28 September 2012

Schumachers Aus bei Mercedes: Er will doch nur fahren

Schumachers Aus bei Mercedes: Er will doch nur fahren

http://www.spiegel.de/images/image-406993-thumbsmall-jcor.jpg

Michael Schumacher fliegt bei Mercedes raus - und viele Sportfans fragen sich: Hat er mit seinem Comeback-Versuch sein eigenes Denkmal zerstört? Im Gegenteil. Sein Scheitern zeugt von wahrer Größe, von der wir alle lernen können.



via SPIEGEL ONLINE - Schlagzeilen http://www.spiegel.de/sport/formel1/kommentar-warum-wir-von-schumachers-aus-bei-mercedes-lernen-koennen-a-858535.html

27 September 2012

Richard Feynman Explains Where Trees Actually Come From and How Fire Works

Richard Feynman Explains Where Trees Actually Come From and How Fire Works

http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/feynman1.jpg

How the light and heat of the sun made their way into your fireplace.


We’ve already seen that trees can be powerful purveyors of philosophy, keepers of deep time, and visual metaphors for evolution — but where do they actually come from?


There’s a reason Richard Feynmanchampion of scientific culture, graphic novel hero, crusader for integrity, holder of the key to science, adviser of future generations — earned himself the moniker “The Great Explainer.” In this short clip from BBC’s 1983 series Fun to Imagine, Feynman explains where trees actually come from the air and why the light and heat emanating from a burning fire are in fact the light and heat of the sun, “stored sun” that made its way into the fireplace via the substance of the tree:



Is this the second most astounding fact about the universe, or what?


Krulwich Wonders


Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.



Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right. Holstee







via Brain Pickings http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/27/richard-feynman-fire-trees/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+brainpickings%2Frss+%28Brain+Pickings%29

26 September 2012

RT @Cmdr_Hadfield: Astronaut Dessert - strawberries and vanilla pudding, floating in the Space Station. Suni said it was delicious! http://t.co/zCuXgQs5

http://twitter.com/nimmerm33r/status/250963065170976768 on Twitter.

Sowas machen Sternenflottenkapitäne also in ihrer Freizeit. Original Post from William Shatner: Meet my world champi... http://t.co/DZnM3Tvn

http://twitter.com/nimmerm33r/status/250859430017654784 on Twitter.

EU working group produces the stupidest set of proposed Internet rules in the entire history of the human race

EU working group produces the stupidest set of proposed Internet rules in the entire history of the human race

http://craphound.com/images/762566887_696f454be7_b.jpg



An EU working group that's been charged with coming up with recommendations for a terrorist-free European Internet has been brainstorming the stupidest goddamned ideas you've ever read, which are now widely visible, thanks to a leaked memo. The group, CleanIT, which is composed of cops, governments, and some NGOs from across Europe, has been given €400,000 to make its recommendations, and a document dated August 2012 sets out some of the group's thinking to date. As mentioned, it's pretty amazingly bad. Like, infra-stupid, containing strains of stupidity so low and awful they can't be perceived with unaided human apparatus. Here's Ars Technica's summary of the ideas in the memo:



* "Knowingly providing hyperlinks on websites to terrorist content must be defined by law as illegal just like the terrorist content itself"

* "Governments must disseminate lists of illegal, terrorist websites"

* "The Council Regulation (EC) No 881/2002 of 27 May 2002 (art 1.2) should be explained that providing Internet services is included in providing economics instruments to Al Qaeda (and other terrorist persons and organisations designated by the EU) and therefore an illegal act"

* "On Voice over IP services it must be possible to flag users for terrorist activity."

* "Internet companies must allow only real, common names."

* "Social media companies must allow only real pictures of users."

* "At the European level a browser or operating system based reporting button must be developed."

* "Governments will start drafting legislation that will make offering... a system [to monitor Internet activity] to Internet users obligatory for browser or operating systems...as a condition of selling their products in this country or the European Union."



