Isotropic

According to “Oldest Gecko Fossil Ever Found, Entombed In Amber“, ‘Scientists from Oregon State University and the Natural History Museum in London have announced the discovery of the oldest known fossil of a gecko, with body parts that are forever preserved in life-like form after 100 million years of being entombed in amber.’
Images In [...]

“… they could have [...] eliminated the infrastructure kinetically”, according to Gadi Evron in “Internet Attacks Against Georgian Websites” (and followup).
There is a plethora of commentary on the Georgian situation, so I’m not going to discuss it here. However, the concept of eliminating infrastructure kinetically did ping my interesting phrases meter, so I’m [...]

“Who doesn’t long for household help at times? Service robots will soon be able to relieve us of heavy, dirty, monotonous or irksome tasks. Research scientists have now presented a new generation of household robots, the ‘Care-O-bot® 3′.” — ScienceDaily, New Generation Of Home Robots Have Gentle Touch
It is interesting that (according to the [...]

I confess I still use dialup. I hope it didn’t hurt too much when your jaw dropped, but please close your mouth now, it’s unbecoming.
The recent article Broadband Internet? No thanks (CNN) [h/t to Slashdot] inspired this post. I don’t have anything against high speed, it’s just that I’ve never needed it [...]

Totally tubular, man! Robots for teh Intertubes.
In the main, today’s robots are not that clever [to inspect pipes and shafts]. They cannot climb or navigate in vertical pipes – and very few have active joints. Cybernetics and optical measurement scientists at SINTEF are working on a solution.
SINTEF (2008, June 27). Robot That [...]

According to Hannah Hickey, in Underwater communication: Robofish are the ultimate in ocean robots, keeping in touch without scientists’ help (University of Washington), “The Robofish pack’s first assignment, beginning this summer, will be to trail a remote-controlled toy shark.”.
Robofish are unique in that that they can coordinate their activities and, due to underwater inter-communication, [...]

This article at NewScientist, Malicious software threatens internet economy, by Colin Barras & Tom Simonite, summarizes an OECD report: Malware: A security threat to the Internet economy (PDF). I’ve selected a few items from the summary:

most malware infections (93%) occur on home users’ computers
around one in four personal computers in the US – [...]

I’m always inordinately delighted by interesting phrases (Ooh, shiny!). So much so that I’ll make a post just so I can reference the phrases. That isn’t to say that the posts I link to aren’t interesting in themselves — I didn’t find them while actually looking for quotes, after all. I’m [...]

Steve Ballmer is in no way disappointed with Windows Vista. It is selling “incredibly well”, he told a press conference in Herzeliya, Israel today. “Vista sells on almost 100 per cent of all the new consumer PCs around the world,” the Microsoft CEO proclaimed. He added that the operating system was also selling on, “45 percent [...]

According to Akismet, 89% of all comments are spam.
For some peculiar reason, 90% of the spam I get shows up as comments on a single post — my ancient Wikipedia and Nupedia. (Ancient is ambiguous; although the permalink is from 2001, this blog didn’t exist before January 2008, when I dumped several items from [...]