It's a common misunderstanding that evolution has a "goal". You see this most often when evolution is presented as a progression with human-kind as the end result. Evolution simply selects for organisms that are more well adapted to the current local environment; it does not select organisms that are further along the path to some "goal". Mario Ageno, a professor of biophysics put it like this:
"The ideal of a bacterium is not to become a man, but to become two bacteria."
Researchers at Philips have created a laser-based optical pointing device that would integrate nicely into small electronic devices. It's kind of like a touch-pad, but instead of a "large" pad on which you slide your finger around, there's a small contact point that you slide your finger over. A laser tracks how your finger moves. At first it could replace the "scroll buttons" found on most cell phones, or the "jog dials" found on some (these mechanical bits are always the first to go). You could also add it to PDAs for a more mouse-like interface.
 Optical scrolling |
 Prototype device |
Don't bet the farm on biometric authentication yet…
http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/11/11
(English translation from German "c't", Nov 2002, pg 114)
http://www.otmtech.com/vpen.asp
Instead, the pen converts motion at the tip into latin (or asian) characters and sends to your PDA, cell phone (think SMS), etc. It can also send the raw movements to allow you to sketch.
I've seen the idea floating around for several years, but this looks like it might be the first company to actually implement it (although their site does not mention when it will be available, so maybe not…)
… or "Why is the circumference of the Earth almost exactly 40 million meters?"
http://www.amasci.com/amateur/traffic/t
The animated gifs are informative but a bit annoying; don't let them "drive" you out of the site, it's interesting stuff.
There is one "big picture" item that is missing: the total capacity of the road. If a road can only carry 100 cars per minute per lane, it doesn't matter how people drive if 1000 cars per minute want to use that section of road. In that case you're going to have backups no matter what you do. The only solution in that case is to convince people to wait a while before taking their trip. The techniques outlined here work best when the road is nearing its capacity but is not yet at capacity.
I guess you could argue that delaying your trip is just an extreme form of friendly merging behavior… ;-)
BTW, the idea behind on-ramp traffic lights is to space out the cars that are trying to merge (one half of the problem). The benefit of the lights is not obvious, so lots of people complain about them. Interestingly, Minnesota tried an experiment in 2001 where they turned off all the on-ramp traffic lights for several weeks. At that point it became obvious that the lights had been helping because traffic immediately got worse. So everybody voted to turn them back on and now traffic is back to where it was before.
I hate policies that say that users have to change passwords periodically because that way the system is "more secure". Bruce Schneier has discussed this a few times in Crypto-Gram. I also like this recent post on Slashdot by dangermouse:
That is the single most hare-brained bit of common security "wisdom" in the world.
Years ago, I picked a password that's random as hell and was very difficult to remember. No password cracker– dictionary *or* brute force– has broken it yet. I use this password on about ten systems.
If I changed those passwords on a regular basis, I'd have to come up with something easier to remember to make up for the decreased learning time. That would likely make my password less secure.
I keep running into admins who– by hook or by crook– make their users change passwords periodically. The result? Passwords on Post-It notes; passwords that are the names of pets or wives or firstborn children; sets of passwords that are absurdly simple and that get cycled through.
If they had just let the users keep their original passwords and run a cracker against the shadow file to turn up the overly simple ones, their systems would be a lot more secure. But somebody told them changing passwords frequently was a good idea, and by god their users are going to change passwords frequently.
Bryan Hayes has a short history of the technology of disk drives. He speculates on consumer priced multi-terabyte drives by the next decade.
But the best part is at the end when he speculates on how what we will do with room for all those bits:
I have some further questions about life in the terabyte era. Except for video, it's not clear how to get all those trillions of bytes onto a disk in the first place. No one is going to type it, or copy it from 180,000 CD-ROMs. Suppose it comes over the Internet. With a T1 connection, running steadily at top speed, it would take nearly 20 years to fill up 120 terabytes. Of course a decade from now everyone may have a link much faster than a T1 line, but such an increase in bandwidth cuts both ways. With better communication, there is less need to keep local copies of information. For the very reason that you can download anything, you don't need to.
The economic implications are also perplexing. Suppose you have identified 120 terabytes of data that you would like to have on your laptop, and you have a physical means of transferring the files. How will you pay for it all? At current prices, buying 120 million books or 40 million songs or 30,000 movies would put a strain on most family budgets. Thus the real limit on practical disk-drive capacity may have nothing to do with superparamagnetism; it may simply be the cost of content.
On the other hand, it’s also possible that the economic lever will act in the other direction. Recent controversies over intellectual property rights suggest that restricting the flow of bits by either legal or technical means is going to be very difficult in a world of abundant digital storage and bandwidth. Setting the price of information far above the cost of its physical medium is at best a metastable situation; it probably cannot last indefinitely. A musician may well resent the idea that the economic value of her work is determined by something so remote and arcane as the dimensions of bit cells on plated glass disks, but this is hardly the first time that recording and communications technologies have altered the economics of the creative arts; consider the phonograph and the radio.
Still another nagging question is how anyone will be able to organize and make sense of a personal archive amounting to 120 terabytes. Computer file systems and the human interface to them are already creaking under the strain of managing a few gigabytes; using the same tools to index the Library of Congress is unthinkable. Perhaps this is the other side of the economic equation: Information itself becomes free (or do I mean worthless?), but metadata — the means of organizing information — is priceless.
The notion that we may soon have a surplus of disk capacity is profoundly counterintuitive. A well-known corollary of Parkinson’s Law says that data, like everything else, always expands to fill the volume allotted to it. Shortage of storage space has been a constant of human history; I have never met anyone who had a hard time filling up closets or bookshelves or file cabinets. But closets and bookshelves and file cabinets don't double in size every year. Now it seems we face a curious Malthusian catastrophe of the information economy: The products of human creativity grow only arithmetically, whereas the capacity to store and distribute them increases geometrically. The human imagination can't keep up.
Or maybe it's only my imagination that can't keep up.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/calen
This is nice page (using Javascript) that lets you convert between Gregorian, Julian, Hebrew, etc calendars. Also has nice concise explanations of the origins of the calendars (one or two paragraphs).
Most of the characters in the Star Wars universe talk about democracy and freedom, but what about their actions?
Jonathan V. Last wrote an editorial piece, The Case for the Empire, after watching Ep2: Attack of the Clones.
David Brin wrote two pieces for Salon, "Star Wars" despots vs. "Star Trek" populists and What's wrong (and right) with "The Phantom Menace". After these articles were published, he received a lot of "feedback" from Star Wars fans, so he wrote a response on his own website.