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anzha writes "Wired's Threat Level reports that Hans Reiser has offered up Nina's body in exchange for a reduced sentence. The deal is at the very preliminary stage. However, it should be quite the message to those that doubt Hans offed Nina: it's a little hard to offer up something that you don't have."

MOBE2001 writes "Excerpted from The Register:

[...] Multiple processor architectures introduce a new class of programming problem. Writing software to get the best performance from multiple-processor systems is far from straightforward. Issues such as synchronization, load balancing, memory protection and task distribution place new demands on programmers and those building tools that are used by developers.

Chip builders have concentrated on the use of multi threading. Intel, for example, has invested heavily in multi-threading technology with its thread building blocks (TBB) library extensions to C++. But the validity of multi threading is under attack. Veteran programmer Knuth said in a recent interview that multithreading may not be up to the task and could fail. As such, he is "unhappy" with the current trend towards multi-core architectures.

[...]Knuth — the author of the seminal programmers' manual The Art of Computer Programming and a Turing Award winner — has to be taken seriously on this. And he is not alone. Sun Microsystems' director of web technologies Tim Bray, one of the team that created XML, has also criticized multi threading. Bray said that, while he once favored the approach, he had now turned away from it. Elsewhere the criticism of multi threading is even more direct.

"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/06/gates_knuth_parallel/

MOBE2001 writes "There has been a lot of talk lately about how the use of multiple concurrent threads is considered harmful by a growing number of experts. I think the problem is much deeper than that. What many fail to realize is that multithreading is the direct evolutionary outcome of single threading. Whether running singly or concurrently with other threads, a thread is still a thread. In my writings on the software crisis, I argue that the thread concept is the root cause of every ill that ails computing, from the chronic problems of unreliability and low productivity to the current parallel programming crisis. Obviously, if a single thread is bad, multiple concurrent threads will make things worse. Fortunately, there is a way to design and program computers that does not involve the use of threads at all. See Parallel Computing: Why the Future Is Non-Algorithmic for the full article."
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2008/05/parallel-computing-why-future-is-non.html

MOBE2001 writes "The bad news is that time does not change. Spatial velocity is given as dx/dt. Velocity in time(dt/dt) is nonsensical. As simple as that. In other words, no time travel to the past or the future, no motion in space-time, no wormholes and no hanky-panky with your great, great, great grandmother. There is only the changing present, aka the NOW. This is the reason that Sir Karl Popper called spacetime, "Einstein's block universe in which nothing ever happens" (Conjectures and Refutations). The good news is that distance is an illusion and we'll be able to travel instantly from anywhere to anywhere."
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/36771/113/

MOBE2001 writes "The human brain is a super parallel signal-processing machine and, as such, it is perfectly suited to the concurrent processing of huge numbers of parallel streams of sensory and proprioceptive signals. So why is it that we find parallel programming so hard? I will argue that the reason is not because the human brain finds it hard to think in parallel, but because what passes for parallel programming is not parallel programming in the first place. Switch to a true parallel programming environment and the problem will disappear. Read the rest of the article."
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2008/03/why-parallel-programming-is-so-hard.html

There is widespread disagreement among experts on how best to design and program multicore processors. Some, like senior AMD fellow, Chuck Moore, believe that the industry should move to a new model based on a multiplicity of cores optimized for various tasks. Others (e.g., Anant Agarwal, CTO of Tilera Corporation) disagree on the ground that heterogeneous processors would be too hard to program. Some see multithreading as the best way for most applications to take advantage of parallel hardware. Others (Agarwal) consider threads to be evil. The only emerging consensus seems to be that multicore computing is facing a major crisis. [...] In a recent EETIMES article titled "Multicore puts screws to parallel-programming models", AMD's Chuck Moore is reported to have said that "the industry is in a little bit of a panic about how to program multicore processors, especially heterogeneous ones." Full article: Nightmare on Core Street.
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2008/03/nightmare-on-core-street.html

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Copied from Rebel Science News

The Darwinian Walls

There is a war going on between believers and non-believers. The believers believe that an intelligent designer created the universe and all life forms while the non-believers deny it. The Neo-Darwinists, Atheists and Materialists (the deniers) are under siege. Their mortal enemy (the believers) is at the gate. The deniers know the consequences of losing the war and they will do everything in their power to defeat their attackers. So far, they have the upper hand. They have done an excellent job at keeping the enemy at bay and they have surrounded themselves with near-impregnable walls. The believers have made several attempts to breach the walls without much success.

