Near Real-Time Flu Map
Posted on April 26th, 2009 by avi
It’s easier to just download the CSV file and look at it in Excel…
It’s easier to just download the CSV file and look at it in Excel…
On the news that United Airlines is now charging obese people for the number of actual seats they consume, some people cheer the decision, and some wonder if it makes sense. I mean, there are few people who literally require 2 or 3 full seats, but a full person is often displaced by a fattie. Not only that, but someone weighing 300lbs sure costs as much in fuel as two average-sized people.
My wife and I watched two episodes of the History Channel’s "The Universe" series and nearly died of apoplexy. The show’s premise seems to be that there exist a vast number of people who are both vaguely interested in science and at the same time are too dumb to understand even the most basic concepts.
So it resorts to explaining some inherently interesting and natural phenomena in terms of silly and endless child-like analogies, delivered by scientists who, as the linked article explains, seem more suited to greet a class of fourth graders (who might in fact have greater attention span and comprehension than this show’s apparent intended audience).
I mean, how would you like everything in the world to be explained in terms of gummi bears.
The sun is a giant gummy furnace, churning out little excited gummi bears, called photons, which travel through space (defined as the absence of gummi) to finally plop down on beaches all over the world. Fusion happens when you squeeze two bears, such that you wind up with two heads and three legs (one leg escapes as pure melt-in-your-mouth energy). Fission, of course, is when you bite the head off your gummi and stick it to your upper lip. [cue Neil deGrasse Tyson sticking candy to his face...]
So I’m glad the Discovery Channel is at least trying to do one better with the Hawking seal of approval. I figure they asked Adam and Jamie first, but the cost of building the "throw fusion reactor into mini black hole" Mythbusting episode was just too damn high.
Frankly, Cosmos was about as good as it gets for television. Just rebroadcast that!
I wrote the following essay to help us get going crafting a review paper for a major comp-sci journal. ‘Us’ in this case was Blaise Aguera y Arcas, one of the founders of PhotoSynth and Virtual Earfth’s new architect, and Jaron Lanier, one of the pioneers of VR, who thought of pretty much everything before I became conscious of the world.
Now, I should caution that Blaise didn’t ultimately want to use this text and Jaron equally had issues with it. The tone is all wrong for an academic journal, plus Jaron disputes some of the dates I recorded from my research (he may well know better). But I felt it might at least be entertaining to RP readers, so I’m posting it for you to enjoy. Still, don’t take any of it as official, just me being a smart-ass.
Remember those AT&T "You Will" ads? If not, watch this and you will…
The question was: how right were they? Amazingly good, except for the part about "and the company that’ll bring it to you." AT&T has consistently been late to the game, except when they buy other companies or disrupt markets. And even in the ads, they notoriously got the phone bits wrong and/or didn’t deliver. No video phone, for the most part. There aren’t even very many phone booths left.
So what does that show?
Well, for one thing, it’s the companies that don’t spend tens of millions of dollars telling you what they’ll do that can actually spend that money doing it. For another thing, it’s not always wise to telegraph (so to speak) your moves, as it mainly inspires people to go out and do it first. Of course, AT&T didn’t care. They just wanted you to believe they were really technologically advanced, so you’d sign up for their long distance plan.
This, I think, is the danger of Microsoft’s "2019" video, cool as it is.
Well, at least it isn’t Minority Report. But maybe we can forget about pushing pixels to every glass or paper surface and think about putting pixels everywhere you look. I mean it’s 10 years out. Let’s live a little.
We knew it would happen eventually. Embryos have been screened for genetic diseases for a few years now. But this may be the first time embryos have been specifically selected for superficial traits, such as eye color or good looks.
Apologies in advance for taking sides in a moral debate on a tech blog, but it’s impossible to extricate the science from the ethics for this issue…
Amidst the backlash against Facebook’s new terms of service, the company tries desperately to clarify that they never intended to claim ownership of its user’s content. It makes analogies to email, where a copy of a message would be kept even if the sender wished for it to be deleted. [Read more →]
Via GamesAlfresco.
Note: I don’t hear much audio in these clips, but the concepts here are pretty self-explanatory.
What’s funny is that I remember sitting in the office of a notable entrepreneur last year, discussing the notion of tracking bodies in free-space for better user interfaces. I told him he wasn’t thinking "big enough." It wasn’t about interacting in free-space with a small picture on a monitor. It was about being free in space to interact with anything.
Pixels will be everywhere, regardless of how we achieve it. In this case, low-power projectors are very powerful, though not ideal (not private, for sure, nor do they work well in concert with other users who project on the same surfaces). But that’s the least of the problems to work out.
I do love the virtual picture frame gesture to take a picture.
This is found/inspired from a post on UgoTrade by Tish. Interesting stuff to think about.
According to a Gallop Poll, only 39% of Americans believe in evolution. There’s no number cited for how many, including the Gallop pollsters, don’t understand that evolution is not a belief, not even a theory, but an observable fact. Saying you don’t believe in evolution is like saying you don’t believe the sun came up today.
One can believe that a supreme being exists and, at any point in time (including now), created the known physical universe as we find it. But one can not easily deny that the universe we find is physical, or that it follows laws that we can study and understand.
Evolution is fact. We can observe its effects, and even watch it happen. What is theorized about evolution are the many mechanisms by which it works. We understand quite a bit. But we don’t and probably never will understand every last minute detail. Our understanding itself evolves over time.
But you don’t need to count every gaseous molecule to tell you there’s an atmosphere. And you don’t need a Ph.D. in history or education to tell you that these statistics may be indicative of a tendency toward devolution as well.