My favorite (Austrian) law website has disappeared. Instead there´s a text in latin at normative.zusammenhaenge.at. At school I´ve taken classes (trying) to learn that language, but that knowledge is all gone now. Could anyone translate this for me?? (please leave a comment)
The question on what kind of people you know is interesting. Not sure about the results. One day they should arrive. Participate!
... not! Wired reports that the best strategy to survive the September 11th attacks on the WTC towers was to ignore officials advice and get out of the building as fast as possible, by whatever way available.
After both buildings were burning, many calls to 911 resulted in advice to stay put and wait for rescue. Also, occupants of the towers had been trained to use the stairs, not the elevators, in case of evacuation.
There´s more information from the NIST (National Institute on Standards and Technology) report Occupant Behavior, Egress and Emergeny Communications here (PDF) and here (PDF). Worth reading!
A new NASA World Wind update is available. 171 MB. More about WW here.
You get NeuroGrid when you mix P2P with knowledge management, search engines and social networks or in other words
it´s a framework for finding information within a distributed environment
It´s seems that the stuff / software is still in a heavy experimental state (at least from my first impression). (via Smart Mobs)
Term of the week: Self-organization. I had that idea after reading this on Susan Crawford´s blog:
We're clearly surrounded by self-organizing systems, at all levels. Things are becoming more interesting all the time.
Note the connections between science and software (quote from Wikipedia):
...phenomenon from mathematics and computer science such as cellular automata, random graphs, and some instances of evolutionary computation and artificial life exhibit features of self-organization. In swarm robotics, self-organization is used to produce emergent behavior.
Notable connections to swarm robotics: BitTorrent swarms, networking, Emergence - the book, swarmstreaming / swarming from OnionNetworks
Blogs have so much interesting content. I just have to find a moment to read and think through stuff like this on Thermodynamics and Evolution:
Back in 1984, John W. Patterson contributed an essay called "Thermodynamics and Evolution" to a volume of scientific responses to creationism. Creationists have claimed that the second law of thermodynamics ("The Entropy Inventory of the World Tends to a Maximum") conflicts with evolution.
These days, with outside temperatures well below zero in lower areas, we may experience an interesting phenomenon what´s called industrial snow (Industrieschnee), snow fall in/near heavy industrialized areas. Industrial snow is created with combinations of local sources of water vapour, certain atmospheric capacity (wind) and temperatures of -3 °C to -10 °C.
Unfortunately I can´t find enough material in English, since the term industrial snow is also used for artificial snow (snow blowers, snow melters and the like). Enough!
FastForward into the future: August 2009: How Google beat Amazon. The Semantic Web may become the next great thing. Or not. Well, actually yes!
Anyway, here´s a list of items worth reviewing: namespaces, URIs, prefixes, serialization, PURLs, and RDF - essentially data about web data - or metadata.
Regular readers of this weblog may realize that "essentially" is one of my favorite words - but, heck, this article is essential reading. Maybe one day, logical statements, regular expressions and the like will become commonplace.
Then, OK, when that article was written - back in 2002 really (not 2009), SOAP interfaces was something new, now it pretty common to enter a books ISBN number or title plus author on a form on your weblog and get back the cover, number of pages, and more. Now, with any other service (than books and search engines) you should also offer semantic interfaces to let others query your database, aggregate that with some other databases or user generated content and so one; if you don´t, someone else will. This is exciting!
From the series "How to Kill Fill your broadband connection": Nasa World Wind is a neat little big application that allows you to access NASA/UGSG satelite images from all over the world. Fascinating!
Actually the download is big - 259 MB including the .NET runtime and DirectX - and will download additional image data as needed while zooming in at various earth locations.
The first picture is Europe from space, the second is Chicago from 4000 m high with UGSG data. Unfortunately there´s not so good - yet quite good - data available for Europe.
Here´s more information on good visible cities (in the US), some data - as the white house - is pixelated though.
The software requires Windows 2000, XP Home or XP Professional with Pentium 3 at 1 GHz or up, at least 256 MB RAM, a 3D 64MB or more graphic card, 2 GB free disk space and a broadband connection. Some times the servers may be very slow, such as when the service go /. (slashdotted). To speed up things, cache files are available for download, and there´s also an update that´s essential for international users. The total data set is about 20 Terabytes, so it´s not for download. Further information on the software can be found in the FAQ. (via Martin Röll)
As regular readers of this blog may be aware, I´m interested in a bizarre thing: death. No, no, I don´t wear black coats and T-shirts. But after reading Mary Roach´s book Stiff - The curious lives of human cadavers - I got hooked on what happens to man after death. Therefore this story has caught my attention:
As BoingBoing reports, a UK TV show will feature a decomposing corpse. As the Guardian reports, Channel4 will cross "another televisual rubicon" after already featuring the first images of aborted foetuses and Britains first public autopsy of TV.
