Over at the ever marvelous APOD:
Interview with Craig Venter of Celera, the decoders of the human genome. (via Pharyngula)
Returning to the '29 crisis: http://www.businessinsider.com/us-wealth-inequality-2010-7
Finally! Yoohoo!
The clever people at APOD celebrate today venerable's site 15th anniversary with a wimsical fascinating recursive pseudo-steganography stunt. They recreated by imagery pixelisation (creation of an image from tiny thumbnails of other images) a faked Vermeer from their 5th anniversary. Nice little intellectual public orgasm there ;-)
Hey, that's crazy! Local stores (sorry, no link, I don't do unpaid publicity) are advertising DSLR's (Sony alpha 230) sold for under 300$! With lens! Interesting times are a-coming.
We can't stop the progress. Here comes another brilliant and passionate way of wasting time and money: gigapans.
We live a new kind of life, with data to prove it. I guess this thorough and very well written up (if long) article in The New York Times underlines the case for a major evolutionary event in the human species' life.
Floating-point arithmetics on traditional computers and the associated issues: this is basic knowledge for all programmers and computer scientists (or should). Still, gotta love the Internet for offering nice and clean ressources for easy perusing for new trainees (like highschool kids and new enthusiasts). And also having heavy reading and rigurous scientific detailing for the strong-hearted. How did we do education before the time of the Internet?
richarddawkins.net documents a rather appalling crime (beware, it's hurtful to watch): monsters raping innocent children's minds. Why go these grave offenses against humanity unpunished?
I happened tonight to browse the cable TV listing and find on Bravo the "Musical Brain" documentary created by Christina Pochmursky for CTV and featuring Sting, Feist, Wyclef Jean and Daniel Levitin. Levitin is a McGill professor of neuroscience that became a neuroscientist so that he can understand why we do music at all. The documentary is absolutely fascinating, even if a bit light. Levitin also worked recently on a new development, with Bobby McFerrin, called "The Music Instinct" -- that I crave to find and see. He wrote two very well known books on the same topics, "This is your brain on music" being a bestseller. Looking for more information on these, I found "Notes and Neurons", a rather long panel at the the World Science Festival last year. Very interesting topic, very interesting speakers.
Over at the ever marvelous APOD:
Patented Genes, a very well done report on CBS's <i>60 minutes</i>, explains all the absurdity of this situation, very clearly. I'd feel ashamed of being human, if I'd manage to overcome my shock at this kind of appaling non-human — no, anti-human — behavior.
The other day, I was looking for information on matplotlib and I found videolectures.net. I believe this is an interesting source of information, with high pedagogic value.
The New Humanist points to an interesting opinion of Theodore Darymple on self-esteem versus self-respect. This subtle (at first but clear on better reflection) distinction is perhaps well understood and daily practiced by any self-reflecting and analytically spirited person. It is nevertheless very useful to read such a clearly expressed description in Darymple's post.
The kinds of things that fascinate me in photography as an art are so well explained by this excellent image from LIFE magazine's public archive:
A nice comedic (but still profound) read by Christopher Hitchens:
"... at every step of their arduous journey the Israelites are reminded to keep to the laws, not because they are right but just because they will lead them to become conquerors (of, as it happens, almost the only part of the Middle East that has no oil)."
Certain kinds of photos are simply mind blowing. And I know I will be never capable of shooting, which makes them even more fascinating.
[via Pharyngula]
What a bit of ingeniousness and a lot of patience can produce: OK Go – This too shall pass.
Exams are over. Lots of corrections, but anyways, things are lighter now. I started improve the contents of the site: a log for things I read and another for movies I saw. All goes very slowly, but ... there is progress! Now to fill all this.
While looking for more details about the HDR technique, I found:
We are a civilisation of freeloaders. OK, this is a recurrent theme with me (and even semipermanent), but once in a while I get peeved over the board of my patience. What tickled me this time is a video of a presentation Microsoft did a few days ago at TED, about its new bing maps technology. I don't have anything against the technology or the obvious bloody competition with Google. But just look at the last 5 seconds of the video, to see the audience become lustful and almost perceivedly greedy. We absolutely love our hypertech toys. We despise the creators, we even physically molest them sometimes (think of the invetor of the blue LED), we bask in emotional and superstitious behavior, all the more enhanced by all the tech. But we forget to honestly realize that we are mostly freeloaders. That such near-magic requires efforts, and brains, and high quality education. We completely overlook the potential for even more wonderful (and actually useful) magic that could be created with the help of a thoughtful revival of social collaboration. We still allow wonderful brains to be lost through our awful economic predatory behavior. And all is a-OK as long as we get our freeloading toys.