Bag of Beans

Quite an incredible story about a powder being developed that can regrow body parts.

“I put my finger in,” Mr Spievak says, pointing towards the propeller of a model airplane, “and that’s when I sliced my finger off.”

It took the end right off, down to the bone, about half an inch.

“We don’t know where the piece went.”

The photos of his severed finger tip are pretty graphic. You can understand why doctors said he’d lost it for good.

Today though, you wouldn’t know it. Mr Spievak, who is 69 years old, shows off his finger, and it’s all there, tissue, nerves, nail, skin, even his finger print.

• Link (via Digg)

Great retrospective looking back at Clarke’s most influential works.

But relatively little space has been devoted to Clarke’s writing—the notable exception being the essays of his collaborator and friend, Gregory Benford, an astrophysicist and author of many science fiction novels including Timescape, the Galactic Center Saga, and Beyond the Fall of Night (a collaboration with Clarke).

In many of Clarke’s obituaries, there is a subtext (occasionally text) suggesting that while his way of seeing the future was extraordinary, his writing was perhaps not very good. Nothing could be further from the truth. Though he wasn’t known for vivid character portraits, his prose was always elegant, and its style precisely suited to his purposes: prompting readers to think and to wonder.

• Link

A nice memorial for the first dog in space.

Stories about how she was selected varied: Some said Laika was chosen for her good looks — a Soviet space pioneer had to be photogenic. Others indicated the top choice for the mission was dropped because doctors took pity on her: Since there was no way to design a re-entry vehicle in time for the launch, the flight meant a certain death.

“Laika was quiet and charming,” Dr. Vladimir Yazdovsky wrote in his book chronicling the story of Soviet space medicine. He recalled that before heading to the launch pad, he took the dog home to play with his children. “I wanted to do something nice for her: She had so little time left to live,” Yazdovsky said.

• Link (via Boing Boing)

The Poincaré Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe
by Donal O’Shea.
Walker & Company, 2007.

In The Poincaré Conjecture, Donal O’Shea explains a conjecture in topology from 1904 that had remained unsolved for nearly a century. Aside from its importance in topology, the conjecture also has implications on determining the shape of our own universe. It is also one of the seven Millennium Prize problems listed by the Clay Institute in 2000, with a one million dollar reward for a correct solution. It was finally solved in 2002 by Grigory Perelman and since then his solution has been accepted. He may be eligible for the Millennium Prize but does not appear to be interested. In 2006, he was awarded the Fields medal—the highest honor for mathematicians and which also carries a monetary reward—for his work but he declined the award.

In this book, O’Shea takes us through the history of the conjecture and the attempts at solving it, and also takes some time to give us the historical context along the way by describing the social and political climate surrounding each mathematician that has sought to prove the conjecture. He does a good job of providing relatively clear and simple explanations of the complex ideas in topology and non-Euclidean geometry involved, but the book does move at a fairly brisk pace (minus the notes at the end the main text is only 200 pages long) so some work is still required to follow along, but I never felt completely lost. This book contains a nice mix of mathematical ideas and history for a general audience, and it managed to keep my interest throughout.

Rating: 8/10

Links:

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing

Related:

• Book: The Möbius Strip

Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
by Bill Buford.
Anchor Canada, 2007

In Heat, Bill Buford, a writer for The New Yorker, leaves his job to become a cook at Babbo, a top Italian restaurant in Manhanttan. Buford has written a clear and interesting account of his struggles to learn his way in a fast-paced and demanding kitchen as a professional cook, and really brings to life the environment and the personalities of the people that he works with. Eventually, as he becomes more confident in his abilities and his passion for cooking grows, he is drawn to Italy by the desire to learn authentic Italian cooking techniques, including the butchering of meat. As he studies under some of Italy’s masters, we are also treated to a sentimental overview of the history and traditions of Italian cuisine. Bill Buford’s memoir is a well-written, fascinating book and I really enjoyed it.

Rating: 8/10

Links:

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing

A video for Portal’s end credits song filmed in Lego stop-motion!

