Kelly Fox

My favorites as comments below. - Kelly Fox via Bookmarklet

ECONOMICS PRIZE. Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, for discovering that a professional lap dancer's ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings. - Kelly Fox

CHEMISTRY PRIZE. Sharee A. Umpierre of the University of Puerto Rico, Joseph A. Hill of The Fertility Centers of New England (USA), Deborah J. Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School (USA), for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, and to Chuang-Ye Hong of Taipei Medical University (Taiwan), C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang (all of Taiwan) for discovering that it is not. - Kelly Fox

"If you're trying to drive to a destination as quickly as possible, you might think that knowing the traffic conditions would help you choose the quickest route for yourself. Traffic reports and new GPS technologies that provide traffic data are based on this assumption – but scientists have found that knowing this information may do more harm than good." - Kelly Fox via Bookmarklet

Mmmm... emergence and game theory. - Kelly Fox

Interesting perspective by James Pinkerton: "The biggest flaw in the Administration bailout package: It could all happen again. The system doesn’t need just fixing, it needs decentralizing. Financial institutions should be big enough to fail—and never any bigger. We need compartmentalization, also known as federalism." - Kelly Fox via Bookmarklet

No word on whether a miniature black hole is the true cause of the shutdown. - Kelly Fox via Bookmarklet

"By tracking the amount of light emitted by Baghdad neighborhoods at night, a team of UCLA geographers has uncovered fresh evidence that last year's U.S. troop surge in Iraq may not have been as effective at improving security as some U.S. officials have maintained. Night light in neighborhoods populated primarily by embattled Sunni residents declined dramatically just before the February 2007 surge and never returned, suggesting that ethnic cleansing by rival Shiites may have been largely responsible for the decrease in violence for which the U.S. military has claimed credit, the team reports in a new study based on publicly available satellite imagery." - Kelly Fox via Bookmarklet

A "typographic landscape" applet. - Kelly Fox via Bookmarklet

Wow. So this thing has from 32 to 64 CPU cores, and has up to 4 TB of internal disk. It has 8 "blades" (a.k.a. nodes) that each hold 4 or 8 of the CPU cores, along with up to 64GB of RAM per node, for a total of up to 512GB of RAM. Oh, and it is small enough to sit next to your desk, and plugs into a standard power outlet. Runs Red Hat Linux or Windows HPC Server 2008. Prices range from $25,000 to $80,000. - Kelly Fox via Bookmarklet

More info here: http://www.hpcwire.com/feature... and here: http://investors.cray.com/phoe... - Kelly Fox

"Google may take its battle for global domination to the high seas with the launch of its own “computer navy”. The company is considering deploying the supercomputers necessary to operate its internet search engines on barges anchored up to seven miles (11km) offshore. The “water-based data centres” would use wave energy to power and cool their computers, reducing Google’s costs. Their offshore status would also mean the company would no longer have to pay property taxes on its data centres." - Kelly Fox via Bookmarklet

"A sprawling consortium of Hollywood content providers, consumer electronics companies, and Internet players said on Sept. 12 that its members are planning to develop a standard that will let consumers buy movies and other digital content once and play them almost anywhere, on any type of device, without the onerous restrictions that have hobbled the growth of digital downloads." - Kelly Fox via Bookmarklet

YEAH!!! Is it a blousery day or a perfect day for taking over the world? - Shellee

"If you've got an iPhone, pretty much everything you have done on your handset has been temporarily stored as a screenshot that hackers or forensics experts could eventually recover, according to a renowned iPhone hacker who exposed the security flaw in a webcast Thursday." - Kelly Fox via Bookmarklet

Worthwhile read if you access or deal with sensitive data on your iPhone. - Kelly Fox

"The IEEE working group that is putting the finishing touches on the 802.11n 100Mbps wireless LAN standard is about to launch a new project, for a 1Gbps WLAN standard. That would mean gigabit Wi-Fi. ... “I think we’ll see a standard in two years, and WLAN products with more than 1 gigabit per second within three years,” says Craig Mathias, principal for wireless consultancy Farpoint Group." - Kelly Fox via Bookmarklet

"This Wednesday, Cambridge University startup Plastic Logic, which is headquartered in Mountain View, CA, will open a factory in Dresden, Germany, that will produce about 11 million large, flexible electronic-paper display units a year. The displays will be used in an electronic reader that the company showed at the Demo conference in San Diego last week. The product, which is scheduled to be commercially launched in January, uses display technology from E Ink and backplane technologies that employ polymer electronics developed by Plastic Logic's founders at Cambridge University." - Kelly Fox via Bookmarklet

"Because knotted light beams have both beamlike properties and unique unexplored properties, the physicists predict that creating the beams could have applications in several areas. These could include applications in plasma confinement, atomic particle trapping, manipulating cold atomic ensembles, and generating soliton-like solutions in nonlinear media." - Kelly Fox via Bookmarklet

You KNOW the problems I've been having with plasma containment... I've had serious ass plasma containment problems. At least now I may not have to see a doctor for it. However, finding a proctologist who also happens to be a physicist might be a challenge. - Kelly Fox

P.S. SOCKPUPPETS '08!!! - Kelly Fox

You KNOW the problems I've been having with soliton-like solutions in nonlinear media... - Shellee

"Space solar power could be a clean, renewable solution to America's long-term energy needs. John C. Mankins, former manager of NASA's Exploration Systems Research and Technology Program, and one of the foremost experts on space solar power, will announce on Friday a milestone demonstration of the critical technology enabling SSP: long-distance, solar-powered wireless power transmission. The project demonstrated wireless power transmission between two Hawaiian islands 148 kilometers apart, more than the distance from the surface of Earth to the boundary of space." - Kelly Fox via Bookmarklet

This sounds promising... I'd like to see the actual press conference or a transcript from it. I suppose watching the Discovery Channel special wouldn't hurt, either. - Kelly Fox

didn't Tesla try to do this with the Wardenclyffe Tower back at the beginning of the 20th century? - Joe Blair