Ars Technica's Cyrus Farivar tracked down a CleanIT spokesman on his home planet. But Klaasen is the Dutch national coordinator for counterterrorism and security, and he is really upset that we can read this stupid, stupid document full of recommendations that would be illegal in European law. He also can't believe that European Digital Rights, the NGO that published the leaked stupid, stupid document, didn't honor the confidentiality notice on the stupid, stupid cover-page.



"I do fully understand that the publishing of the document led to misunderstandings," he told Ars. "If we publish like this, it will scare people—that’s the reason that we didn’t publish it. It’s food for thought. We do realize these are very rough ideas."


..."You can compare [this situation] to taking pictures of what someone buys for dinner with how a dinner tastes—you don’t have the complete picture," he added.


..."We really didn’t expect that people would publish a document that clearly says ‘not for publication’—that really surprised us," he said. "I don’t know if it’s naive. Why can’t I trust people?"



Proposed EU plan to stop terrorist sites even more ridiculous than it sounds


(Image: Clown, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from manc's photostream)








via Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2012/09/25/eu-working-group-produces-the.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

25 September 2012

Ich habe ein @YouTube-Video positiv bewertet: http://t.co/AWUCGa7m A Toy Train in Space

http://twitter.com/nimmerm33r/status/250629334170210305 on Twitter.

Ich habe ein @YouTube-Video positiv bewertet: http://t.co/6kKilP19 Nature by Numbers

http://twitter.com/nimmerm33r/status/250507837602689024 on Twitter.

Adobe releases open-source coding typeface

Adobe releases open-source coding typeface

http://boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Confusable_Chars-300x60.png


Adobe's Paul D. Hunt announces the company's latest open-source typeface. This one's for coders and anyone else who loves legible monospaced figures—and who hates getting confused between l, 1 and I.



To my eye, many existing monospaced font suffer from one of three problems. The first problem that I often notice is that, many monospaced fonts force lowercase letters with a very large x-height into a single width, resulting in overly condensed letter forms which result in words and text with a monotonous rhythm, which quickly becomes tedious for human eyes to process. The second problem is somewhat the opposite of the first: many monospaced fonts have lowercase letters that leave too much space in between letters, causing words and strings to not hold together. Lastly, there is a category of monospaced fonts whose details I find to be too fussy to really work well in coding applications where a programmer doesn’t want to be distracted by such things.



Download the family at SourceForge. Previously.








via Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2012/09/24/adobe-releases-open-source-cod.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

24 September 2012

Iranian cleric beaten and hospitalized by “badly covered” woman

Iranian cleric beaten and hospitalized by “badly covered” woman

http://ads.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=74d1436addbab55d2a2c80a086f93e45&p=1

In the northern province of Semnan, cleric Hojatoleslam Ali Beheshti spotted a woman in the street who was not sufficiently covered to his liking. When he ordered her to cover herself up, she beat him to a pulp.


“I fell on my back on the floor,” Beheshti said. “I don’t know what happened after that, all I could feel was the kicks of this woman who was insulting me and attacking me.” Since the 1979 revolution that brought Shiite Muslim religious leaders to power, women in Iran have been required to cover their hair and body curves in public with head-scarves and loose-fitting coats, to protect religious values and “preserve society’s morals and security.”

Gruesome photo here







via Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2012/09/24/iranian-cleric-beaten-and-hosp.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

RT @Aki_Hoshide: What do we do on weekends? Clean our house. 週末は何をするか?お家のお掃除。 http://t.co/UFLckpOU

http://twitter.com/nimmerm33r/status/250237003864612864 on Twitter.

Auch in der Sternenflotte gibt's Probleme. Time-Warner Cable pisses off two Starship Enterprise Captains on two coas... http://t.co/U51FfHGS

http://twitter.com/nimmerm33r/status/250134592906985472 on Twitter.

