interweaving ideas
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Star Trek Online: Explore Strange New Worlds, Seek Out New Life and New Civilizations…and Kill Them: Looking for Science in Star Trek Online Beta
For the past two weeks I have been on a quest. A quest in which I have invested over 20 hours, at the expense of doing much more productive things, like bathing and other basic hygiene tasks. My quest has been to find the science in Star Trek Online’s (STO’s) beta test. Vulcan Science Officer…
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A Review of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program. When they design an internet…
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Enlightenment Tagging
Awhile back, I was visiting Monument Park in Richmond Virginia, which requires crossing a very long suspension bridge running underneath the highway across a river. While crossing this bridge, I happened to look up and spot some graffiti on the underside of the freeway. It was an incredibly impressive place for someone to tag with…
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Glen Beck’s Confusion Over What Constitutes “Race” on the American Census
Types of Human Race On his radio show, Glen Beck recently objected to the term “African American being included with the terms “black” and “negro” on a census form: African-American is a bogus, PC, made-up term. I mean, that’s not a race. Your ancestry is from Africa and now you live in America. Ok so…
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The Decline and Fall of Second Life
Carbon Buckeyball Model at the Second Life Science Center I’m one of those people who saw incredible potential in Linden Labs’ Second Life and sang its praises, while so many critics demanded to know what the virtual world was good for. All too well I remember critics of the Internet over ten years ago complaining,…
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2009 Year in Science
ideonexus 2009 Science Links Tag Cloud The National Ignition Facility went online, focusing the power of numerous high-powered lasers on a single point to produce the environment inside a star… but then we didn’t hear anything else about it. Space Shuttle Discovery took a bat to space clinging to the external fuel tank. Scarlet Knight…
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Random Thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar
Neytiri Roger Ebert absolutely loved it, Jim Emerson thought it was totally lame, and io9 has an essay up about it being a recapitulation of the “White Man’s Guilt” plotline. Here are my thought’s on James Cameron’s Avatar: Uncanny Valley: Doesn’t apply to this movie at all, which was one of my disappointments with it.…
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CIS210 Systems Analysis and Development: Assignments, Discussions, and MiniCases
From CIS210 Systems Analysis and Development: CIS210 Systems Analysis and Development: Week 01 Assignment CIS210 Systems Analysis and Development: Week 01 Discussion CIS210 Systems Analysis and Development: Week 01 Minicase CIS210 Systems Analysis and Development: Week 02 Assignment CIS210 Systems Analysis and Development: Week 02 Discussion CIS210 Systems Analysis and Development: Week 02 Minicase CIS210…
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Plugging a Century of Climate Data into Eureqa
Friday I posted some links to the Cornell’s free data analysis software Eureqa. The video tutorials take a collection of data points from a swinging pendulum over time and then have the Eureqa software determine the function that best explains its wave using an evolutionary algorithm. I played with the software a bit this weekend,…
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National American History Museum: Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Hall of Invention
27 Scraps of Paper Credit: Arthur Ganson 2002 “Invention breeds invention.” – Edison Check out the complete flickr set here.
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High Line Park, New York
Carbon Emission Counter City living is good for the environment. When populations are concentrated, they are pooling resources. They use less electricity because their apartments are close together, less oil because of mass transportation and less water because they don’t have big lawns to feed. And cities like New York are constantly working to become…
