science

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Wacky Sci-Fi "Laws"

Sci-Fi writers seem to enjoy coining Laws: adages bearing their own names that live on past their appearances in Sci-Fi stories. Here are five of my favorites, plus one bonus law (actually a Principle) from the world of cartoons. 1. Hanlon's Razor (aka Hanlon's... READ ON

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The Clock of the Long Now

Most clocks are built to keep time on fairly short timescales: windup watches may run a few days between windings, torsion pendulum clocks go about a year between windings, battery-powered watches often go several years on a given battery, and of course electrical clocks plugged into mains power run as long as that power is provided. All of these inventions require continuous human intervention to operate, and even more attention to keep the clocks accurately set to the current time. But what if you're... READ ON

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Schwarzenegger Beetles (and other celebrity species)

Recently, Stephen Colbert had a segment on his show where he celebrated a great honor: a spider being named after him. John Cleese said last week that having a lemur named after him was an honor he liked more than the possibility of knighthood. It's not unusual for species to be named after celebrities. In fact, a look through nature's nomenclature is practically equal parts Latin textbook and US Weekly. But how do celebrities get this honor? Some scientists saw a resemblance between their... READ ON

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Photos: Making Exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History

The American Museum of Natural History has posted an online exhibit called Picturing the Museum. Included are a series of archival photos showing old exhibits at their museum, the most interesting (to me, anyway) being a bunch of behind-the-scenes photos showing the staff putting together exhibits. The photos are all over the map, but in general are a fascinating look at the making of great exhibits. Some of the photos are picturesque, like this shot of "Sister and Sammy Keith collecting tadpoles for... READ ON

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Using AI to Improve Animation

Torsten Reil gave a TED Talk in 2003 called Simulating Humans, describing his research on animating human characters in 3D. Reil discusses how traditional video game animation is static and repetitive: animators create each character animation, and the character goes through the same motions every time -- every time the character falls down it's exactly the same animation of falling down. As a result, human characters in games have looked pretty unrealistic, and movie animation has taken a long time to... READ ON

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Spore: The Buzz Begins

I've wanted to play Will Wright's next game, Spore, for years. I first wrote about Spore way back in February 2007, proudly and naively stating that "our wait will soon be over." Well, I was right if by "soon" I meant "in another year and a half." Spore has been in development since 2000, and it finally has a reliable release date: September 7, 2008. Let's hope the wait has been worth it. Spore is a video game unlike any other. Following in the tradition of Wright's SimCity and The Sims, it's a... READ ON

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George Dyson on the Birth of the Computer

George Dyson returns to TED with a seventeen-minute talk explaining the origins of the digital computer -- in hilarious style. Briefly starting with Leibniz's machine-based calculus proposal from 1679, Dyson takes us on a humorous ride through early computer development, with tons of anecdotes from early computer engineers' notebooks (including scans of all sorts of amusing notes). (If you can't see the visuals well enough below, try downloading the full-size MP4 file). If you like history or math,... READ ON

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Required Viewing: The Machine That Changed the World

Andy Baio of Waxy.org has begun posting digitized versions of a 1992 documentary about personal computers entitled The Machine That Changed the World. Narrated by Frontline veteran Will Lyman, the WGBH Boston documentary is "the longest, most comprehensive documentary about the history of computing ever produced," according to Baio. The documentary is great fun -- featuring extensive interviews with major computer pioneers, it covers a broad spectrum of computer history and trivia. From Baio's... READ ON

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How to Solve a Rubik's Cube in Only 23 Moves

I've never solved a Rubik's Cube. I'm that guy who takes the stickers off puts them where I want them in order to get it over with. (Much to the consternation of any legitimate puzzle-solver who might try to use my cube in the future.) So it was with some amazement that I learned that Rubik's Cube solutions are an area of active mathematical research. There are scholars out there working on ideal cube-solving algorithms, and major progress is being made towards "God's algorithm" -- more on that in a... READ ON

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Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine

Danny Hillis is best known for his Connection Machine, a massively parallel supercomputer that led to breakthroughs in computational science and parallel computing. (It also was the subject of Hillis's book The Connection Machine, which was a highly technical but fascinating version of his thesis paper on parallel computing. If you want the only halfway mind-blowing version, check out The Pattern on the Stone.) Hillis later led R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering, but in my book the Connection Machine was... READ ON