Think Logically

Think Logically

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/think_logically.png

I've developed a more logical set of rules but the people on the chess community have a bunch of stupid emotional biases and won't reply to my posts.



via xkcd.com http://xkcd.com/1112/

21 September 2012

Mug appears to be stuck in table

Mug appears to be stuck in table

http://boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/treasuremmm1-300x106.png

Treasuremmm The Treasure Mug is a delightful illusion cup available directly from Japan via Plywood or Amazon JP. (via Spoon & Tamago)







via Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2012/09/21/mug-appears-to-be-stuck-in-tab.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

20 September 2012

19 September 2012

Three Space Shuttle flight decks (photos)

Three Space Shuttle flight decks (photos)

http://boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Endeavour_flight_deck1-300x199.jpg


Ben Cooper of Launch Photography has photos of the flight deck from all three Space Shuttles, Endeavour (fully-powered), Atlantis and Discovery.


"Endeavour [shown here] looks particularly spectacular, in all its glory, just as it had been in space during a mission," he writes.


You can buy prints! I want huge prints of all three, one for each wall of my office.








via Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2012/09/19/three-space-shuttle-flight-dec.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

Comic for September 17, 2012

Comic for September 17, 2012

http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/100000/60000/7000/700/167731/167731.strip.print.gif







via Dilbert Daily Strip http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-09-17/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dilbert%2Fdaily_strip+%28Dilbert+Daily+Strip+-+UU%29

13 September 2012

RT @brainpicker: "Those who don't believe in magic will never find it." Happy Roald Dahl Day! http://t.co/u3nu3TNl

http://twitter.com/nimmerm33r/status/246331800757084160 on Twitter.

Magic: The Gathering is Turing complete

Magic: The Gathering is Turing complete

http://craphound.com/images/5983778721_c9cdc8d576_z.jpg



Alex Churchill has posted a way to implement a Turing complete computer within a game of Magic: The Gathering ("Turing complete" is a way of classifying a calculating engine that is capable of general-purpose computation). The profound and interesting thing about the recurrence of Turing completeness in many unexpected places -- such as page-layout descriptive engines -- is that it suggests that there's something foundational about the ability to do general computation. It also suggests that attempts to limit general computation will be complicated by the continued discovery of new potential computing engines. That is, even if you lock down all the PCs so that they only play restricted music formats and not Ogg, if you allow a sufficiently speedy and scriptable Magic: The Gathering program to exist, someone may implement the Ogg player using collectible card games.



A series of Ally tokens controlled by Alex represent the tape to the right of the current head: the creature one step to the right of the head is 1 toughness away from dying, the next one over is 2 toughness from dying, etc. A similar chain of Zombie tokens, also controlled by Alex, represent the tape to the left. The colour of each token represents the contents of that space on the tape.


The operation "move one step to the left" is represented in this machine by creating a new Ally token, growing all Allies by 1, and shrinking all Zombies by one. The details are as follows:


When the machine creates a new 2/2 Ally token under Alex's control, four things trigger: Bob's Noxious Ghoul, Cathy's Aether Flash, Denzil's Carnival of Souls, and Alex's Kazuul Warlord. They go on the stack in that order, because it's Bob's turn; so they resolve in reverse order. The Kazuul Warlord adds +1/+1 counters to all Alex's Allies, leaving them one step further away from dying, including making the new one 3/3. Then Carnival of Souls gives Denzil a white mana thanks to False Dawn (he doesn't lose life because of his Platinum Emperion). Then Aether Flash deals 2 damage to the new token, leaving it 1 toughness from dying as desired. And then the Noxious Ghoul, which has been hacked with Artificial Evolution, gives all non-Allies -1/-1, which kills the smallest Zombie. Depending on whether the smallest Zombie was red, green or blue, a different event will trigger. The machine has moved one step to the left.


If the new token had been a Zombie rather than an Ally, a different Kazuul Warlord and a different Noxious Ghoul would have triggered, as well as the same Aether Flash. So the same would have happened except it would be all the Zombies that got +1/+1 and all the Allies that got -1/-1. This would effectively take us one step to the right.



