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A Few Million Virtual Monkeys Randomly Recreate Shakespeare 312

First time accepted submitter eljefe6a writes "On September 23 at 2:30 PST the A Million Amazonian Monkeys project successfully recreated A Lover's Complaint. This is the first time a work of Shakespeare has actually been randomly reproduced. It is one small step for a monkey, one giant leap for virtual primates everywhere. From the article: 'For this project, I used Hadoop, Amazon EC2, and Ubuntu Linux. Since I don’t have real monkeys, I have to create fake Amazonian Map Monkeys. The Map Monkeys create random data in ASCII between a and z. It uses Sean Luke’s Mersenne Twister to make sure I have fast, random, well behaved monkeys. Once the monkey’s output is mapped, it is passed to the reducer which runs the characters through a Bloom Field membership test. If the monkey output passes the membership test, the Shakespearean works are checked using a string comparison. If that passes, a genius monkey has written 9 characters of Shakespeare. The source material is all of Shakespeare’s works as taken from Project Gutenberg.'"
Power

Limits On Growth of Energy Use and Economies 482

snoop.daub writes "Dr. Tom Murphy, professor of astrophysics at UCSD, has a new blog called 'Do The Math,' and the first few posts are doozies. In the first, he shows the impossibility of continued exponential growth in energy use. Even if a new, 'free' energy source is developed, thermodynamic limits on efficiency mean that the heat associated with converting this energy into useful work will increase the temperature of the earth to unbearable levels within 300 years. In the second, he extends the argument to economic growth. The timescales there are faster, only 50-100 years. Fascinating stuff. Time to stop breeding, folks, or to get our butts into space."

Comment Re:speaking as a Canadian to the USTR (Score 1) 277

Because the people who back he IIPA are the same people behind the networks who stream everything for free to people within the US (via HULU etc), but decided it's not worth their time to try and secure advertisers in other countries, and put them all on a IP ban list. It shouldn't be a big surprise that when there are no legitimate avenues to obtain things, people would resort to piracy. But I doubt they actually care, because it gives them fodder to argue for tighter restrictions..

Comment hypocrasy (Score 1) 375

Perhaps then they should reconsider hiring marketing firms to create bogus youtube accounts (which go to great lengths to appear to be owned by trendy youths) to post full videos of their artists works. You can't complain about the medium if you are using it to your advantage...

Comment Who didn't see this coming? (Score 1) 2166

Gun control is clearly to blame -- If she had been packing heat, she could have defended herself! But seriously folks... If any good comes of this, it will be in the form of a people's movement that calls for greater responsibility in political speech, to disagree rather than demonize each other. Here's hoping Jon Stewart picks this up and runs with it.

Comment Re:not just japan (Score 1) 315

Hi there. It's great to see that you've bought into the video game industry's marketing juggernaut (thereby identifying yourself as a gamer, keen to spend more money on said games), but some of those companies have contributed some quality titles; possibly not of your generation or preferred genre, but true none-the-less.

Comment Re:New headline (Score 1) 620

CCP is one of the few companies that understands it's player-base and consistently treats them right. EVE players do not want to be babysat. They do not want to be protected from their own stupidity. If they want to be able to take a risk, they don't want some in-game barrier preventing them from doing what they want with their own (virtual) property. And so, CCP lifted the restrictions on PLEX, with a HEAVY warning as to what could happen if a player choses to leave a station with PLEX in the hold. So what does this guy do? He takes 74 of them, in a KESTRAL (which, for those unfamiliar with EVE, is basically a newbie ship). No amount of armed escorts would have made a difference because this ship will be rubble in 2 shots. This person chose to gamble, and they lost.
Earth

New Batfish Species Found Under Gulf Oil Spill 226

eDarwin writes "Researchers have discovered two previously unknown species of bottom-dwelling fish in the Gulf of Mexico, living right in the area affected by the BP oil spill. Researchers identified new species of pancake batfishes, a flat fish rarely seen because of the dark depths they favor. They are named for the clumsy way they 'walk' along the sea bottom, like a bat crawling."

Comment good luck (Score 3, Insightful) 90

i wish them the best (and will sign up when i can) but i can't help but think this will fail hard. the vast majority of facebook users are not concerned with privacy, rather they actively seek to do away with it. they want to make sure each of their 700 friends knows every inconsequential detail of their daily lives; facebook provides them with the platform to do this, diaspora likely will not. diaspora may find a niche but i can't see it taking a significant dent out of facebook's market share.

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