A spinoff of the excellent series, Battlestar Galactica, is planned. I can’t wait!
“Caprica” will be set more than 50 years prior to the events of “Battlestar Galactica” and focus on the lives of two families — the Adamas (ancestors of future Galactica commander William) and the Graystones. Humankind’s Twelve Colonies are at peace and on the verge of a technological breakthrough: the first Cylon.
Great article on writing self-replicating programs known as quines. Douglas Hofstadter’s wonderful book–Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid–also explains quines rather well.
A “quine†(or “selfrepâ€) is a computer program which prints its own listing. This may sound either impossible, or trivial, or completely uninteresting, depending on your temper and your knowledge of computer science. Actually, it is possible, and there are some interesting ideas involved (in particular, writing a quine is not a hack that only works because the programming language has certain nice properties — it is a consequence of the general so-called “fixed-point†theorem, itself an instance of Cantor’s ubiquitous diagonal argument).
An article at Wired News explains why the Lara Croft games are appealing to more than just the usual horny, teenaged boys.
The Final Girl theory emerged in 1985, when Carol Clover — a medievalist and feminist film critic — was dared by a friend to see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Back then, most feminist theorists loathed slasher films, and regarded them as classic examples of male misogyny. It wasn’t hard to figure out why: Thousands of young men were trooping into theaters to cheer wildly as masked psychos hacked apart screaming young women. That really didn’t look good.
But as Clover sat in the theaters, she noticed something curious. Sure, the young men would laugh and cheer as the villain hunted down his female prey. But eventually the movie would whittle down the victims to one last terrified woman — the Final Girl, as Clover called her. Suddenly, the young men in the audience would switch their allegiance — and begin cheering just as madly for the Final Girl as she attacked and killed the psycho.
Researchers can use the noise profile of digital camera sensors to identify whether a set of images came from a certain camera. From MetaFilter:
Every original digital picture is overlaid by a weak noise-like pattern of pixel-to-pixel non-uniformity. Although these patterns are invisible to the human eye, the unique reference pattern or “fingerprint” of any camera can be electronically extracted by analyzing a number of images taken by a single camera. Fridrich’s lab analyzed 2,700 pictures taken by nine digital cameras and with 100 percent accuracy linked individual images with the camera that took them.
Damn Interesting explains risk homeostasis.
Let’s suppose your child wants to take a martial arts class. Being a conscientious parent, you check out the local dojos and find two good places. Both are suitable and well equipped. Both practice fighting with contact – but there’s one major difference. One dojo insists on a full range of protective padding – hands, feet, chest protectors, shin guards – the whole works. The other takes a much lighter approach - hands and feet, and sometimes not even those.
To the conscientious parent, the first place is going to look much safer, right? But when you look at the injury rates of the two dojos, you notice something odd: They’re about the same. The kids covered in foam padding are getting just as many bruises, scrapes, and sprains as the kids wearing almost none. What could be going on here?
Wikipedia has a good article on the broken window fallacy.
The parable describes a shopkeeper whose window is broken by a little boy. Everyone sympathizes with the man whose window was broken, but pretty soon they start to suggest that the broken window makes work for the glazier, who will then buy bread, benefitting the baker, who will then buy shoes, benefitting the cobbler, etc. Finally, the onlookers conclude that the little boy was not guilty of vandalism; instead he was a public benefactor, creating economic benefits for everyone in town.
The latest version of TrueCrypt encryption software has been released. This is one of the best tools available out there for securing your data.
TrueCrypt 4.2 Released
April 17, 2006; 1900 GMT
We are pleased to announce that TrueCrypt 4.2 has been released. Among the new features is the ability to create a TrueCrypt volume under Linux, ability to create a ‘dynamic’ container whose physical size (actual disk space used) grows as new data is added to it, ability to change volume passwords/keyfiles under Linux, ability to create keyfiles under Linux, ability to restore and backup volume headers under Linux, and many more.
This release makes the Linux version of TrueCrypt completely independent on the Windows version. However, both versions will continue to be mutually compatible. For a comprehensive list of changes, please see http://www.truecrypt.org/history.php
Freedom to Tinker has an interesting post on how HDCP could be broken.
Every new HDCP device is given two things: a secret vector, and an addition rule. The secret vector is a sequence of 40 secret numbers that the device is not supposed to reveal to anybody. The addition rule, which is not a secret, describes a way of adding up numbers selected from a vector. Both the secret vector and the addition rule are assigned by HDCP’s central authority. (I like to imagine that the central authority occupies an undersea command center worthy of Doctor Evil, but it’s probably just a nondescript office suite in Burbank.)
Grynx has a simple project to build a LED flashlight using an empty Tic Tac box.
A disposable torch with long life (I hope I don’t invent the wheel once more) I bought ‘tic-tac’ mint candy and found out that this package must be ideal for 3 AAA batteries to make a small torch (or lamp) with.
Yes the batteries fitted perfect - I soldered them in series and used a small micro switch from an old circuit-board together with an ultra bright white LED (25.000 mcd - 3,8 volt and 20 mA - 35 degrees) and a serial resistor of 27 ohm (to make it 3,8 Volt).
This is a video of some freakin’ brilliant Rube Goldberg machines. Brings back memories of The Incredible Machine.
Apparently a spinning hard-boiled egg can make small jumps into the air.
After two years of work, with a purpose-built steel machine wired up to high-speed cameras, microphones and electronic sensors, a team of Japanese researchers has finally proved that a hard-boiled egg can jump. All it takes, according to Yutaka Shimomura and colleagues of Keio University, is a good spin.
A spinning egg will spontaneously rise up from lying on its side to standing on its end. Shimomura, along with physicists at the University of Cambridge, had previously worked out why this is so, and predicted that the forces involved could also make an egg leap a tiny bit into the air.
I don’t know what possible use this could have but there you go.
This is a nice and easy to make flash bouncer card. Sure beats the old index card and elastic band trick.
The latest changes to Python have been posted.
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