January 2008
42 posts
Sterndale: How do you know that?
Sherlock Holmes: I followed you.
Sterndale: I saw no one.
Sherlock Holmes: That is what you may expect to see when I follow you.
Key to Innovation: Becoming an Observer →
The keys, from Lifehack: Don’t take things for granted: look for details, hidden opportunities, question assumptions. Watch for inconveniences: they’re bugs waiting to be solved. Watch for possible gaps: don’t get too used to doing things the same way. How can it be improved? What new technology can be applied? Follow technology trends: know what’s possible, so you can...
How to invent new physical laws [pdf] →
This was the coolest lecture in Physics 218: Waves and Thermodynamics. In it, Prof. Sethna showed a mind-blowing method to derive new physical laws. Instead of deriving from more general laws (e.g. figuring out the forces acting upon the object etc), you first think of all the variables that could possibly matter, then apply all the symmetries, invariances, parities etc inherent in the system to...
Exploiting conserved structures in languages →
From Hal Daume’s review of the Symposium on Discrete Algorithms: “The twist that she [Bonnie Berger] is taking is to try to solve these problems [in computational biology: RNA/protein structure prediction, protein-protein interaction graphs, etc] simultaneously for more than two organisms (typically: yeast, worm, fly, mouse, human; these are the organisms for which we have the most...
“When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
– Abraham Maslow (attrib.)
The future of manufacturing, according to Douglas...
“Very few things actually get manufactured these days, becase in an infinitely large Universe such as, for instance, the one in which we live, most things one could possibly imagine and a lot of things one would rather not, grow somewhere. (A forest was discovered recently in whic most of the trees grew ratchet screwdrivers as fruit. The life cycle of ratchet screwdriver fruit is quite...
1 tag
At last, a ringtone useful for something →
“Korea’s SK Telecom yesterday unveiled a service to turn the cellphone into a mobile mosquito repellent. For 3,000 won (£1.54), users can download a sound file that is inaudible to the human ear but helps ward off mosquitoes within a one-metre radius, the firm said.”
Using mouse-tracking to approximate eye-tracking →
Eye-tracking studies have been carried out for a long time in HCI. But eye-tracking requires special equipment and time to set up. This paper looks at whether similarly useful results can come out of cheaper-and-easier mouse-tracking. They found that it could be a useful indication of some search behaviour.
Breaking codes with the Chinese Lottery →
“Concept of a cryptanalytical attack where special brute-force chips are inserted to every TV and radio sold in China. Each chip is either set to test a specific array of keys or just random keys. Now when the government needs a code broken, they broadcast the cipher text and every chip begins processing away. When one of the chips finally stumbles upon the key, it alerts its owner by...
“Now, when anybody starts talking about this he immediately shifts language. My...”
– William Friedman, economist
Using the mechanisms of disease to conquer disease →
Harvard Medical School researchers have invented a new drug delivery method that can penetrate the blood-brain barrier. It uses a modified form of the rhabdovirus, which infiltrates the brain to cause rabies, as a vehicle to deliver drugs targeted at the brain.
“Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to...”
– Walter Chrysler via SvN
The grammar of time travel
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering. It has been built on the fragmented remains of … it will be built on the fragmented … that is to say it will have been built by this time, and indeed has been - One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your...
A grammar of morality? →
One of the simplest ways to get creative is to mash two concepts together and see what you can make of the resulting mess. Marc Hauser is apparently looking to see whether the notion of a grammar might apply to morality, according to Scienceblog. One of the most controversial new approaches, promoted by Marc Hauser of Harvard University, is to study moral reasoning by analogy to linguistics. For...
From John Hockenberry's indictment of network... →
‘The most memorable reporting I’ve encountered on the conflict in Iraq was delivered in the form of confetti exploding out of a cardboard tube. I had just begun working at the MIT Media Lab in March 2006 when Alyssa Wright, a lab student, got me to participate in a project called “Cherry Blossoms.” I strapped on a backpack with a pair of vertical tubes sticking out of the...