Magic Turing Machine v4: Teysa / Chancellor of the Spires (via /. )


(Image: Magic the Gathering, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 23601773@N02's photostream)








via Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2012/09/12/magic-the-gathering.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

Supercomputer built from Raspberry Pis and Lego

Supercomputer built from Raspberry Pis and Lego

http://craphound.com/images/274936c4b649c88ffad7944bfc7a744a_XL.jpg



A team of computer scientists at the University of Southampton in the UK created a supercomputer out of 64 Raspberry Pi matchbox Linux-on-a-chip computers and Lego. The team included six year old James Cox, the son of project lead Professor Simon Cox, "who provided specialist support on Lego and system testing."


Here's a PDF with instructions for making your own Raspberry Pi/Lego supercomputer.



Professor Cox comments: “As soon as we were able to source sufficient Raspberry Pi computers we wanted to see if it was possible to link them together into a supercomputer. We installed and built all of the necessary software on the Pi starting from a standard Debian Wheezy system image and we have published a guide so you can build your own supercomputer.”


The racking was built using Lego with a design developed by Simon and James, who has also been testing the Raspberry Pi by programming it using free computer programming software Python and Scratch over the summer. The machine, named “Iridis-Pi” after the University’s Iridis supercomputer, runs off a single 13 Amp mains socket and uses MPI (Message Passing Interface) to communicate between nodes using Ethernet. The whole system cost under £2,500 (excluding switches) and has a total of 64 processors and 1Tb of memory (16Gb SD cards for each Raspberry Pi). Professor Cox uses the free plug-in ‘Python Tools for Visual Studio’ to develop code for the Raspberry Pi.


Professor Cox adds: “The first test we ran – well obviously we calculated Pi on the Raspberry Pi using MPI, which is a well-known first test for any new supercomputer.”



Engineers Build Supercomputer Using Raspberry Pi, Lego [Parity News]


Southampton engineers a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer [Press release]


(Images: Simon J Cox 2012)








via Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2012/09/13/supercomputer-built-from-raspb.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

How to Raise a Child: 10 Rules from Susan Sontag

How to Raise a Child: 10 Rules from Susan Sontag

http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/sontag_reborn.jpg

Be consistent. Always speak well of his pop. Do not discourage childish fantasies.


The second volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 , gave us the celebrated author and thinker’s insights on love, writing, censorship, and aphorisms. However, it was in the first installment, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 (public library ), that the beloved public intellectual coalesces out of a shaky young woman grappling with her place in relation to the world and herself — as we’ve already seen in her 1957 list of “rules + duties for being 24″.


Two years later, in September of 1959, Sontag lists her 10 rules for raising a child. (Their object, Sontag’s son David Rieff, edited this very volume.) Underpinning them is a subtle but palpable reverence for the precious gift of “childishness” — something Ted Hughes has spoken to with such stirring eloquence.





  1. Be consistent.

  2. Don’t speak about him to others (e.g., tell funny things) in his presence. (Don’t make him self-conscious.)

  3. Don’t praise him for something I wouldn’t always accept as good.

  4. Don’t reprimand him harshly for something he’s been allowed to do.

  5. Daily routine: eating, homework, bath, teeth, room, story, bed.

  6. Don’t allow him to monopolize me when I am with other people.

  7. Always speak well of his pop. (No faces, sighs, impatience, etc.)

  8. Do not discourage childish fantasies.

  9. Make him aware that there is a grown-up world that’s none of his business.

  10. Don’t assume that what I don’t like to do (bath, hairwash) he won’t like either.



Image via The Telegraph


Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.



Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right. Holstee







via Brain Pickings http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/13/susan-sontag-10-rules-for-raising-a-child/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+brainpickings%2Frss+%28Brain+Pickings%29

Dieses Blog durchsuchen