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Motion blur photos - Beautiful!

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 03:35:26 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks:

Clip Source: digital-photography-school.com

The George Orwell Diaries

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 10:59:20 GMT

clipped by: Djiezes
clipper's remarks: Published real-time in blog format with a 70 year lag.
http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/

Clip Source: orwelldiaries.wordpress.com

THE ORWELL PRIZE

In association with the Orwell Trust, Political Quarterly and Media Standards Trust

Clip Source: orwelldiaries.wordpress.com

The Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing, is publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog. From 9th August 2008, Orwell’s domestic and political diaries (from 9th August 1938 until October 1942) will be posted in real-time, exactly 70 years after the entries were written.

The diaries are exactly as Orwell wrote them.

For more information, click here.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Though as prolific as any blogger (his collected writings occupy some 20 volumes), Orwell, who died in 1950, never had the chance to spontaneously publish his thoughts to a waiting public. Now — with some lag time — they are being made available that way at orwelldiaries.wordpress.com.

Tags: george orwell, diary, politics, news, history, literature, writer

African Masks

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 18:31:59 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: www.nmafa.si.edu

Previous Next

2/2 Mask (Detail)

Possibly Efik peoples, lower Cross River region, Calabar area, Nigeria

Clip Source: www.nmafa.si.edu

Previous Next

2/2 Mask

Bassa peoples, Liberia

Clip Source: www.nmafa.si.edu

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1/2 Mask

Wee peoples, Côte d'Ivoire

Clip Source: www.nmafa.si.edu

Mask

Clip Source: www.nmafa.si.edu

Going away for a while...

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 16:02:02 GMT

clipped by: Fast T friend
clipper's remarks: Its going to be days on the desert beach for me for a while, somewhere down there
hope to come back with renewed clipping zest, meanwhile cheers you all!

Clip Source: www.seatreker.com

Tags: v a c a t i o n

Four Reasons Not to Give Up on Interstellar Travel

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 13:42:25 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: It looks far, dark, and cold... Yet, 120 years ago, flight was science fiction as well. C. G. Jung said that all dreams of space travel are just an escape from one most difficult challenge of all, that is the journey to man's inner space.

...and see my clip from last week on suggested FTL drive. It seems the motivation to escape an inner journey just grows.

Clip Source: io9.com

According to the scientists who attended this year's Joint Propulsion Conference in Hartford, Connecticut, humans may never be able to achieve interstellar travel.

But don't add "space adventure" to your list of unlikely futures for the human species just yet — here are four reasons why.

1. We are likely to develop new propulsion methods.

2. Humans could figure out ways to endure long space journeys.

3. Earth is not the only source of fuel.

4. We may yet discover a way to achieve faster-than-light travel.

According to NASA's Robert Frisbee:

It's always science fiction until someone goes out and does it.

Tags: space, space travel, propulsion

Transformers - The Nature of Alien Life

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 12:52:47 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: The driving factor is a pragmatic desire to improve mental capacity. Alien beings may have already reached a point in their evolution where, having exhausted the potential of their biological brains, they have taken the next logical step and opted for robotic brains equipped with artificial intelligence. This brain swap may not be as far off for humans as one might think. In only a few decades, the computer revolution here on Earth has produced supercomputers capable of performing more than a quadrillion calculations per second.

According to research by Hans Moravec, an artificial-intelligence expert at Carnegie Mellon University, that rate trumps the human brain’s estimated top speed of 100 trillion calculations per second. Some scientists speculate that in a few decades, an event called the technological singularity will occur, and machines armed with computer brains will become sentient and surpass human intelligence. Civilizations equipped with technology light-years ahead

Clip Source: kemo-d7.livejournal.com

The existence of a race of sentient alien robots might be
not just possible, but inevitable.

Daniel C. Dennett points out that we do not consider chemicals to be alive. Even self-replicating crystals and clever nanobots are not "living"; we consider them to be completely mechanical. Yet we are made of these non-living, "mechanical" chemicals. Not only are we made of robots, and we still consider ourselves to be valid conscious life, but the evolution of all life is from such mindless robots.

As life is based in biology, and biology in biochemistry, chemistry is based on the cold, non-living laws of physics.

Given the current pace of development, it is easy to imagine artificial life venturing out into the universe and leaving us fragile humans behind.

In fact, we might be living in a "post-biological universe" right now, in which intelligent extraterrestrials somewhere have exchanged organic brains for artificial ones.

Tags: ai, science fiction, alien life

"Dudes, It's the 21st century Evolve! girl can be smart & sexy, science-y & sleek" ;-)

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 08:08:29 GMT

clipped by: einbar
clipper's remarks: "When physicist Lisa Randall posed for Vogue a couple of years ago, there were all sorts of outrageous criticisms of how she was playing into appearance-obsessed stereotypes and hurting the image of women in physics, blah, blah, blah. No one stopped to marvel at how incredible it was that Vogue -- which reaches millions of women around the globe each month who would never, in a million years, pick up a book or article about science -- chose to feature a woman scientist in its pages at all. If even a fraction of those millions of readers worldwide had their perceptions of female scientists changed for the better, huzzah! "

Clip Source: twistedphysics.typepad.com

smart = sexy

Clip Source: www.nerdgirls.com

Clip Source: twistedphysics.typepad.com

the Nerd Girls: a Website, blog, and collection of curricula aimed at celebrating "smart-girl individuality" and challenging "stereotypes and myths about women in science and engineering.

Apparently this site is controversial because it depicts smart women who are pretty, have a sense of style

young girls in particular are subjected to immense social pressure to look and act a certain way, and this can lead to low self-esteem, eating disorders and the like.

there is an annoying tendency for guys in science and engineering fields to act surprised and become, shall we say, overly enthusiastic at discovering a girl is both science-y smart and "teh hawt."

And Randall Monroe captured the problem perfectly in the classic XKCD comic

Dudes! It's the 21st century! Evolve already

these are serious issues. The mistake many people make

My hope is

this question of whether a girl can be both smart and sexy, girly and geeky, science-y and sleek, will have become entirely moot.