoring WikiLeaks... Well, here's a way for any individual to support such an organization, in a fully anonymous and uncontrollable way...
  • tvinko on 18 May 11
     
    One of my colleagues has made a nice, short write-up about BitCoin: http://www.pds.ewi.tudelft.nl/~victor/bitcoin.html
  • LeopoldS on 18 May 11
     
    very nice analysis indeed - thanks Tamas for sharing it!
  • pacome delva on 20 May 11
     
    mmm I'm not an expert but it seemed to me that, even if these criticisms are true, there is one fundamental difference between the money you exchange on internet via your bank, and bitcoins. The first one is virtual money and the second one aims at being real, physical, money, even if digital, in the same way as banknotes, coins, or gold.
  • nikolas smyrlakis on 20 May 11
     
    An algorithm wanna-be central bank issuing untraceable tax free money between internet users? not more likely than the end of the world supposed to take place tomorrow, in my opinion. Algorithms don't usually assault women though !:P
  • LeopoldS on 21 May 11
     
    well, most money is anyway just virtual and only based on expectations and trust ... (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply) and thus if people trust that this "money" has some value in the sense that they can get something of value to them in exchange, then not much more is needed it seems to me ...
  • pacome delva on 23 May 11
     
    @Leopold: ok let's use the rigth words then. Bitcoin aim at being a currency ("physical objects generally accepted as a medium of exchange" from wikipedia), different than the "demand deposit". In the article proposed by Tamas he compares what cannot be compared (currencies, demand deposits and their mean of exchange). The interesting question is wether one can create a digital currency which is too difficult to counterfeit. As far as I know, there is no existing digital currency except this bitcoins (and maybe the currencies from games as second life and others, but which are of limited use in real world).
  • nikolas smyrlakis on 23 May 11
     
    well of course money is trust, and even more loans and credit and even more stock and bond markets. It all represents trust and expectations. However since the first banks 500 years ago and the first loans etc. etc., and as well the fact that bonds and currencies bring down whole countries (Greece lately), and are mainly controlled by large financial centres and (central) banks, banks have always been on the winning side no matter what and that isn't going to change easily. So if you are talking about these new currencies it would be a new era, not just a new currency. So should Greece convert its debt to bitcoins ;P ?
  • pacome delva on 23 May 11
     
    well, from 1936 to 1993 the central bank of france was owned by the state and was supposed to serve the general interest...
Luís F. Simões

20 predictions for the next 25 years | guardian.co.uk - 5 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...25-predictions-25-years

future politics economy BIO health energy advertising neuroscience BMI physics PHY dark_matter planck food biotechnology nanotechnology game internet privacy environment biodiversity transport religion entertainment population climate_change crisis

shared by Luís F. Simões on 06 Jan 11 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • Giusi Schiavone on 06 Jan 11
     
    the 10th is interesting, connected with our crowdsourcing experiments with the spacegame
LeopoldS

Human Brain Project - Goals - 3 views

www.humanbrainproject.eu/goals.html

AI bio technology science

shared by LeopoldS on 20 May 11 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 20 May 11
     
    can we contribute in any way to this - or alternatively benefit from this research already now?
  • ...4 more comments...
  • Luzi Bergamin on 20 May 11
     
    Watch out!! I read quite a lot about the contribution by EPFL (apparently coordinator) and their boss, Henry Markram. From what I read, this is not really science, but mainly a PR campaign. The main motor in this project is attracting a lot of money and the main aim to do so is promising a lot of stuff that nobody will be able to deliver. Accordingly, Markram is a very controversial person in the business...
  • Luzi Bergamin on 20 May 11
     
    Oups, sorry! Of course I meant, "the main MEAN to do so...", but the aim justifies the means. Well, that's exactly Markram's motto, I guess.
  • LeopoldS on 21 May 11
     
    interesting info indeed ... I though still think that the overall goal of this project, even if too ambitious for the time being is interesting, no?
  • Luzi Bergamin on 22 May 11
     
    It's not about interesting or not, it's about serious science or not. Also the goal of a fortune-teller is interesting, isn't it? Any description of a good science project is too ambitious, that's normal and not necessarily PR. But personally I think there is a certain limit where a science project becomes a bad SciFi thriller. This one here is a dime novel, I think. But the too ambitious is not the only point I became very doubtful. I have seen quite a number of scientists and engineers from different fields; what I read about the character and attitude of this guy just hints towards the worst case scenario. It's presumptive evidence, I know...
  • LeopoldS on 22 May 11
     
    that bad! wow ....
  • Luzi Bergamin on 22 May 11
     
    You know me, I'm the bullshitter... You remember Kurzweil and his Singularity-nonsense. In a way this was very similar. Though I think Kurzweil and Markram are very different characters (The Singularity essentially is a religion, I can't see anything like that in Markram's claims) they seem to share an important point: they are both complete nerds that apparently never spent a single thought on the limits of science (in its English meaning) in general nor of their particular research field in specific. One may find this excusable, I don't. But even then, they make claims that the nerdest nerd must know that they are completely unrealistic and thus I just have to assume that they claim their nonsense on purpose. The reason in Markram's case clearly seems to be money. But all this does not mean that these nerds cannot produce valuable results.
ESA ACT

God or Multiverse? - 0 views

www.scimednet.org/...godormultiverse.pdf

phy religion esotericism

shared by ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09 - No Cached
  • ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09
     
    I don't know whom I should hate more, the physicists or the theologists.
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