There is no question that a careful examination of a design can reveal a lot about its designer. However, if the designer happens to be a highly advanced entity (or a group of entities), the design can be so complex, so perfect and so tightly integrated with its environment as to be almost indistinguishable from nature. Regardless of the evidence, the non-believers can always argue for a naturalistic origin. They can muddy the waters to the point of rendering any dissent ineffective. They have, in effect, built a near-invincible fortress around themselves. The believers realize this. They know they must maintain the pressure but they also know that, in order to breach through the walls, they need a new plan of attack and a more effective weapon. They must regroup and reevaluate their strategy.

Secret Message From the Gods

I believe that there is another way to approach this fight. Assuming that the intelligent design hypothesis is correct, one can argue that, since humans are the dominant species on earth, the designers must have had a special interest in us when they began their project. My hypothesis is that they are conducting an experiment, the purpose of which is to distinguish between believers and deniers. Given their vast intellect, it is certain that they anticipated the current conflict. If so, it is highly likely that they would have left us a secret message, a message so powerful that its mere publication would cause the collapse of the materialist fortress. The message would have to be coded and presented in such a way that only the believers would recognize it as such. Otherwise the deniers would do everything in their power to destroy it.

The Ideal Hiding Place

By far, the favorite weapon of the neo-Darwinist/materialist camp is the accusation that religion is not science because religion offers no falsifiable hypotheses. Of course, when atheists mention religion, what they usually have in mind is Christianity. The main target of their derision and contempt is the Christian Bible. To them, the Bible is no more than a book of fables and superstition that has nothing to do with science. Even many believers are convinced that the Bible has little to do with science. However, and this is my point, what better place is there to hide a secret scientific message than the Bible? I'm talking about the kind of jaw-dropping scientific knowledge that would cause the entire world to stand up and take notice. The enemy would never suspect it. They would ridicule it. They'd have to ridicule it simply because they can't help it: mockery is in the nature of the denier. Which is not necessarily a bad thing for the believer, when you think about it, because the element of surprise always works in favor of the attacker.

Bringing Down the Walls

Consider that there are lots of mysterious symbolic passages in the Bible that Christians have a hard time interpreting. But what if those passages were actual coded messages for our age, the age of enlightenment? (Note: I am not referring to the Bible Code nonsense that became popular in the nineties). This has been my thesis and the subject of my research for the last eight years or so. I have identified a few passages in the books of Revelation and Zechariah as having to do with intelligence and the human brain. I believe that the Bible contains the secret of intelligence among other things. It is still work in progress but already I have made a few breakthroughs. I recently posted a couple of falsifiable predictions about the human cerebellum. My goal is to use my understanding of the metaphorical texts to design and build a true artificial intelligence. The Christian AI! It is only a matter of time. When that happens, the Darwinian walls will come crumbling down like the old walls of Jericho. Sweet revenge. Stay tuned.

Intelligent Design Links

Discover Institute
Uncommon Descent
Research Intelligent Design
Intelligent Design - The Future
Post-Darwinist
Evolution News and Views
International Society for Complexity, Information and Design
Access Research Network
Expelled

A DARPA-funded research project at UCLA has wrapped up a set of animal trials testing the effects of inhalation of the brain chemical orexin A, a deficiency of which is a characteristic of narcolepsy. From the article:

The monkeys were deprived of sleep for 30 to 36 hours and then given either orexin A or a saline placebo before taking standard cognitive tests. The monkeys given orexin A in a nasal spray scored about the same as alert monkeys, while the saline-control group was severely impaired. The study, published in the Dec. 26 edition of The Journal of Neuroscience, found orexin A not only restored monkeys' cognitive abilities but made their brains look "awake" in PET scans. Siegel said that orexin A is unique in that it only had an impact on sleepy monkeys, not alert ones, and that it is "specific in reversing the effects of sleepiness" without other impacts on the brain.

