Psybertron Asks

Greater grace needed in engineering survivability in spacecraft and spacesuits.

Posted verbatim from Laurie Taylor’s Thinking Allowed newsletter … Welcome to the Thinking Allowed Newsletter – Doctor Dyt and Wittgenstein Wednesday 17 December 2008 – http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowed/ Repeat Sunday 21 December 2008 I had a university tutor in psychology who was popularly known as Doctor Dit.  For a couple of terms I assumed along with my [...]

Deep social patterns (of luck ?) behind success. NYT review by David Brooks of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” . Thanks to Marsha at MoQ-Discuss for the link.

This New Scientist article on the Intelligent Design crowd reinforcing the dualism of mind stuff distinct from material stuff, as part of a theism vs Darwinism debate passed me by in my recent move a couple of months ago. I’m pretty clearly a physicalist, a non-reductive materialist … both material-stuff and meaning-stuff arising from the [...]

At small scales.

No, not blog-link-rot this time, but two great links from Sam on global sustainability issues. Energy Myths and the Svalbard Seed Bank.

Being sold on e-Bay, Nancy Pirsig‘s motorcycle jacket. This leather jacket belongs to the ex-wife of author Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), whose married name was Nancy Pirsig. She is selling it because she doesn’t need it, since she now lives in a warm climate and no longer rides a motorcycle. [...]

List from the Beeb. White Lies sound like the pick of the bunch, but Little Boots and Empire of the Sun (feat Luke Steele, ex Perth WA) err … interesting. Saw local bands Kill Your Darlings and Hallucinations the other night at Cafe Kaos. Both different but good, though incredibly short sets. Hallucinations technically accomplished amplified-acoustic [...]

Just a holding link, prompted by a post from Sam.

These two stories tickled me. Flexo-piezo-devices being self-powered, even by ambient sound. And the telephone hoax that wasn’t.

Having moved twice in recent years, with a growing library of books, I recognize a lot of these issues / traits. I do have a few “unread” and a few “incompletely read” but I doubt that’s more than 2%. So many different ways to organize the reasons for keeping different selections of books, though in [...]

Beat that Ronaldo ?

A while since I linked to Oliver Wrede’s Global Brain (in the blogroll). Two current / recent stories one on the “petaflop barrier”, the other on the “zeitgeist addendum”. Must come back to both.

Just capturing this modern version of the Quadrivium from Wendy Ellyat … (in Inclusional correspondence) … Arithmetic – numbers in themselves Geometry – numbers in space Music – numbers in time Cosmology – numbers in space and time Maybe (after Kline) the last two are both in space & time but one is natural the [...]

Seems I’m not alone in being annoyed by Limelight Networks LLC. Seems both Akamai and MIT sued them, and so did Level 3, the largest Tier-1 network provider underlying so many major ISP’s. LLNW on the other hand are a big media content service provider with their own dedicated networks, but only a very small 1% [...]

Mad. You see the scale on the big screen monitor in the foreground showing an aerial view of the whole of Dubai’s Palm Island Atlantis Resort opening fireworks event, as well as the fireworks in direct view from in front of the hotel facade. (Thanks to MCSeavey)

Mentioned to Island in the comment thread about the Multiverse below, the problem that otherwise credible stories in physics are accompanied by mathematical theory near incomprehensible to laymen such as myself. I had this feeling previously when trying to understand the “Dirac Nilpotent Rewrite” behind the Rowlands and Diaz work in quantum information theory. Reminded [...]

Thanks to Rogelio Casado (Brazilian blogger) for the link to this 2005 Pirsig / ZMM article including a link back to my Timeline. Rogelio’s post is here. Thanks to BabelFish for an attempt at English translation from the Portugese.

Thanks to Piers Young at Monkey Magic for the link to this article from Discover. A good summary of issues based on interviews by Tim Folger with working scientists in the field, many of whom I’ve quoted before on psybertron. Strange how the multiverse idea is still seen as the most convincing solution to the [...]

Had one of those transatlantic (twelve hours of sunset) opportunities to get a bit of reading in last week, a week in Boston. (Incidentally encountered Steven Pinker in the hotel bar, though left him undisturbed deep in conversation with another, having just explained he was my second favourite evolutionary psychology / linguistic philosopher, after Dan [...]

Blogging a lot of links to Peston’s Picks these days. Same subject, but for a change this one has an optimistic silver-lining tone after so many panic-stations downers recently. Be interesting to see what Goodwin does with his wealth and knighthood, once he goes (if he goes). Might he stay on as the manager who “serves” [...]