Yet another up-to-the-minute story.

Q: If an atom slams into another atom in the forest, and nobody is around to hear it, did it make a phonon or not? A: Yes.

They're reinventing the wheel. A better solution is to use an inverted hyperbolic cosine catenary curve.

People who live in brick houses with tile roofs in earthquake zones are just asking for trouble.

I know Yi So-Yeon, the first Korean astronaut. She said she hated space. She wanted to throw up the whole time, and felt like her head was going to explode. (Both of these symptoms are caused by gravity not pulling things downwards, as well as the vestibular system being screwed up.)

Personally, I have been on a Zero-G "Vomit comet" flight, and it *was* "frickin awesome" until about the 15th parabola, then I started feeling extremely nauseated. I'm lucky we landed before I needed to throw up (some poor shmuck paid $6000 for the flight and had to strap himself into a seat so he could throw up constantly into a bag after the very first parabola). However, I have never felt more motion-sick -- it was *awful* -- and it didn't subside for over five hours after we landed.

Almost all hardware manufacturers *do* mine with all the hardware they make. They make it and mine with it even after you have paid for it. They then ship it to you right before the break-even point. There are endless stories out there about missed shipping deadline after missed shipping deadline, mining hardware companies making empty promises, and would-be miners receiving hardware a few months too late, by which point their projected return is orders of magnitude smaller than it would have been due to the increase in network hash rate between when they paid for the hardware and when they received it.

All this means is that OKC's match algorithms suck: there's only a weak correlation between match scores and real-world compatibility (like with every other dating site).

Building roads all over a continent is one of the fastest ways to decimate species.

Oh, and the reason I finally got PRK was because I realized PRK cost the same amount as my Canon EOS 5D Mark II, and I valued seeing things with my eyes more than through a camera lens. I sold the camera and got PRK.

If you get Lasik, the structural integrity of your cornea will never be the same as it was. One impact of a branch on your eye, or a tag from your jacket flicking you in the eye, could dislodge the corneal flap... and trust me, that's an injury you don't want to have.

I opted for PRK instead of Lasik for the following three reasons: (1) there's no flap with PRK, so no loss of structural integrity; (2) PRK reportedly causes fewer problems with dry eyes (because you're not severing the nerves within the cornea, just cutting off the nerve endings); and (3) PRK removes less of the cornea than Lasik, making a later "touch up" operation more of an option.

Recovery from PRK was brutal -- for two weeks you can't see anything ("I see men as trees, walking") and it feels like someone has poked both your eyes with their thumbs. Five years later I still have frequent issues with dry eyes -- primarily, I often can't really open my eyes when I wake up until I have put drops in, they're very painful otherwise. Getting salt from the Dead Sea in my eyes recently was excruciatingly painful -- more so than for normal people. I don't have halos at night, but if my eyes are dry I get some glare. Would I do it again? I think so -- life without glasses is awesome, and my vision is better than 20/20 now. I can live life without glasses for the next 10 years, then only need them while reading once presybyopia sets in. But the dry eyes almost make me say no, maybe it wasn't worth it. I go back and forth on this. And I miss the style factor of wearing glasses, to be honest.

From metalev.org: Every news outlet is currently covering the story that a chatbot pretending to be a 13-year old Ukranian boy has deceived 33% of human judges into thinking it is a human, thereby "passing the Turing test for the first time". There are so many problems with the Turing test (even with the numerous refinements to it that many have proposed) that I don't know if it will ever tell us anything useful. The creators of the above chatbot hinted that part of their success in convincing the judges was that “his age ... makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn’t know everything” -- in other words, to make a believable bot, you can't give your bot super-human knowledge or capabilities, even if this is technically possible to do (e.g. computers can multiply large numbers almost instantly). Limiting computational power to appear human-like is known as "artificial stupidity". The need for artificial stupidity to pass the Turing test illustrates one of the deepest issues with the test, and one that cannot be fixed by simply tweaking the rules: the Turing test is a test of human dupe-ability, not of machine intelligence. I'm pretty sure we'll start seeing several claims per year that a bot has "passed the Turing test", followed by a flurry of discussion about what was actually tested and whether the result is believable or even meaningful, until it becomes so cliche'd to say that your bot passed the Turing test that nobody with a halfway decent AI would actually *want* to claim that their AI passed a test of this form. Hopefully we see the day when the Turing test is inverted, and we realize we need a test to establish that someone is a "genuine human" and not a bot ;-) But until then, we still have a heck of a lot of work to do!

In Physics, FTL = Faster Than Light. Nice pun. However, the sheer horrendous complexity of the system they described in the blog post indicates all that is wrong with Javascript as "the assembly language of the Web". Why, oh why, haven't we replaced Javascript with something cleaner, more robust and more efficient? It's 2014, people.

(1) So since it works in worms, it will work in humans? (2) And of course nature never thought of this before or tried this before. Reminds me of a TV character in the 80s (was it ALF? or Steve Urkel?) who was modifying car engines to get 200mpg. Trouble is, 500 miles down the road, the engine fell out of the car. (3) Maybe nature doesn't want us living for 200 years? See (2).

Forget Fortran, I want to know why anybody in their right mind is still using the obtuse juggernaut mongrel of a language known as C++ in 2014. (Even with the 11 and 14 versions don't make things any better, they only wallpaper over obtuse features with other obtuse features... very few people alive truly know all the weird quirks of C++ inside and out.)

Just wondering.