A collection of discussions, links, stories, news and whatever else I find interesting in the fields of computing, information, science, privacy, semantics, mathematics and so on...
The world has changed! Students tend to think these papers are boring. "Everybody knows that!"Boring possibly given today's "advances" from there, but too many fundamentals and much history is ignored and deliberately forgotten in computer science. Time to re-read and re-learn the principles in some of these - maybe we haven't "advanced" so much at all..
"...a word of caution: Apparently The figures have been weighted and are representative of all GB adults (aged 18+). This has been one of the reasons why most previous Welsh polls have proved disastrously inaccurate. Wales is not a mini GB. In Wales the C2s Ds and Es are a much more important factor in elections than the C1s who swing middle England for one party or an other."mae'r rhifau o'r YouGov Poll ydy (Hydref 2009)
When you look at footage of the fighting in Helmand today everyone assumes it is being played out against an ancient background of villages and fields built over the centuries.
This is not true. If you look beyond the soldiers, and into the distance, what you are really seeing are the ruins of one of the biggest technological projects the United States has ever undertaken. Its aim was to use science to try and change the course of history and produce a modern utopia in Afghanistan. The city of Lashkar Gah was built by the Americans as a model planned city, and the hundreds of miles of canals that the Taliban now hide in were constructed by the same company that built the San Francisco Bay Bridge and Cape Canaveral.
None of us truly understands the P versus NP problem, we have only begun to peel the layers around this increasingly complex question. Perhaps we will see a resolution of the P versus NP problem in the near future but I almost hope not. The P versus NP problem continues to inspire and boggle the mind and continued exploration of this problem will lead us to yet even new complexities in that truly mysterious process we call computation.
Nereus Crater on Mars Explanation: It was along the way. The robotic rover OpportunityMeridiani Plain on Mars has a destination of Endeavour Crater, a large crater over 20 kilometers across which may yield additional clues about the cryptic past of ancient Mars. Besides passing open fields of dark soil and light rock, Opportunity has chanced upon several interesting features. One such feature, pictured above in a digitally stitched and horizontally compressed panorama, is Nereus Crater, a small crater about 10 meters across that is surrounded by jagged rock. Besides Nereus, Opportunity recently also happened upon another unusual rock -- one that appears to be the third large meteorite found on Mars and the second for Opportunity during only this trip. Opportunity has been traveling toward Endeavour Crater for over a year now, and if it can avoid ridged rocks and soft sand along the way, it may reach Endeavour sometime next year.
Credit: Mars Exploration Rover Mission, JPL, NASA; Image Processing: Kenneth Kremer
Today is the day we have all been waiting for—when the IBEX first heliospheric results and sky maps are unveiled to the scientific community and public audience for the first time! The first results are summarized in five papers published online today by Science Magazine. They chronicle the remarkable discovery of a bright, narrow band of ENA emissions that was totally unpredicted by any previous theories or models and that snakes between the two Voyager spacecraft, but remained totally undetected by either of them.
Last week I was writing about the Mozilla European developers conference, and the palpable energy there.This is really good stuff to hear, especially as I'm part of it (even Slashdot has good things to say!).
I'm currently at the Qt Developer Days, surrounded by some 700 Qt hackers: since Qt is pronounced “cute” this makes for some amusing puns. But cute or not, there is a similar atmosphere that augurs well for the open source project.
