The internet sucks... I regret saving it. --Michael Lynn
Wired News: Top Secret: We're Wiretapping You
Topic: Miscellaneous
7:35 pm EST, Mar 6, 2007
Top Secret: We're Wiretapping You
By Ryan Singel| Also by this reporter 02:00 AM Mar, 05, 2007 It could be a scene from Kafka or Brazil. Imagine a government agency, in a bureaucratic foul-up, accidentally gives you a copy of a document marked "top secret." And it contains a log of some of your private phone calls. You read it and ponder it and wonder what it all means. Then, two months later, the FBI shows up at your door, demands the document back and orders you to forget you ever saw it. By all accounts, that's what happened to Washington D.C. attorney Wendell Belew in August 2004. And it happened at a time when no one outside a small group of high-ranking officials and workaday spooks knew the National Security Agency was listening in on Americans' phone calls without warrants. Belew didn't know what to make of the episode. But now, thanks to that government gaffe, he and a colleague have
What's Special About This Number? 0 is the additive identity. 1 is the multiplicative identity. 2 is the only even prime. 3 is the number of spatial dimensions we live in. 4 is the smallest number of colors sufficient to color all planar maps. 5 is the number of Platonic solids. 6 is the smallest perfect number. 7 is the smallest number of faces of a regular polygon that is not constructible by straightedge and compass. 8 is the largest cube in the Fibonacci sequence. 9 is the maximum number of cubes that are needed to sum to any positive integer. 10 is the base of our number system.
a math prof made this cool site talking about special quality about thousands of numbers...good mental masterbation for all the number theory junkies out there (you know who you are)...
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YouTube - Video explains the world's most important 6-sec drum loop
Topic: Arts
5:47 pm EST, Feb 15, 2007
This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the "Amen Break," a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music -- a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. Nate Harrison's 2004 video is a meditation on the ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history of a remarkable music clip.
UPDATE - A detour into the strange world of quantum computing
Topic: Miscellaneous
9:47 pm EST, Feb 12, 2007
A detour into the strange world of quantum computing 2/12/2007 12:16:26 PM, by John Timmer On Tuesday, a startup company called D-Wave is going to publicly demonstrate a quantum computing system that they call Orion. Is this the dawn of a new era of computing or simply an exercise in hype? It's hard to say prior to the announcement, but my guess is a little of both. To fully appreciate why, we'll have to take a detour into the strange world of quantum computing.
they claim to have a working 16 bit quantum computer...even if its extremely limited in its applications I'm very excited to see this technology moving forward so quickly...
UPDATE: so I just heard from someone that was at the demo, it apears to have worked as advertised...pretty amazing...
