interweaving ideas
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The Energy Game
Sun Credit: onlinewoman A hydroelectric dam converts the motion energy of water flowing downhill into electrical energy through mechanical turbines. The water flowing downhill expends the gravitational energy it stored when it was deposited up in the mountains. The water got from the ocean to the mountaintop via thermal energy, which evaporated it into the…
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Merchant’s Millpond State Park
On a recent canoe trip through what has to be the most exotic state park I have yet adventured through, Vicky and I saw turkey vultures, lily pads, beavers, geese, Spanish moss, two bald eagles, painted turtles, bald cypress, and this fine fellow: Alligator in Merchant’s Millpond State Park Credit: Moi The pond is the…
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Gaming Nostalgia
Commodore Logo Researchers are using the oceans of data in Everquest’s logs for psychological, sociological, anthropological, and other studies. Constance Steinkuehler, a game academic at the University of Wisconsin, has found clear evidence that gamers use the scientific method, experimenting and communicating results, to understand the virtual worlds in which they play. Academia is finally…
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How the Brain Grows Into the Body
Baby and Godmother Credit: kton25 Harvard Psychologist Stephen M. Kosslyn presents a fascinating conundrum concerning the development of a human embryo: In order for the brain to process the two images our eyes transmit to it in 3-D stereovision, complete with the ability to estimate distances accurately, it must know the distance between the eyes;…
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Smithsonian Natural History Museum: The Insect Wing
To understand the success of insects is to appreciate our own shortcomings. —Thomas Eisner They crawl, they fly, they swim. They communicate with dance, chemicals, and sounds. They act alone or gather together into superorganisms. They possibly represent 90% of the differing life forms on the planet. Insect in Amber Credit: Moi Check out the…
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Fossils of the Technium in the Anthropocene
Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself. – Edward O. Wilson In David Brin’s The Postman, greatest post-apocalyptic book ever, the protagonist finds shelter in an old mail truck and keeps warm by making a blanket out of the letters. Recently, Vicky and I checked out the Camden County Jeep Trail,…
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Remember Snow?
When I was a kid, it was guaranteed we would get at the very least one good school-closing snowfall a year. It was like a bonus holiday, where all the neighborhood kids would come out for snowball fights, sledding, and maple-syrup snow cones. The snow was always gone in a day or two, leaving a…
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Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History: Butterflies and Plants
With final exams, school projects due, work projects due, and the rest of life, I’ve been stressing and slacking on uploading science photos to my flickr account. I’m glad I took the time to get to it tonight for an hour or so of naturalist zen. Lacking anything more profound, I’ll just say this: Butterflies…
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Thinking in Different Programming Languages
For seven years, I wrote computer programs in Visual Basic Script (VBScript), a Microsoft programming language used in building WebPages from information in a database. As part of a paradigm shift where I work to open-source software, in the last six months I have had to learn and develop software in Hypertext Preprocessor script (PHP).…
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ALD09post Ada Lovelace Day: Esther Dyson
Happy Ada Lovelace Day! In celebration of Ada Lovelace, only child to Lord Byron and author of the world’s first computer program in 1843 for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, bloggers everywhere are running posts about one of their favorite women in tech. So this year I’d like to introduce everyone to Esther Dyson: Esther Dyson…
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CIS510 Advanced Systems Analysis and Design: The Systems Analyst as Polymath
A PDF of this Paper is available here. I. Introduction The book Systems Architecture describes the function of the systems analyst as performing “activities of the business modeling and requirements disciplines,” and goes on to expand the possible responsibilities into “business modeling, requirements, design, and management of a development project (Burd, 2006).” As this paper…
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Patterns in the PHP Random Function
When you make the finding yourself – even if you’re the last person on Earth to see the light – you’ll never forget it. – Carl Sagan Inspired by Oranchak’s post on Genetic Algorithms, I decided to revisit a project I left off on a few months back, the end result of which is to…
