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01 Feb 17:07

91

by Romantically Apocalyptic
Hugo.pipping

Gustav!

19 Nov 11:51

Thomas Sowell

"There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously."
04 Nov 21:00

Douglas Adams

Hugo.pipping

Ah, one of my favourite Douglas Adams quotes!

"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."
01 Nov 19:46

WIRED: FAA Finally Lifts Ancient Ban on Mobile Device Use on Planes

by Dr. Stefan Gruenwald

The Federal Aviation Administration has finally seen the error of its ways and will permit airlines to allow passengers to use electronic devices during takeoff and landing. Because, no, playing Dots isn’t going to bring down Boeing’s latest high-tech airliner.


The ban on mobile devices has been in effect since the early 1990s, when cellphones began to crop up, and the FAA and airlines summarily freaked the hell out for no good reason. Despite no direct evidence that the use of mobile phones or other electronic devices would interfere with the plane’s systems, the ban continued — even after the FAA hired an outside safety agency to find if anything could go wrong. They didn’t. But the FAA and airlines decided to continue the policy. Until today.

 

The FAA’s announcement requires airlines to prove that electronic devices are safe to use on their planes from gate to gate, and the agency expects all carriers to get the thumbs-up from the Feds by the end of the year.

 

E-book devices, handheld gaming systems, tablets, and phones will be allowed during takeoff and landing, although the FAA recommends that you still switch to airplane mode because you’re not going to get a signal 30,000 feet in the air — the only hit you’ll take is a dead battery when you land. However, larger devices like laptops will have to be stowed away because of their potential to become silicon-filled projectiles if there’s an emergency — which was the real reason many airlines preferred the ban to be in effect.



29 Oct 08:11

Friedrich Nietzsche

"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
29 Oct 08:09

Kurt Vonnegut

"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand"
28 Oct 20:46

MIT: The Million-Year Data Storage Disk Unveiled

by Dr. Stefan Gruenwald

Magnetic hard discs can store data for little more than a decade. But nanotechnologists have now designed and built a disk that can store data for a million years or more.

 

Back in 1956, IBM introduced the world’s first commercial computer capable of storing data on a magnetic disk drive. The IBM 305 RAMAC used fifty 24-inch discs to store up to 5 MB, an impressive feat in those days. Today, however, it’s not difficult to find hard drives that can store 1 TB of data on a single 3.5-inch disk. But despite this huge increase in storage density and a similarly impressive improvement in power efficiency, one thing hasn’t changed. The lifetime over which data can be stored on magnetic discs is still about a decade.

 

That raises an interesting problem. How are we to preserve information about our civilisation on a timescale that outlasts it? In other words, what technology can reliably store information for 1 million years or more?

 

Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Jeroen de Vries at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and a few pals. These guys have designed and built a disk capable of storing data over this timescale. And they’ve performed accelerated ageing tests which show it should be able to store data for 1 million years and possibly longer.

 

These guys start with some theory about aging. Clearly, it’s impractical to conduct an ageing experiment in real time, particularly when the periods involved are measured in millions of years.  But there is a way to accelerate the process of aging.

 

This is based on the idea that data must be stored in an energy minimum that is separated from other minima by an energy barrier. So to corrupt data by converting a 0 to a 1, for example, requires enough energy to overcome this barrier.

 

The probability that the system will jump in this way is governed by an idea known as Arrhenius law. This relates the probability of jumping the barrier to factors such as its temperature, the Boltzmann constant and how often a jump can be attempted, which is related to the level of atomic vibrations.

 

Some straightforward calculations reveal that to last a million years, the required energy barrier is 63 KBT or 70 KBT to last a billion years. “These values are well within the range of today’s technology,” say de Vries and co.

 

The disk is simple in conception. The data is stored in the pattern of lines etched into a thin metal disc and then covered with a protective layer.

The metal in question is tungsten, which they chose because of its high melting temperature (3,422 degrees C) and low thermal expansion coefficient.  The protective layer is silicon nitride (Si3N4) chosen because of its high resistance to fracture and its low thermal expansion coefficient.

 

The results are impressive. According to Arrhenius law, a disk capable of surviving a million years would have to survive 1 hour at 445 Kelvin, a test that the new disks passed with ease. Indeed, they survived temperatures up to 848 Kelvin, albeit with significant amounts of information loss.



12 Oct 07:53

Sir Winston Churchill

Hugo.pipping

That's one charming motherfucker!

"I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."
10 Oct 13:57

Aristotle

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
08 Oct 12:26

John Dewey

Hugo.pipping

Actually we can, but it often isn't very useful.

"We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts."
08 Oct 05:00

Simulate The Human Brain In A Supercomputer: The Human Brain Project Has Officially Begun

by Dr. Stefan Gruenwald
Hugo.pipping

This might be a pretty historical moment. Wonder how it will manage...


