Must see. I mean it.

Wonderful images by BENEDETTA BONICHI:
To See In The Dark

I received a message by Open University to remove this video here. I wonder if it is illegal to imbed youtube videos? It doesn’t matter, since the youtube video has been taken down as well:

“HOW THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE …”
This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by The Open University.

I’ll google this in a few days and hope I can find a “legal” source for this wonderful video.

A wonderful 10 minute video about the development of the English language. The best chapters for me were the chapters about science (“Acid” 1626, “Gravity” 1641, “Electricity” 1646, “Pendulum” 1660, “Penis” 1693, “Vagina” 1682, “Cardiac” 1601, “Sternum” 1667, “Tonsil” 1601) and words from other languages (Carribbean: BQQ, canoe, cannibal; India: stairs, bungalow; Africa: voodoo, zombie; Australia: walkaround, nugget; Holland: cookies).

Link of the day: “The Top 10 Relationship Words That Aren’t Translatable Into English”

Cafuné (Brazilian Portuguese): The act of tenderly running your fingers through someone’s hair.

“Debates about scientific realism are centrally connected to almost everything else in the philosophy of science, for they concern the very nature of scientific knowledge. Scientific realism is a positive epistemic attitude towards the content of our best theories and models, recommending belief in both observable and unobservable aspects of the world described by the sciences. This epistemic attitude has important metaphysical and semantic dimensions, and these various commitments are contested by a number of rival epistemologies of science, known collectively as forms of scientific antirealism. This article explains what scientific realism is, outlines its main variants, considers the most common arguments for and against the position, and contrasts it with its most important antirealist counterparts.”

Source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/

(Thanks, Benedikt)

I love the future. As dystopic as things might get, politically, economically, ethically – there will always be things to keep me going.
Like swarm robotics.

“Swarm robotics is a new approach to the coordination of multirobot systems which consist of large numbers of mostly simple physical robots. It is supposed that a desired collective behavior emerges from the interactions between the robots and interactions of robots with the environment. This approach emerged on the field of artificial swarm intelligence, as well as the biological studies of insects, ants and other fields in nature, where swarm behaviour occurs”.

When I grow up, I want to become a swarm roboticist.

This article sums up very nicely that google is providing different people with different “truths” about subjects like climate change, depending on your personal google history:

So if last time you looked up climate change and chose to open something by, say, Marc Morano, then Senator Inhofe, and then the Drudge Report, which would all poo-poo climate change, google thinks, “oh, this moron likes denier news about climate change,” and next time, more of its top suggestions for your search will be skewed even further to the right.
As you keep heading further into la-la land, Google is there, holding your hand, assuring you that indeed, this is the objective, google-able truth. Two people with different search histories get two entirely different sets of google “facts” for the identical search terms.
– Susan Kraemer, “How Google is Making the Climate War Worse”

Link of the day:
Cynical-C.com

A website listing “One star Amazon reviews of classic movies, music and literature.”

Catcher in the Rye:

I am very open minded when it comes to literature (I even read through Mein Kampf without any objection) but I just hated this book! If it wasn’t required reading, I would have stopped on the fourth page! I think Salinger could have done much better!

The old man and the sea:

I couldn’t have cared less what happened to the old man, the fish, the boat, or Ernest Hemmingway. It was a titanic struggle to get through the book–way harder than anything the old man had to face. James Joyce does stream of consciousness a whole lot better–and I hate Joyce’s writing too.

Two researchers from the University of California Davis, Hao Chen and Lian Cai, have successfully divined the keystrokes on an Android on-screen keyboard by measuring the wiggles, jiggles, and vibrations picked up by the device’s accelerometer. This is significant because the data from accelerometers is not thought of as a potential attack vector, and is thus freely available to any application on any smartphone or tablet.

via extremetech.com