It's ironic that we share more of ourselves than ever, pollsters should be having a hard time guessing what we think. From the millions of tweets and Facebook updates and Google searches we collectively make each day, plus modern text parsing and data mining techniques, we should be able to approximate something like the political pulse of the population. I have a feeling that we reveal a lot more with our online behavior than what we ever reveal to pollsters, it's just a matter of someone scooping up and processing the data.

That's what's so great about the DARPA challenge: It reveals the difference between a lab's PR videos and the actual performance of robots they produce. It's not like Berkeley didn't try to score the two million from DARPA. IIRC, they failed. Comically.

How about an Occulus Rift for everyone, which shows you "acceleration-appropriate" visuals to prevent carsickness, but makes it look like you're in a completely transparent bubble canopy driving through someplace that's a lot more interesting than where you actually are? If you get bored, you can add things for you to shoot at with your "laser pistol".

First of all, this is the link that the story should have included. It includes updates of the scoreboard, etc. On it you will see that even though the brains are collectively beating Claudico, the computer is actually over $100,000 ahead against Jason Les, a feat that almost no human could match. Yes, Claudico is down against the other three, but these are the top players in the world, and most human pros would get clobbered much worse by these guys. Are we really so hard to impress? This is the first time that something like this has been tried, and already, the computer is performing on a level that most poker pros would love to reach.

"Geoengineering is a bad idea." "Why?"
"Because it hasn't been tested and could have unpredictable consequences."
"So let's do some testing and improve our models of how it works."
"No way, we can't be doing research on geoengineering!" "Why not?"
"Because geoengineering is such a bad idea!" "Why?"
"Because it hasn't been tested and could have unpredictable consequences."
...

I'm not so sure. You didn't need to be wearing stupid goggles to use Bob. But yeah, I made the same connection when I saw this demo: It's Bob, in threeee deeeeeeee! There's even a virtual yellow dog.

Nobody said that the nerves are going to work. Post transplant, the person will certainly be paralyzed from the neck down. That's why this kind of surgery is only appropriate for a paraplegic whose body is about to fail. He or she is not going to stop being a paraplegic, but might get many extra years of life by acquiring a robust new body.

It's pretty simple. If the excess power I generate has more value to me if I store it in a battery, rather than sell it to the grid, then I can just cut my connection to the grid. The fact that they're being such jerks would increase my incentive to cut them off.

If Norway does the right thing and opens up the FM spectrum for people and personal their short range transmitters, maybe we'll find something more useful to do with the FM bands. And since Norway are doing this first, they have a special opportunity to set a good precedent.

I hope it's not winter.

Everybody seems to be saying: "Oh noes, this is soooo bad! It's gonna make China get up off its ass and finally give Intel some actual competition!!!"

And here I am, thinking that we all stand to benefit if Intel got some actual competition.

I doubt that this is right. It's just a misconception to say that in a first-world society, fertility is pretty much the same thing as attractiveness. It's not. In fact, the people who are broadly judged to be most desirable - the people with Ph.D's, sixpack abs and fancy jobs - have fewer children that the average. A much stronger driver of first-world fertility in a place like NL is: Who's sloppy with their birth control, who's impulsive enough to think things like "Yeah, I should just have the baby!", who's someone that thinks that having a child is going to fix the problems in their relationship, etc.

For these fertility increasers to be correlated with height is just weird and hard to explain, but it's obviously real, so there much be some mechanism. But that mechanism is not as simple as "Taller men get more girls".

I'll make one prediction right now: No car of the future, clever or dumb, will be accelerated and decelerated with a single pedal oval, the right half of which does the former and the left half does the latter. We might all think that's completely obvious, but look at the interior photo of the prototype. Even Steve Jobs would think it's suicidal.

The ISS was a huge waste of NASA money, costing as much as all of NASA's "space exploration activities" combined (source:). This prevented, killed and neutered many missions that would have produced genuine science. It was simply a mistake. So hooray, let's make a bigger one!

Do you really think there are going to be humans in LEO turning bolts with hand-held wrenches, and that's how the Mars ship will be built? Did you not notice that even in the safety of Earth's factories, humans aren't really doing that kind of stuff anymore? By the time we get around to building a Mars ship, I doubt our automated manufacturing machines will be worse than now, and unlike humans, these machines can actually be designed to perform optimally in space.