The brain, with its billions of interconnected neurons, is without any doubt the most complex organ in the body and it will be a long time before we understand all its mysteries. The Human Brain Project proposes a completely new approach. The project is integrating everything we know about the brain into computer models and using these models to simulate the actual working of the brain. Ultimately, it will attempt to simulate the complete human brain. The models built by the project will cover all the different levels of brain organisation -- from individual neurons through to the complete cortex. The goal is to bring about a revolution in neuroscience and medicine and to derive new information technologies directly from the architecture of the brain.

The challenges facing the project are huge. Neuroscience alone produces more than 60'000 scientific papers every year. From this enormous mass of information, the project will have to select and harmonise the data it is going to use -- ensuring that data produced with different methods is fully comparable.

The data feeding the project's simulation effort will come from the clinic and from neuroscience experiments. As we try to fit all the information together, we will discover many of the brain's fundamental design secrets: the geometry and electrical behaviour of different classes of neurons, the way they connect to form circuits, and the way new functions emerge as more and more neurons connect. It is these principles, translated into mathematics that will drive the project's models and simulations.

Today, simulating a single neuron requires the full power of a laptop computer. But the brain has billions of neurons and simulating all them simultaneously is a huge challenge. To get round this problem, the project will develop novel techniques of multi-level simulation in which only groups of neurons that are highly active are simulated in detail. But even in this way, simulating the complete human brain will require a computer a thousand times more powerful than the most powerful machine available today. This means that some of the key players in the Human Brain Project will be specialists in supercomputing. Their task: to work with industry to provide the project with the computing power it will need at each stage of its work.

The Human Brain Project will impact many different areas of society. Brain simulation will provide new insights into the basic causes of neurological diseases such as autism, depression, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. It will give us new ways of testing drugs and understanding the way they work. It will provide a test platform for new drugs that directly target the causes of disease and that have fewer side effects than current treatments. It will allow us to design prosthetic devices to help people with disabilities. The benefits are potentially huge. As world populations grow older, more than a third will be affected by some kind of brain disease. Brain simulation provides us with a powerful new strategy to tackle the problem.

The project also promises to become a source of new Information Technologies. Unlike the computers of today, the brain has the ability to repair itself, to take decisions, to learn, and to think creatively - all while consuming no more energy than an electric light bulb. The Human Brain Project will bring these capabilities to a new generation of neuromorphic computing devices, with circuitry directly derived from the circuitry of the brain. The new devices will help us to build a new generation of genuinely intelligent robots to help us at work and in our daily lives.

The Human Brain Project builds on the work of the Blue Brain Project. Led by Henry Markram of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the Blue Brain Project has already taken an essential first towards simulation of the complete brain. Over the last six years, the project has developed a prototype facility with the tools, know-how and supercomputing technology necessary to build brain models, potentially of any species at any stage in its development. As a proof of concept, the project has successfully built the first ever, detailed model of the neocortical column, one of the brain's basic building blocks.



25 Sep 13:40

Privacy Opinions

Hugo.pipping

I'm not sure if I'm the Nihilist or the Exhibitionist...

I'm the Philosopher until someone hands me a burrito.
23 Sep 04:12

Chaos Computer Club hackers trick Apple’s TouchID security feature

by Nathan Mattise
Hugo.pipping

Well, that didn't take long.

Germany's Chaos Computing Club claims to have tricked Apple's new TouchID security feature this weekend. In a blog post on the breakthrough, the CCC writes that they bypassed the fingerprint-reader by simply starting with "the fingerprint of the phone user photographed from a glass surface."

The entire process is documented by hacker Starbug in the video above, and the club outlines it in a how-to. For this particular initiative, the CCC started by photographing a fingerprint with 2400 dpi. Next the image was inverted and laser printed at 1200 dpi. To create the fingerprint mask Starbug finally used, latex milk was poured into the pattern, eventually lifted, breathed on (for moisture), and pushed onto the sensor to unlock the phone. In this sense, it's hard to definitively state the hackers "broke" the TouchID precautions, because they did not circumvent the security measure without access to the fingerprint. (TouchID could similarly be cleared with a GTA V-like strategy of knocking the phone user unconscious and pressing finger-to-sensor.) However, the CCC did successfully trick TouchID into working as advertised for an individual who wasn't the phone user.

The CCC, and Starbug in particular, are well-known critics of biometric security systems. Back in 2008, Starbug even cloned the fingerprint of a German politician who advocated for collecting citizens' unique physical characteristics as a means of preventing terrorism.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments


    






31 Mar 09:22

Let's Identify Types Of Meat

Let's Identify Types Of Meat

31 Mar 09:21

Easy Hand Washing Guide

31 Mar 09:21

The Striped Bass

The Striped Bass

27 Mar 20:07

The Past

Hugo.pipping

Oh, yeah! Let's invade with a cunning use of flags!

If history has taught us anything, we can use that information to destroy it.