More books on forensic surprises (I didn´t read them yet, but plan to): Mark Benecke´s Mordmethoden and Kriminalbiologie
Clive Thompson takes a look at arguments against creationism. More on the crusade (as they title it) against evolution in Wired 12.10 and National Geographic.
It´s a while ago since I followed some discussions on the subject, lacking much scientific knowledge of either side. Here´s the argument put forward by physicist Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio (!!):
"By no definition of any modern scientist is intelligent design (ID) science," Krauss concluded, "and it's a waste of our students' time to subject them to it."
ID simply says, that the complexity of biological structures defied any explenation but a designer; while Darwin argues (in Origin of Species) that evolution can create the appearance of design. Read the Wired article! [and buy the Nat´Geo November issue]
20Q, an experiment in artificial intelligence and neural networks, guesses almost anything you´re thinking of by asking (up to) 20 questions - such as finding out that I was thinking about the dishwasher:
I am guessing that it is a dishwasher? Yes , No , Close 19. Can you use it at school? No. 18. Does it come in a box? Probably. 17. Would you find it on a farm? Probably. 16. Can it be stolen? Irrelevant. 15. Is it a common household object? Yes. 14. Does it contain a liquid? Yes. 13. Do most people use this daily? Probably. 12. Does it produce heat? Yes. 11. Does it bring joy to people? Irrelevant. 10. Would you use it in the dark? Irrelevant. 9. Can it be easily moved? No. 8. Do you put things in it? Yes. 7. Is it heavy? Yes. 6. Can you switch it on and off? Yes. 5. Do you hold it when you use it? No. 4. Does it have a hard outer shell? Yes. 3. Do you use it in your home? Yes. 2. Is it pleasurable? Irrelevant. 1. It is classified as Other.Even though there was some mis-understanding between the computer and me:
You were thinking of a dishwasher. Would you find it on a farm? You said Probably, I say No.
I though nowadays even people living on a farm - at least in the western world - have a dishwasher. Well, thinking about dishwasher doesn´t sound scientific. :-)
Legalaffairs reports on the science of reconstructing car accidents. It´s not quite criminal biology - a subject which took my interest after reading a few books around that subject (more on that in a few day on this blog) - but quite similar in the reconstructional agenda.
Here´s what took my interest (in bold letters):
Reconstructionists usually rely for their data on police investigators who take photos, measurements, and samples of all the evidence at a crash scene: spattered blood, automotive debris, clothing fibers.
This reminds me of ..., well, I´m gonna tell you about that book later ... of this.
Nuclear weapons are detonated aboard several Soviet satellites in low Earth orbit over the U.S. and other areas, generating electromagnetic pulses (EMP). This devastates electronics in these areas. Most unhardened computers and related equipment are rendered useless, destroying communication, information, and power supply networks on a nationwide scale. Transportation vehicles using electronics are inoperable. Many satellites are disabled. While few human casualties have occurred so far, much of the civilian elements of a continent-spanning society are devastated.
Read about the effects of a global thermonuclear war.
The Civilian Space eXploration Team is launching the first amateur rocket into space. Liftoff! Whoa! (via boingboing)
Slightly more difficult than building a model car. :-)
A physics primer takes a look at the rather strange interpretation of physics in popular movies, such as Armageddon. You should also take a look at moviemistakes.com (via boingboing & KM).
In Armageddon they claim drilling a relatively small hole into the asteroid as done in the movie isn´t simple a good idea. A better one to save mankind would be to throw a bowling ball at the asteroid.
With the asteroid headed toward Earth at 22,000 mph a space shuttle could head away from Earth at 22,000 mph straight toward the asteroid. This would give a closing speed of 44,000 mph or 19,678 m/s. A bowling ball rolled out the front of the shuttle would eventually strike the asteroid with so much kinetic energy that the ball would explode.
Ah, yes, and you should definitely read this about The Core.
The BBC has a test of truly disgusting things (and this after watching Kill Bill Vol. 1 - see previous post). Well, actually this scientific tests shows nothing really disgusting (like the tubgirl picture (WARNING: disgusting!)).
Another application for RFID technology: implant a chip in a police officer´s hand, and put the matching reader inside a gun. No hand, no firing. (Unless someone chops off the hands in KillBill style :-)). Wired has the story.
Librarians are not satisfied that people search the web instead of looking up things in (reference) books:
"Sometimes people are surprised that you can even find things in the books that aren't online," said Ann M. Laubacker, director of the library.
(via GoogleNews and GoogleNews Alert - Guess what´s the search term? :-))
Mary Roach: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Very very good!
Scott Berkun: The Art of Project Management
My 2nd project management book.
Hannes Stein: Endlich Nichtdenker
Not a book for idiots, actually!
Kara Knafelc: Tokyo
Japan. Ah. What more should I say?
