Wired has a piece on the upcoming SpaceShipOne flight. The second picture attached to the article shows that it really is going high!
Update: Well, they made it! (info in New Scientist and Wired)
"I went to the backup, and the backup saved the day," he said. He hesitated before adding, "But that was planned — it was planned to have a backup that saved the day."
A nice PDF chart of the evolutionary tree of programming languages (part of an advertising campaign by O'Reilly publishers.)
Arstechnica has a reports on the interesting concept of "work clubs", where you telecommute from a "third place" rather than home. Nice idea, I especially like the possibility of working with friends, without requiring the unlikely possibility of all being in the same company and avoiding the nasty politics that that may cause.
Re-reading Paul Graham's essay "Hackers and Painters" (in book form), the following passage stood out. I'd like to go back to university, but always suspected that there's no research topics that I'd like to do. This gives some kind of justification:
In the best case, the papers are just a formality. Hackers write cool software, and then write a paper about it, and the paper becomes a proxy for the achievement represented by the software. But often this mismatch causes problems. It's easy to drift away from building beautiful things toward building ugly things that make more suitable subjects for research papers.
Unfortunately, beautiful things don't always make the best subjects for papers. Number one, research must be original — and as anyone who has written a PhD dissertation knows, the way to be sure that you're exploring virgin territory is to to stake out a piece of ground that no one wants. Number two, research must be substantial ‐ and awkward systems yield meatier papers, because you can write about the obstacles you have to overcome in order to get things done. Nothing yields meaty problems like starting with the wrong assumptions. Most of AI is an example of this rule; if you assume that knowledge can be represented as a list of predicate logic expressions whose arguments represent abstract concepts, you'll have a lot of papers to write about how to make this work. ...
The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.
I'm reading Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters. The first chapter, "Why Nerds are Unpopular" is a must read. There is an earlier version of it on his site. It will be pretty hard to send a kid through a normal high school after reading this.
These guys are creating an open source textbook by collaborating on-line using techniques borrowed from open source software design. The textbook(s) can be freely downloaded & printed out, this is an excellent idea as textbooks are way too expensive and often out of date by the time they're printed. Unlike the wikipedia, they're aiming for a real book, not an online resource (though, they can do that easily too.)
This review is quite detailed and contains some interesting data about wireless networks in the Greater London area. It looks like there is a lot of wireless going on, with an estimated 19,451 nodes found by flying over london in a plane. People generally seem to be leaving them "open" by accident, but some are naming their nodes with "hobo" style codes used in war-chalking such as ")(" to signify a freenetwork, and "Fuck Off and use your own" to signify, well...
This article on why realistic graphics make humans look creepy in computer games is quite interesting.
If something behaves in only a slightly human way, we'll fill in the blanks—we'll read humanness into it.
...we identify more deeply with simply drawn cartoon characters ... [that don't] trigger our obsession with the missing details the way a not-quite-photorealistic character does, so we project ourselves onto [them] more easily
I haven't yet had a chance to look through Utilitarianism: past, present and future, but it seems interesting.
Taking me to that site was this experiment on censorship, which highlighted some of the problems with ISPs reactions to potential copyright violations.
I'd been rather unimpressed by the prospect of the transit of venus (see Wired News: Thousands Spy Venus' Rare Transit), but it does raise some points to ponder: No one alive had seen it before yesterday; and more people saw it yesterday than ever before in all of human history (it can't be seen with the naked eye, and only a few people had used telescopes the last few times round). I might pay a bit more attention to the next transit in 8 years.