More than 1300 individual pictures went into the making of this film. It is based off of the video game, Portal, and features the soundtrack from the game’s credits with an all lego cast.

• Link (via Joystiq)

The New York Times has an article commemorating the life of science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who just passed away.

The author of almost 100 books, Mr. Clarke was an ardent promoter of the idea that humanity’s destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth. It was a vision served most vividly by “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the classic 1968 science-fiction film he created with the director Stanley Kubrick and the novel of the same title that he wrote as part of the project.

His work was also prophetic: his detailed forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945 came more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight.

Other early advocates of a space program argued that it would pay for itself by jump-starting new technology. Mr. Clarke set his sights higher. Borrowing a phrase from William James, he suggested that exploring the solar system could serve as the “moral equivalent of war,” giving an outlet to energies that might otherwise lead to nuclear holocaust.

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This is a pretty funny piece of fiction on what could happen when nearly anybody can time-travel and change history.

At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:
Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.

At 18:06:59, BigChill wrote:
Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what’s the harm?

• Link (via Bureau 42)

Here are a few useful shortcuts when using the command prompt in Windows.

We look at some useful keyboard shortcuts and commands that will help you personalize the MS-DOS Command Prompt Window without using the mouse.

You will also learn about hotkeys for executing DOS commands more quickly. The keyboard shortcuts are known to work in Windows Vista and XP command prompt.

• Link (via Lifehacker)
• More function key shortcuts

This post contains a cool optical illusion and a detailed explanation. The centres of the two circles are actually changing colour in synchrony, but your perception is quite different.

This simple relationship between the colors used to create the illusion and the perception of the illusion has helped Shapiro come up with a model of how we perceive it. We see the illusion because our visual system relies not just on color information, but also on contrast information to make judgments about what we are seeing. When color values are plugged into Shapiro’s mathematical model, when the difference between the color angle of the surround and center equals 90 degrees, then the plot of contrast for the left (red) and the right (blue) disk becomes identical, so the centers are seen changing together, while for all other values we see them changing out of phase.

• Link (via Digg)

This article gives some interesting tips on making the most of your caffeine intake.

A landmark 2004 study showed that small hourly doses of caffeine (.3mg per kg of body weight [approx 20 mg per hour; thanks digg!]) can support extended wakefulness, potentially by counteracting the homeostatic sleep pressure, which builds slowly across the day and acts preferentially on the prefrontal cortex (an area of the brain thought responsible for executive and “higher” cognitive functions).

• Link (via Lifehacker)

Wired has a fascinating story about two AI researchers, both of whom committed suicide.

In 1991, Singh went to MIT to study artificial intelligence with his idol and soon attracted notice for his passion and mental stamina. Word was that he had read every single one of the dauntingly complex books on the shelves in Minsky’s office. A casual conversation with the smiling young researcher in the hallway or at a favorite restaurant like Kebab-N-Kurry could turn into an intense hour-long debate. As one fellow student put it, Singh had a way of “taking your idea and showing you what it looks like from about 50 miles up.”

The field of AI research that Singh was joining had a history of bipolar behavior, swinging from wild overoptimism to despair. When 2001 came out in the late ’60s, many believed that a thinking machine like HAL would exist well before the end of the 20th century, and researchers were flush with government grants. Within a few years, it had become apparent that these predictions were absurdly unrealistic, and the funding soon dried up.

• Link (via Slashdot)

Dr. Dobb’s Journal has a nice summary of the new features introduced in Microsoft’s latest developer environment.

Since the release of the .NET Framework 1.0, Microsoft has committed to a made-to-measure programming environment with each new version of its managed framework. But for a number of reasons, this tradition was interrupted last year when .NET Framework 3.0 made its debut without a new version of Visual Studio. This year, however, .NET 3.5 comes out with a new programming environment—Visual Studio 2008.

• Link (via Slashdot)
• Download the Express Editions for free from Microsoft’s site.

Steve Yegge has put up an insightful post on some of the issues with dealing with a large code base. Definitely worth a read.

