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At the link below you find additional information about the projects: Education: Ten weeks to save the world http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100915/full/467266a.html

well, most good ideas probably take only a second to be formulated, it's the details that take years :-)

I do not think the point of the SU is to formulate new ideas (infact there is nothing new in the projects chosen). Their mission is to build and maintain a network of contacts among who they believe will be the 'future leaders' of space ... very similar to our beloved ISU.

Interesting ideas - though some metaphors are a bit far fetched. Personally, I think it could be interesting if every scientific article would also have a how-to or tutorial section that gives a recipe of how to apply the newly gained knowledge. Of course, that might be tough to do... :-)

The API of the world is already there (a bit), it is the previous knowledge developed by others. Open Source projects such as the wheel or the brick, allow everyday amazing new APPs to be build such as buildings and cars .... There still is merit, though, in learning from software developments techniques in the everyday world projects. This is indeed the motivation for the ACT to do work in open source (SOCIS, GSoC) and push its members to use stuff like wiki, svn, github, jenkins, and alike. This way we are performing and fostering (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/foster) research into working methods in the hope we will be able to export some of its benefit to the larger ESA.

true?

Isn't that why systems have a "wait for 15 minutes before trying again" after 3 or 5 wrong guesses? All the brute force in the word can't save you from real-life latency.

Oh, so you haven't heard about diceware yet? http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html And, of course, a related XKCD...

In a world first, an artificial intelligence machine plays chess by evaluating the board rather than using brute force to work out every possible move. It's been almost 20 years since IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer beat the reigning world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, for the first time under standard tournament rules.

The disadvantage in this kind of engine lies exactly in its inability to extrapolate. You might actually be able to beat it if you play like an idiot.

In the world of mathematical tiling, news doesn't come bigger than this. In the world of bathroom tiling - I bet they're interested too. If you can cover a flat surface using only identical copies of the same shape leaving neither gaps nor overlaps, then that shape is said to tile the plane. Also only mathematicians can put the words "Pentagon", "attack", and "plane" in the same sentence...

I especially love this part of the story: "The hunt to find and classify the pentagons that can tile the plane has been a century-long mathematical quest, begun by the German mathematician Karl Reinhardt, who in 1918 discovered five types of pentagon that do tile the plane. (To clarify, he did not find five single pentagons. He discovered five classes of pentagon that can each be described by an equation. For the curious, the equations are here. And for further clarification, we are talking about convex pentagons, which are most people's understanding of a pentagon in that every corner sticks out.) Most people assumed Reinhardt had the complete list until half a century later in 1968 when R. B. Kershner found three more. Richard James brought the number of types of pentagonal tile up to nine in 1975. That same year an unlikely mathematical pioneer entered the fray: Marjorie Rice, a San Diego housewife in her 50s, who had read about James' discovery in Scientific American. An amateur mathematician, Rice developed her own notation and method and over the next few years discovered another four types of pentagon that tile the plane. In 1985 Rolf Stein found a fourteenth. Way to go!"

Another Pi digits calculation record.

wow - apparently the project started as a high-school project! http://www.numberworld.org/y-cruncher/

read this

" However, Dr. Konig also found copper vases plated with silver in the Baghdad Museum, excavated from !!!Sumerian!!! sites in southern Iraq, dating back to at least 2500 BCE. When the vases were lightly tapped, a blue patina or film separated from the surface, which is characteristic of silver electroplated onto copper base. It would appear then that the Parthians inherited their batteries from one of the earliest known civilizations." ... they just mistyped the name ...

following up on the lunchtime discussion. An older link is available here: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/14/0219246

here's something we didn't consider yesterday in the meeting on extra-solar planets!

this is because you did not read the nature paper I have posted (see post a few lines below ...)

forced to play WOW ...

Friday afternoon geeky humour.

The search for the best observatory site in the world has lead to the discovery of what is thought to be the coldest, driest, calmest place on Earth - a place where no human is thought to have ever set foot.

As ACT is tasked to investigate innovative working methods... DO IT!!! :)

but then we also have to ask who is willing to work on saturdays one day more for an extra 20% ...

super-highways: an old stuff, but still very fascinating ...

looking a bit back to small world nets bibliography I bumped into that. quote: The probability that a Brazilian soccer player has worked at $N$ clubs or played $M$ games shows an exponential decay while the probability that he has scored $G$ goals is power law. (!)

Australian government approved the construction of one of the biggest wind farms of the world