Researchers seem cautious to bill the treatment as a replacement for sleep, as it is not clear that adjusting brain chemistry could have the same physical benefits of real sleep in the long run. The drug is aimed at replacing amphetamines used by drowsy long-haul military pilots, but there would no doubt be large demand for such a remedy thanks to its apparent lack of side-effects.

An anonymous reader writes "A short essay on why parallel programming is so hard and on how to fix the problem. Excerpted from Parallel Programming, Math and the Curse of the Algorithm:

Adding more processing cores to a CPU should have been a relatively painless evolution of computer technology but it turned out to be a real pain in the ass, programming wise. Why? To understand the problem, we must go back to the very beginning of the computer age, close to a hundred and fifty years ago, when an Englishman named Charles Babbage designed the world's first general purpose computer, the analytical engine. Babbage was a mathematician and like most mathematicians of his day, he longed for a time when he would be freed from the tedium of performing long calculation sequences. All he wanted was a reasonably fast calculator that could reliably execute mathematical sequences or algorithms. The idea of using a single fast central processor to emulate the behaviors of multiple small parallel processors was the furthest thing from his mind. Indeed, the very first program written for the analytical engine by Babbage's friend and fellow mathematician, Lady Ada Lovelace, was a table of instructions meant to calculate the Bernoulli numbers, a sequence of rational numbers. Neither Babbage nor Lady Ada should be faulted for this but current modern computers are still based on Babbage's sequential model. Is it any wonder that the computer industry is having such a hard time making the transition from sequential to parallel computing?

"

mlimber writes "The NYTimes science section has up an interesting article discussing the nature of scientific laws. It comes partly in reply to physicist Paul Davies, whose recent op-ed in same paper lit up the blogosphere and solicited flurry of reader responses to the editorial page. It asks, 'Are [laws of nature] merely fancy bookkeeping, a way of organizing facts about the world? Do they govern nature or just describe it? And does it matter that we don't know and that most scientists don't seem to know or care where they come from?' The current article proceeds to survey different views on the matter. The author seems to be poking fun at himself by quoting Richard Feynman's epigram, 'Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.'"

An anonymous reader writes "From the article:

According to my interpretation of the Biblical texts, the cerebellum is a supervised automaton. It is trained by the motor cortex to take over certain routine motor tasks whenever the basal ganglia and motor cortex are busy reasoning internally or engaging in some other motor activity. My understanding of the metaphorical messages to the church of Pergamum (Broca's area) and Laodicea (cerebellum) in the book of Revelation is that speech is always an attentional or volitional (as opposed to automatic) process that involves corrective feedback from the basal ganglia. The cerebellum is not directly involved in processing speech and language. The indication is that the cerebellum can have motor control over the entire body except the mouth, throat and tongue muscles. This means that activities like eating, chewing and swallowing are also excluded from cerebellar control.

"
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2007/12/falsifiable-prediction-about-human.html

Zalbik writes "It seems that Activision's legal battles over the latest edition of the Guitar Hero franchise are not over yet. Having been sued previously over the inclusion of a song cover that sounds too much like the original, they are now being subject to a class action suit due to the fact that the Wii edition of the game only outputs mono sound, despite packaging claims to the contrary.

Apparently their offer to replace any defective discs free of charge isn't enough for some people, so Samuel Livingston of San Diego (represented by the law firm KamberEdelson, LLC) has filed a class action suit over this issue. previously covered lawsuits over the latest edition of the Guitar Hero franchise."
http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/12/activision-sued.html

Anonymous Cow writes "By now just about everyone has heard the story of the teenager who hanged herself after receiving nasty messages on her MySpace from a parent posing as a teenage boy. In June 2006 another teenage girl committed suicide after being sexually assaulted by a man she met on MySpace. DailyTech reports the family of the assaulted suicide victim is suing MySpace, claiming the site knew about prior sexual assaults by predators using the site and failed to implement security measures to prevent assaults from happening again."
http://www.dailytech.com/Family+Sues+MySpace+After+Teen+Commits+Suicide/article10013.htm