I’ve never actually been that much into cars but I have a general curiosity on how most things work and this includes the inner workings of vehicles. This golden-oldie video depicts the simple, yet effective, mechanism of differential steering, so if, like me, you didn’t know how this worked…well, now you know. Enjoy:
(thanks, Sérgio)
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Christopher Priest – The PrestigeMy Review: The jury is still out on my favorite Chris Nolan movie, but The Prestige is definitely up there fighting for first place with Memento. So, it was no surprise that I felt I had to read the book that originated the movie. The book is quite different from the movie but the rivalry between the two performers is still the baseline of the plot. However, the storyline is presented by way of the performers’ grandsons reading their personal diaries, entry by entry and trying to make sense of the long-standing war between their families. I very much enjoyed the book as it presents a quite different story based on the same premise, but the delivery is not as good as in the movie. Nevertheless, it’s still a great read for fans of the movie. My Rating: 4/5 |
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Terry Pratchett, Stephen Baxter – The Long EarthMy Review: Imagine that there are multiple (possibly infinite) parallel earths that you can visit (“step”) using a very simple potato-powered device that you can build with rudimentary components. This is what this book is all about: setting the baseline for this kind of universe and how this affects society. The story then revolves around a small set of characters that step all over several different Earths in an attempt to understand and discover everything there is to know about this phenomenon. The idea behind the book is great and it definitely raises some interesting questions but the fact that this is only the first volume of a planned series is evident in the pace and continuity of the plot. I’ll look forward for the next volumes. My Rating: 4/5 |
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Max Brooks – World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie WarMy Review: This book focus on a fake documentary that gathers witnesses’ reports from all around the world regarding the (fictional) Zombie War. It has the same problem as Robopocalypse: in stories based on characters reporting what happened, you already know that those characters didn’t die. And that kind of spoils the story on so many levels. Nevertheless, you still have some interesting twists that can save those story-telling chapters, but that doesn’t always happen and most stories are boring. I think the upcoming movie based on the book may have taken the right approach by focusing on a single character’s point of view (Brad Pitt) and therefore bringing in only the most exciting parts of the book. My Rating: 3/5 |
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by J.R.R. Tolkien – The HobbitMy Review: There isn’t much I can say about this book as it is a well-known piece of literature. I quite enjoyed reading it but it would have had a much greater impact on me if I had read it at an earlier age. The Hobbit is definitely a more fantasy/adventure story directed to younger audiences than, say, The Lord of the Rings’ books, which is a lot darker and more dramatic in the fight of good versus evil. My Rating: 4/5 |
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George R. R. Martin – A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire #3)My Review: It’s pointless to try and say much about this book without shooting spoilers all around, so I’ll just say this: two thirds in on this book and I was ready to give it a 3/5 rating, mainly because almost all of the characters spend most of their time traveling and not much happens in terms of the initial development present in the first two books. However (and I can’t stress this “however” enough), the last third of the book is priceless. Huge turns, twists and developments make up for the rest of the book and leave you hanging for more developments (which I hope will be address in the next book). My Rating: 5/5 |
Related: What I’ve been reading, Vol. I, II, III, IV, V, VI and VII
Imagine that the typical money-for-ransom is traded with a weird request like: “If you want to get your dear princess back, the prime-minister will have to have sexual intercourse with a pig on live television.” Will the prime-minister do it? Or more importantly, in a heavily socialized society where viral content dominates the people’s attention span, would they want him to do it and would they watch?
Or imagine that you live in a future where the most common way of making an income is to work on huge energy-production buildings where people pedal specialized stationary bikes to produce the energy that the rest of the world will consume. The alternative of leading this boring and tiresome life is to become a star in worldwide-broadcast reality shows that range from singing or pornography to physical abuse. Is everything better than the bike?
Or imagine instead that everyone has a brain implant that allows recording and reviewing every memory they have ever had and, by using a small external device, people can simply rewind and fast-forward to a particular memory and display it on a nearby TV for everyone to see. Now imagine you suspect your wife is cheating on you and you over-analyse every memory that you have of her with the guy you suspect she’s having the affair with. How long would it take you to go insane?
These stories are the plots of the 3 episodes of the first season of BBC’s wonderful series Black Mirror, a techno-paranoia drama where each episode features a different story, a different cast and a different reality. In a modern-day Twilight Zone-like setting, each story brings us a potential future for our society that, albeit seeming a bit extremist, will definitely leave you thinking if this is really what you want for your future.
I definitely recommend everyone to see it. I dare say it’s mandatory for anyone with any kind of technology enthusiastic view of the society.
EPFL scientists have developed a tiny, portable personal implantable blood testing laboratory that sends data through mobile phone network
Yes, it’s all going according to the plan.
