This is pretty cool. They detect minuscule motions in video and amplify them. The example the concentrate on in this video below is showing someone's pulse when all you have is a video of them.
It works with video they took, or with any video of someone…like a scene from Batman.
Originally posted on Google+ · March 6, 2013
Originally posted on Google+ · March 5, 2013
I haven't had the time to do anything more than skim this paper, but it looks like they connected two rats brains together and they managed to "become one". They even had one in Brazil and one in the US, connected over the internet.
I don't suppose we're too far from being able to do the same with humans and implantable electronics.
A Brain-to-Brain Interface for Real-Time Sharing of Sensorimotor Information : Scientific Reports : Nature Publishing Group
A brain-to-brain interface (BTBI) enabled a real-time transfer of behaviorally meaningful sensorimotor information between the brains of two rats. In this BTBI, an “encoder” rat performed sensorimotor…
Originally posted on Google+ · March 3, 2013
Copernicus crater: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernicus_(lunar_crater)
Originally posted on Google+ · March 2, 2013
Yes to almost all of them.
Originally posted on Google+ · March 2, 2013
This is the most science-y thing I've posted in months.
Originally posted on Google+ · March 2, 2013
Are we in danger of extinction? What kind of things could cause us to go extinct?
The article touches on AI and if it could threaten our existence in the future.
‘There is important research going on in those areas, but the really impressive stuff is hidden away inside AI journals,’ he said. He told me about a team from the University of Alberta that recently trained an AI to play the 1980s video game Pac-Man. Only they didn’t let the AI see the familiar, overhead view of the game. Instead, they dropped it into a three-dimensional version, similar to a corn maze, where ghosts and pellets lurk behind every corner. They didn’t tell it the rules, either; they just threw it into the system and punished it when a ghost caught it. ‘Eventually the AI learned to play pretty well,’ Dewey said. ‘That would have been unheard of a few years ago, but we are getting to that point where we are finally starting to see little sparkles of generality.’
Bostrum also talks about why he hopes we don't find life on Mars. By "great filter" he's talking about the idea that either advanced life on Earth is a cosmic fluke or there is something that prevents civilizations from becoming more space-worthy than our own…in other words, how come we don't see aliens out in the universe.
That’s why Bostrom hopes the Curiosity rover fails. ‘Any discovery of life that didn’t originate on Earth makes it less likely the great filter is in our past, and more likely it’s in our future,’ he told me. If life is a cosmic fluke, then we’ve already beaten the odds, and our future is undetermined — the galaxy is there for the taking. If we discover that life arises everywhere, we lose a prime suspect in our hunt for the great filter. The more advanced life we find, the worse the implications. If Curiosity spots a vertebrate fossil embedded in Martian rock, it would mean that a Cambrian explosion occurred twice in the same solar system. It would give us reason to suspect that nature is very good at knitting atoms into complex animal life, but very bad at nurturing star-hopping civilisations. It would make it less likely that humans have already slipped through the trap whose jaws keep our skies lifeless. It would be an omen.
Ross Andersen – Humanity’s deep future
When we peer into the fog of the deep future what do we see – human extinction or a future among the stars?
Originally posted on Google+ · February 27, 2013
I just finished writing a small program that, every 5 minutes, takes a screenshot of my whole screen and uploads that along with text describing every window I have open along with which window is active to my Evernote account. I'll upload it to github after I test it for a few days.
Next up is figuring out a way to get a list of every tab I have open in Chrome and uploading that as well.
After that, I'm going to figure out a way to upload to clip every page I have open for longer than … maybe 5 minutes? … into Evernote. I'd also like to write an extension for Chrome to clip articles that I view in Google Reader for longer than a certain amount of time as well.
I was spurred into this by reading the below linked article about Chris Dancy.
I'm a little worried about dropping all this data into Evernote. I mean, what if the company goes under? In the future, in addition to clipping to Evernote, I will FTP this data onto storage that I control as well as dropping it into a database.
The Quantified Man: How an Obsolete Tech Guy Rebuilt Himself for the Future | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
Our work is being re-quantified — in a big way — and Chris Dancy, a director in the office of the chief technology officer at BMC Software, thinks it’s time for employees to take these metrics into …
Originally posted on Google+ · February 27, 2013
Absolutely fantastic article in Time by Steven Brill investigating why medical bills are as much as they are in the US.
I was going to do a pull quote, but I couldn't choose just one.
Just read it.
Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us | TIME.com
How outrageous pricing and egregious profits are destroying our health care
Originally posted on Google+ · February 22, 2013
Peter Williams @ Universe Today, explains how scifi shows and movies misrepresent what nebulae actually look like.
So if nebula are too faint for to see from Earth with the naked eye — and they are — getting up close and personal doesn’t help any.
In Reality, Nebulae Offer No Place for Spaceships to Hide
In the Battlestar: Galactica universe, nebulas are a nifty spot to hide from the Cylons that are plotting to kill humanity. There’s just one problem with th
Originally posted on Google+ · February 22, 2013