I say my opinion is hard-won because people don’t really talk much about code base size; it’s not widely recognized as a problem. In fact it’s widely recognized as a non-problem. This means that anyone sharing my minority opinion is considered a borderline lunatic, since what rational person would rant against a non-problem?

People in the industry are very excited about various ideas that nominally help you deal with large code bases, such as IDEs that can manipulate code as “algebraic structures”, and search indexes, and so on. These people tend to view code bases much the way construction workers view dirt: they want great big machines that can move the dirt this way and that. There’s conservation of dirt at work: you can’t compress dirt, not much, so their solution set consists of various ways of shoveling the dirt around. There are even programming interview questions, surely metaphorical, about how you might go about moving an entire mountain of dirt, one truck at a time.

Industry programmers are excited about solutions to a big non-problem. It’s just a mountain of dirt, and you just need big tools to move it around. The tools are exciting but the dirt is not.

• Link

Wired’s Game|Life blog has just finished a series of articles on Futurama. Check them out for another look behind the scenes.

This week on Game|Life, Wired magazine senior editor Chris Baker took us through the crazy videogame-obsessed brains of the creators of Futurama, the geekiest show on television.

In case you missed any of the in-depth reports on how Futurama and games have and will continue to intersect, here is the complete set of links. Please waste your entire Friday reading them! I will.

• Link

Related:

• Wired Magazine on the resurrection of Futurama
• Futurama’s David X. Cohen Interview
• New episodes of Futurama coming

One user has written a pretty funny post on their experiences with Vista, and “upgrading” to XP. Based on reports like these, I’m glad I skipped the Vista upgrade cycle altogether and went straight to XP.

In addition, I have noticed that when performing complex tasks such as viewing large images, or updating large spreadsheets, instead of the whole operating system locking down for several seconds, it now just locks down the application I am working on, allowing me to <gasp> Alt-Tab to another application and work on that. I am thrilled that Microsoft decided to add preemptive multitasking to their operating system, and for this reason alone I would strongly urge you to upgrade to XP.

• Link (via Slashdot)

Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think
edited by Andy Oram & Greg Wilson.
O’Reilly, 2007.

Beautiful Code is a collection of essays by master programmers, each discussing a piece of code or software architecture that they find particularly beautiful or elegant. The essays cover a wide range of topics and some will really challenge your understanding, but readers who put in the effort will be rewarded. This is an invaluable resource filled with practical wisdom from gurus, and pretty much all of the code is taken from software in actual use. This book is a must-read for any programmer, and could one day be regarded as a classic text on programming.

Rating: 9/10

Links:

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has an ingenious how-to on creating a clay model of a fractal known as a Sierpinski triangle.

One of our favorite shapes is the Sierpinski triangle. In one sense, a mere mathematical abstraction, on the other, a pattern that naturally emerges in real life from several different simple algorithms. On paper, one can play the Chaos Game to generate the shape (or cheat and just use the java applet).

You can also generate a Sierpinski triangle in what is perhaps a more obvious way: by exploiting its fractal self-similarity.

• Link

Wired has a great series of articles on the new season of Futurama, and the story behind it.

Cohen has another reason to be happy. The segment he’s watching is from Futurama, the show that he codeveloped back in 1999 with Simpsons creator Matt Groening. (Cohen wrote and produced some of the animated sitcom’s most popular episodes.) With that pedigree, Futurama seemed like a can’t-fail proposition, but it was canceled five years ago. This footage, however, is new: Futurama is back in production, and the unexpected return is as curious as the story of its abrupt cancellation.

• Futurama Is Back! Grab a Can of Slurm and Settle In
• The Geekiest Show on TV
• The Original Futurama
• Gallery: Behind the Scenes of Futurama

Check out this list of codes that are still unsolved. No doubt anyone who breaks one of these will ensure a place in history.

Kryptos is a sculpture by American artist James Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia, in the United States. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the encrypted messages it bears. It continues to provide a diversion for employees of the CIA and other cryptanalysts attempting to decrypt the messages.

• Link (via Neatorama)