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Comment As a Female Geek (Score 4, Interesting) 181

by kria (#38147694) Attached to: Anne McCaffrey Passes Away At 85
Anne was one of the first female authors that I managed to find in the SF&F field. She was one of the first authors I read that had really great, strong female characters. She helped teach me that you don't have to be a man to be smart, strong, successful, that you don't have to be a man to be a hero. Her fiction helped shape my perspective, along with authors like Andre Norton and eventually (scoff if you will) Mercedes Lackey. Thank you, Anne McCaffrey.

Comment Technically, my ex-husband's business (Score 1) 252

by kria (#37274132) Attached to: I have started Q businesses, where Q = ...
It wasn't a software house - it was a laser engraving business, doing custom work for businesses and individuals, and then also catering to the roleplaying gamer market. He frequently said (well, says, I imagine) that owning your own business is the second most over-rated thing in the world. The number one most over-rated thing being natural childbirth.
Power

Mussels With Hydrogen Fuel Cells Found 76

Posted by Soulskill from the more-efficient-than-the-coal-burning-shrimp dept.
greenrainbow writes "According to scientists, there are mussels at the bottom of the ocean that are efficiently converting hydrogen into energy in their very own, nature-made hydrogen fuel cells (abstract). The mussels were found near hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor and have onboard symbiotic bacteria that convert hydrogen into energy. With this discovery, researchers might be able to clone the hydrogen eating bacteria to create all-natural hydrogen fuel cells to power things other than sea life."
AI

Can AI Games Create Super-Intelligent Humans? 312

Posted by timothy from the they-already-have dept.
destinyland writes "A technology CEO sees game artificial intelligence as the key to a revolution in education, predicting a synergy where games create smarter humans who then create smarter games. Citing lessons drawn from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, Alex Peake, founder of Primer Labs, sees the possibility of a self-fueling feedback loop which creates 'a Moore's law for artificial intelligence,' with accelerating returns ultimately generating the best possible education outcomes. 'What the computer taught me was that there was real muggle magic ...' writes Peake, adding 'Once we begin relying on AI mentors for our children and we get those mentors increasing in sophistication at an exponential rate, we're dipping our toe into symbiosis between humans and the AI that shape them.'"
Science

Neanderthal Genes Found In All Non-African Populations 406

Posted by Soulskill from the bumping-really-uglies dept.
Med-trump writes "Neanderthals, whose ancestors left Africa about 400,000 to 800,000 years ago, evolved in what is now mainly France, Spain, Germany and Russia, and are thought to have lived until about 30,000 years ago. Now scientists have identified a piece of Neanderthal DNA (called a haplotype) in the human X chromosome and conclude that this haplotype is present because of mating between our ancestors and Neanderthals. The study was published in the latest issue of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution."
Games

A 9V Battery To Your Brain Can Improve Your Gaming 167

Posted by timothy from the needs-an-instructables-page dept.
autospa writes with an intriguing story found at Nature about direct electrical stimulation's effect on the brain. By applying low levels of electrical current to different parts of the brain via electrodes placed on the scalp, University of New Mexico researchers claim to have documented some significant changes in brain activity, which vary depending on the part of the brain targeted. Gamers, take note: in one experiment in which volunteers were recorded while playing a video war game, "those receiving 2 milliamps to the scalp (about one-five-hundredth the amount drawn by a 100-watt light bulb) showed twice as much improvement in the game after a short amount of training as those receiving one-twentieth the amount of current." The idea of affecting the brain by electric stimulation isn't new; but the battery-powered, non-invasive variety naturally leads some people to consider rolling their own.
Books

California Library's Plan: Get Rid of Books 197

Posted by Soulskill from the just-crazy-enough-to-wait-what dept.
HansonMB writes "Facing the likelihood of state budget cuts that would eliminate $15 million for library and reading programs – and, apparently, create a future in which people no longer read things on paper – the city of Newport Beach is considering turning its first library into a community center that would host all the same amenities – except for the books." The library has been inundated with hate-mail as people around the country have learned of their idea, and they hastened to clarify that no final decision has been made; carting books in as needed from other locations was always part of the plan. Whether or not they go through with it, efforts are underway elsewhere to create a massive, public digital library, spurred in part by the recent ruling against Google Books.
Privacy

Dating Site Creates Profiles From Public Records 257

Posted by timothy from the you-didn't-even-know-you-were-looking dept.
schliz writes "Online dating company Gotham Dating Partners has announced plans to create profiles for non-registered individuals based on publicly available information from social networking sites, e-mail registries, mailing lists, marketing surveys, government census records, real estate listings and business websites. Although the Australian Privacy Commissioner has warned that the automatic creation of identifiable profiles of individuals without their knowledge is 'not good privacy practice,' Gotham Dating Partners does not expect to face any privacy issues from the move, which is expected to boost its membership from 6.5 million to 340 million worldwide."
Hardware Hacking

Building a Telegraph Using Only Stone Age Materials 238

Posted by samzenpus from the from-scratch dept.
MMBK writes "It's the ultimate salvagepunk experiment, building a telegraph out of things found in the woods. From the article: 'During the summer of 2009, artist Jamie O’Shea of the organization Substitute Materials set out to test whether or not electronic communication could have been built at any time in history with the proper knowledge, and with only tools and materials found in the wilderness of New Jersey.'"

Comment Re:Then again... (Score 1) 131

by kria (#32873398) Attached to: The Demographics of Web Search
And my first thought was: I'm a geek who happens to be female, please don't lump me with a demo by gender! But really, I suppose that's true of most geeks. I suspect, for example, that the interest in sports of the average Slashdot reader is somewhat lower than "normal". Etc.

Comment Working on a long term project (Score 3, Interesting) 543

by kria (#32651598) Attached to: At Google, You're Old and Gray At 40

It's amazing the differences, working on a long term project. How long term? Our first released version was in the mid-nineties - and yes, we're doing more than just maintenance, even now. It's a defense project.

I'm on a team (within the larger project, which is 70-100 people) of seven people. Four are over forty, in some cases by a lot, one is about to turn forty, I'm thirty-three, and then we have our one, shiny just out of college person. We're pretty representative of the project as a whole, with the UI team trending younger than the others. The idea that older people don't know what they're doing, even on new languages, is pretty silly to me.

Comment Too little or too much plot (Score 1) 385

by kria (#32509134) Attached to: Why Are Video Game Movies So Awful?
It seems to be there must be a very narrow band in amount of plot for a conversion of game to movie to be successful. First person shooters (ala Doom) very seldom have enough plot, so it's really an action (or action-horror) movie with a thin veneer of the game laid on top of it, because they had to make too much up.

Conversely, some games have too much plot to be made into movies. With the announcement of a (direct to DVD, anime style) Dragon Age movie, the fan community I belong to when crazy. In a negative fashion. Why? We knew they would never make the choices we made. Heck, it's a mainly female community and we started with the cynical observation that they would surely pick a male hero.

So: you need a game that has a recognizable plot line to it, but not one that allows much impactful choices by the player.

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