Clipmarks | Today's Top Clips

Free Speech and the Right to Offend

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 07:49:30 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Free speech is indeed precious, but that doesn't mean that we have to defend without qualification every moron who abuses it

Saying that we have a right to offend skips over the question of whether we are right to offend. I have a right to tell random strangers that I think they're ugly, or that they have terrible taste in clothes, but it would be wrong of me to exercise that right,

we don't just utter words, we do things with them, as the Oxford philosopher JL Austin put it. When words belittle or mock, they can reinforce prejudice and hierarchies that have very real effects on people's lives. Mockery of those already on the margins can shore up the very barriers that limit their life chances.

Tags: morons

50 Billion Suns! -The Biggest Single Object in the Universe

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 01:17:51 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Based on this self-regulating maximum rate, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Massachusetts, and the European Southern Observatory, Chile, have calculated an upper limit for these mega-mammoth masses. Fifty billion suns, that's 100 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 kg, otherwise known as "ridiculously stupidly big" and triple the size of the largest observed black hole, OJ 287.

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

Scientists have determined the mass of the largest things that could possibly exist in our universe, and they don't appear in the Oprah studio audience.

New results have placed an upper limit on the current size of black holes - and at fifty billion suns it's pretty damn big. That's a hundred thousand tredagrams, and you'll never get the chance to use that word in relation to anything else.

While there's theoretically no upper limit on how big a black hole can be, there are hard limits on how big they could have become by now. The universe has only existed for a finite amount of time, and even the most voracious black hole can only suck in matter at a certain rate. The bigger the black hole, the bigger the gravitational field and the faster it can pull in matter - but that same huge gravitational gradient means that the same matter can release huge amounts of radiation as it falls, blasting other matter further away.

Tags: astronomy, cosmology

The Evolving AI Ecosystem

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 01:13:38 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: He takes his theory further, all the way in to the tubes of the internet. In collaboration with Professor Tim Berners-Lee – the co-inventor of the World Wide Web – the pair have been investigating the next generation Web. “What is emerging now is a digital ecosystem,’ says Professor Shadbolt, ‘involving lots of simple systems which connect millions of complex ones – humans!”

And there begins to be a certain amount of logic and a lessening of the fear I feel for the day when I am some robots whipping boy. We see such developments already in websites such as Facebook and Flickr, and programs such as Google Earth and World of Warcraft. We are being linked together, ever so slowly by a collective consciousness.

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

One of the greatest fears of many is the underlying knowledge that of all the wonderful advances of technology, the internet and robotics is simply bringing us closer to being subservient to our robotic overlords.

However British Computer Society President and ECS Professor of Artificial Intelligence Nigel Shadbolt, believes differently.

Shadbolt believes that the future of artificial intelligence will be much different, though no less exciting, than previously expected.

Instead of intelligence that is a “brain in a box”, we are seeing intelligence that is assistive, adaptive and flexible.

In other words, instead of an intelligence that is “…agonizing about their existence or whether we are about to switch them off” we are seeing the growth of intelligence that, in years to come, will immerse us and center around humans, rather than feel the need to enslave humans.

There will be micro-intelligences all around us – systems that are very good and adaptive at particular tasks

Tags: ai, the web, futurism, man machine interface

16 Websites to Super Charge Your English Vocabulary

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:35:15 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.dumblittleman.com

It won't be an exaggeration if I say that English is the language of this world. Although Mandarin (Chinese) tops the list of most widely spoken languages in the world, we know that it's English which connects people around the world. Hence it won't harm to get a deeper understanding of this ubiquitous language and work towards improving your grammar and vocabulary.

Visuwords
Visuwords is an awesome visual tool to find new words and improve your vocabulary. When you look up a word in this tool, it shows a neat graph which connects that word to various other words based on different relationships between them. You can hover over each word to get its definition and also zoom-in and zoom-out using your mouse wheel. It's certainly an excellent dictionary plus thesaurus.

Dictionary.com

Thesaurus.com

Definr

Merriam-Webstar Online

MetaGlossary

Thsrs

Wordsmith

BBC Learning English

ESL Quizzes

Ninjawords

About.com's Quizzes

Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus

AskOxford

Urban Dictionary

Alpha Dictionary

Tags: language, english, vocabulary

13 of the Coolest Art Installations in the History of Burning Man

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 03:17:21 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: From spiritual enlightenment to experimental collaboration to sheer mind-tripping revelry, numerous motivations drive Burners to make the yearly pilgrimage to Black Rock City, NV. But one core principle unites them all: radical self-expression.

Read more details on site.

Clip Source: matadornights.com

Tags: art, burning man

The girl in the window

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:31:38 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman
clipper's remarks: Rescuing Dani

Clip Source: www.tampabay.com

Dani, 9, has a new family now, and a new chance at life thanks to her brother William, 10, and parents Diane and Bernie Lierow.

Part One: The Feral Child

A little girl, pale, with dark eyes, lifted a dirty blanket above the broken glass and peered out

The girl looked young, 5 or 6, and thin. Too thin. Her cheeks seemed sunken; her eyes were lost.

child abuse investigation. Someone had finally called the police

No one has any way of telling what lies behind Dani’s big brown eyes and vacant stare.

"Unbelievable

The worst I've ever seen.

When he bent to lift her, she yelped like a lamb. "It felt like I was picking up a baby," Holste said. "I put her over my shoulder, and that diaper started leaking down my leg."

She was almost 7 years old.

Part Two: Becoming Dani

Part Three: The Mother

A special multimedia report: A video slideshow about Danielle’s progress, including speech therapy sessions.

Is she okay?

She has learned to

let herself be held

chew ham

swim

She knows her name is Dani.

Futurese- English in 3000 AD

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:13:57 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: So how far will another thousand years take it?

Clip Source: www.xibalba.demon.co.uk

Predicting the future of the English language is rather easy, in the short term. The odds are, over the next few decades its New World dialects are going to gain increasing global dominance, accelerating the demise of thousands of less fortunate languages but at long last allowing a single advertisement to reach everybody in the world. Then after a century or two of US dominance some other geopolitical grouping will gain the ascendancy, everyone will learn Chechen or Patagonian or whatever it is, and history will continue as usual. Ho hum. But apart from that... what might the language actually look like in a thousand years time? For comparison, the English spoken at the turn of the last millennium looked like this:

Wé cildra biddaþ þé, éalá láréow, þæt þú taéce ús sprecan rihte, forþám ungelaérede wé sindon, and gewæmmodlíce we sprecaþ...

We children beg you, teacher, that you should teach us to speak correctly, because we are ignorant and we speak corruptly...

Tags: language, future