HackingTheUniverse

You are browsing the archives of 2011 October.

In 1922, the Stern-Gerlach (named after Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach) experiment sent a beam of silver atoms through a deflecting magnetic field and onto a collecting plate. Charged electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom create a “magnetic moment” (a vector of twisting force) that makes the atom behave as though it were a [...]

Knowledge management (KM) attempts to enhance information sharing and an awareness of how knowledge is accumulated and used to create innovation. Keith Sawyer has written about applying the concepts of “flow” psychology to group collaborations in order to increase creative power. He also points out that group collaboration is in fact responsible for most of [...]

The NIST PM control family is a set of security controls that were added to the NIST SP 800-53 catalog of controls in version 3. These controls are fundamental and foundational and need to be established early in the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC). They lay the groundwork for processes that are critical to information [...]

The Ants – AI Challenge allows contestants to create small programs that control a group of ants that are in competition with other groups of ants. You can control how the ants explore the map, avoid collisions, gather food, spawn and attack enemies. Once you have a strategy encoded, your ant colony can compete against [...]

Jacques Vaucanson was born in Grenoble, France in 1709 and was an inventor and engineer who mainly constructed automated machines known as automatons. These were early versions of robots. His most famous robot was the duck, which could flap its wings, stretch its neck and simulated digestion. He learned anatomy from discussions with surgeons and [...]

We tend to take it for granted that because we consider animals to be less than we are, they have fewer rights. In essence, we’ve made an ethical judgement that a species inferior to humans has less need to survive than humans, or at least not as much need to survive as well as humans. [...]

The period of European history known as “the renaissance” was a slow revolution of knowledge and culture that supported the development of science, art, literature and other areas of intellectual pursuit. It began in the Tuscany area of Italy around 1300-1400 and it’s influence spread across most of Europe over the next several centuries, leading [...]

Over the years, our computing interfaces have become more and more interactive. From simple command lines, to graphical interfaces, to “active” graphical interfaces; they have continually become more interactive, more dynamic, more alive. Our living spaces will soon be following the same trend, becoming both more interactive and reconfigurable. World Builder – [youtube.com] This amazing [...]

Eli Whitney was born in Massachusetts, USA in 1765 and is known for being the inventor of the cotton “gin”. At the time, the word “gin” was used as a short form of the word “engine”. The cotton gin is a machine that combs through cotton to separate the cotton fibers from the seeds. When [...]

The University of Texas at Austin is building a new supercomputer called Stampede, which will be housed in the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Dell servers, Intel coprocessors, and NVIDIA GPUs will comprise the hardware for the linux cluster, which is expected to reach a performance level of over 10 quadrillion calculations per second (petaflop). [...]