Don’t know what “recursion” is? Google explains:
The news came as a shock, at least for me: Google decided that Google Reader will be shut down as of July, 1st. A lot of reasons have been flying around, with the official statement being that Google needs to focus on fewer products and some saying that they need the engineering team behind Google Reader to start working on Google’s social products (read, Google+). To this, I say: what engineering team?
As far as I can tell, Google Reader hasn’t been updated in ages. Nothing (or close to it) has changed for the last months, if not years. It seems to be, for better or for worse, a finalized product. And if they say the use has been declining, I’m guessing that there isn’t even a storage or server use problem. So, what has its team been working on?
I really don’t get it, but then again, this is and has always been a free product, so we can’t actually demand anything from Google other than a clean way to export our feeds, which they already provide.
Now the future. And this is the part that worries me the most. For me, RSS has always had its own and rightful place in my social activity on the Internet. I don’t (usually) mix it and I totally feel that it’s a completely different ball game from things like Twitter or Facebook. They have a different purpose, but they perfectly complete each other.
RSS is my curated news[1], Twitter and Facebook is everyone else’s. And I value each one differently. But I have to say that RSS has played a larger role on my daily on-line activity. I might not check Twitter if I’ve been having a very busy day at work, but I always check my RSS every once in a while. And for RSS, Google Reader has always been the weapon of choice for me.
I don’t use it directly, but it’s the basis of my feed collections since Reeder (which I use on the Mac), Flipboard (which I use on the iPad) and Byline (which I use on the iPhone) all access the Google Reader API directly. And this provides the bliss of my RSS management: if I read in one application it syncs to all other applications.
But what now? Sure, there are alternatives, if you like to use them directly. But what if, like me, you use it through third-party apps? Will they all agree on one single service? Unlikely. Will they all dispute the 1st place now that Google Reader is stepping off the podium? Most definitely. And there goes my RSS management bliss: synchronization.
Well, I may be wrong[2]. Let’s just wait and see. July is still a few months away and the Internet always finds ways to surprise us. But I’m feeling less than optimistic about it. At least, I’m not reacting like this other guy that apparently is entering a real spiral of raging hate:
(via @pedromelo)
What an interesting coincidence: just a few hours after I posted this little question about our capability to simulate the human brain, the SingularityHub posted this piece on how a leading neuroscientist says that Kurzweil’s predictions are rubbish.
Although I find the neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis‘ views a bit extreme, I have to agree (as I said before) that the problem lies on the simple aspect that we don’t know how to develop an algorithm to simulate the brain. It’s true, we have (or we are very close to having) the necessary computing power to do so, but not the knowledge on the inner workings of the human brain to actually make a computable simulation.
But the future will tell us who’s right.
Back in 2007, US researchers have simulated half a virtual brain of a mouse on a supercomputer. Interestingly, Ray Kurzweil, in his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near“, accurately predicted the amount of computing power necessary for that scientific achievement.
What’s really interesting is the prediction that he made for 2013. Check this graphic:
2013 is portrayed as the year where the human race will have enough computing power, according to Kurzweil’s predictions, to simulate an entire virtual human brain.
I still believe that the challenge regarding simulating the human brain is in the software, not in the hardware[1], but this will sure be an interesting year for artificial intelligence research.
When I close the lid of my Macbook I usually just assume it will go to sleep as expected. This one time, however, when I got back to my office and opened the lid I noticed the Mac was absurdly hot for a computer that has just been in sleep mode.
I decided to test it again and close the lid. To my surprise, the usual flashing light on the macbook didn’t flash at all. It just remained steadily lit. At first, I thought it was some hung app that was causing this so I decided to close every app and check if there was some process using the CPU heavily, but that wasn’t the case. I even tried rebooting and still that didn’t solve the problem. I checked the power settings and nothing pointed to it being the responsible for the sleep mode prevention.
After some googling I ended up discovering this neat command that allows checking the state of your power settings:
pmset -g assertions
This command displays a summary of power assertions. And according to the documentation: “These assertions may prevent system sleep or display”.
It’s worth a shot. This was the output:
Assertion status system-wide: PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep 0 PreventSystemSleep 1 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep 0 ExternalMedia 0 UserIsActive 0 ApplePushServiceTask 0 BackgroundTask 1 Listed by owning process: pid 477(helpd): [0x0000000c00000226] 00:54:25 BackgroundTask named: "com.apple.helpd.sdmbuilding" pid 1621(InternetSharing): [0x00000008000017bc] 00:00:02 DenySystemSleep named: "com.apple.InternetSharing"
Bingo! Internet Sharing! I totally forgot about it. Since I’ve been working with the Raspberry Pi lately, I had setup the mac to share its Internet with the mini computer. But I forgot to turn it off. And it makes perfect sense that it prevents the computer from sleeping because it’s sharing the resource that it may be currently used by some other computer.
After turning Internet Sharing off it all went back to normal. Just decided to share because it might happen to someone else.
