Paranormality free mind bending magic app
For those of you in need of a Richard Wiseman fix, there’s plenty to keep you happy even if you live in the US. His recent book has had trouble finding a publisher open minded enough to distribute it, despite the fact it’s had rather wonderful endorsements from:
James Randi
PZ Myers
The Magic Newswire
and many others including Richard Dawkins who has said that in the book ”Wiseman shows us a higher joy as he skewers the paranormal charlatans, blows away the psychic fog and lets in the clear light of reason“.]
Available in the UK here: Amazon Book, Amazon Kindle
Available in the US here: Amazon Book, Amazon Kindle
Urban Miner scrapes over £600 worth of precious metals from cracks in London pavements
The Sunday Telegraph has collected quantities of the precious metal from cracks in the pavements outside the capital’s most famous jewellers.
Our quest was inspired by 43-year-old New Yorker Raffi Stepanian, who crawls around on the sidewalks of Manhattan’s “diamond district” looking for chips of gemstones and tiny pieces of gold.
The “urban miner” claimed last week to have collected a haul worth roughly $1,000 (£620) over the course of a fortnight – mostly gold fragments which are thought to rub off the clothes or shoes of jewellery workers.
The pieces can be so small that they are only recoverable when Mr Stepanian pans the scraped-up dirt using a bowl of water, like a nineteenth-century prospector.
RSA Animate – The Paradox of Choice
RSA animate create another gem of animation and insight with their latest release. In this episode Renata Salecl - a senior researcher at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law at the University of Ljubljana and visiting professor at the University of London – explains the Paradox of choice.
In the days of communism choice wasn’t freely available, all resources and the means of production were controlled by the government. When choice became ubiquitous it created a layer of anxiety in people.
Renata explores these ideas in beautifully animated words.
The (new) World’s Shortest Man
Move over, Edward Nino Hernandez, there’s a new smallest man in town. Junrey Balawing of Zamboanga del Norte, who turns 18 today, measures only 24 inches from head to foot lying down and just over 23 inches standing up.
Balawing, the eldest of four siblings, is not only the shortest living man, but the shortest living man in history, the Guinness World Records said.
Happy Birthday dude.
More at Neatorama
Jack Horner the man who’s making a “Chickenosaurus”
Renowned paleontologist Jack Horner has spent his career trying to reconstruct a dinosaur. He’s found fossils with extraordinarily well-preserved blood vessels and soft tissues, but never intact DNA. So, in a new approach, he’s taking living descendants of the dinosaur (chickens) and genetically engineering them to reactivate ancestral traits — including teeth, tails, and even hands — to make a “Chickenosaurus”.
Remembering Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalization of the concepts of “algorithm” and “computation” with the Turing machine, which played a significant role in the creation of the modern computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence.
During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking centre. He devised a number of techniques for breaking Germanciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.
Turing’s homosexuality resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952, when homosexual acts were still illegal in the United Kingdom. He accepted treatment with female hormones (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. He died in 1954, several weeks before his 42nd birthday, fromcyanide poisoning.
An inquest determined it was suicide; his mother and some others believed his death was accidental. On 10 September 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.
First quantum computer just sold to Lockheed Martin but binary computers fight back
On Wednesday, D-Wave Systems made history by announcing the sale of the world’s first commercial quantum computer. The buyer was Lockheed Martin Corporation, who will use the machine to help solve some of their “most challenging computation problems.” Lockheed purchased the system, known as D-Wave One, as well as maintenance and associated professional services. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
D-Wave One uses a superconducting 128-qubit (quantum bit) chip, called Rainier, representing the first commercial implementation of a quantum processor. Built around a superconducting processor, the entire system’s footprint is approximately 100 square feet. The total wall-plug power consumed by a D-Wave One system is 15 kilowatts (a standard laptop uses about 60 watts). Unfortunately the actual speed of the computer is secret, but this is because speed isn’t actually the point of a quantum computer.
A normal computer operates on the basis of units known as bits. Each bit in a normal computer can only be one of 0 or 1 and nothing else. No matter how many bits you have, each computer at a single point in time can only occupy one combination of these bits in order for the programming to actually work.
A quantum computer is different from this because of a principle in quantum mechanics known as superposition. The sort of problem that a conventional computer is very slow at which a quantum computer would be very good at are the ones where you are trying to find one out of billions of billions of billions of combinations which produces an answer. A conventional computer has to go through all the possibilities one by one, the quantum computer can in some sense try them all out at once and can therefore do the calculation in far fewer steps. They are however extremely expensive, the DWave has been rumoured to cost a cool $10-Million.
Despite the fact traditional binary machines have started to reach their limits, new emerging concepts are showing incredible promise. Marc McAndrew is one individual who has invented a machine known as The Charity Engine. The surprising thing is it’s more of a concept than an actual computer. McAndrew has realised that the wasted processing power of machines can be collectively harnessed to make the worlds most powerful supercomputer – for nothing.
By simply running his software on your PC (when it’s idle), you’ll be part of the world’s fastest computer, helping research cures for cancer or new technologies. And the best part of this is that the money the network generates from this research goes to charity. It’s infinitely more environmentally friendly and is so revolutionary that the likes of Amnesty International, Water Aid, Oxfam and ActionAid have all created donation programs to plug in to it – they also monitor the research that takes place to make sure it’s all completely 100% ethical from head to toe. McAndrew (an already successful business owner) has also signed up to a The Giving Pledge that guarantees if he ever makes any real money from the business most of his share will go to charity too. Could you ask for more?
You can sign up to the facebook page here, find out when the Engine will be launching and do your bit for charity too. To encourage you, everyone who signs up is automatically entered in to a completely free lottery draw of $1Million.
Adam Curtis – All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
Without a doubt Adam Curtis is one of the most important documentary makers alive today. His work isn’t just ground breaking in it’s messaging, the sheer volume of information and the way he delivers is food for thought itself. Using a mixture of well found retro footage and expert narration, Curtis delivers his own distinct form of sociopolitical theatre. Even if you were to completely disagree with him, it’s utterly thought-provoking and entertaining. It’s possibly the only reason to own a TV.
Curtis completed a Bachelor of Arts in Human Sciences at the University of Oxford, where he studied genetics, evolutionary biology, psychology, politics, sociology and elementary statistics. Curtis also taught Politics there for a time.
His work has received more than a few awards to date – here’s a run down of our favourites:
1992 – Pandora’s Box – examines the dangers of technocratic and political rationality – BAFTA Award for Best Factual Series.
1996 - 25 Million Pounds – study of Nick Leeson, collapse of Barings Bank – Winner at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
1997 – The Way of All Flesh – The story of Henrietta Lacks - Golden Gate award.
1999 – The Mayfair Set – the climate of the Thatcher years - BAFTA Award for Best Factual Series.
2002 – The Century of the Self - Edward Bernays’ development of public relations - Broadcast Award, Longman Award.
2004 - The Power of Nightmares - the rise of Islamism and Neoconservatism - BAFTA for Best Factual Series
2007 – The Trap – a series addressing the modern concepts of freedom.
Curtis has also provided many snippets of brilliance to the Charlie Brooker series Screenwipe in 2007 and Newswipe in 2009. What more you could ask for I do not know.
His current series All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace is now showing on BBC 2 / iPlayer and is utterly essential watching. It is a series of films about how humans have been colonised by the machines they have built. Although we don’t realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.
Episode one of 3 is available now – I recommend watching it 3 times at least and take notes too.
