Once upon a time, a “computer” was a human being, usually female, who did calculations set for her by men in suits. Then, in the 1940s, something happened: computers became machines based on electronics. The switch had awesome implications; in the end, it spawned a technology that became inextricably woven into the fabric of late-20th- and early 21st-century life and is now indispensable. If the billions of (mostly unseen) computers that now run our industrialised support systems were suddenly to stop working, then our societies would very rapidly grind to a halt.
So the question of where this Promethean force sprang from is an intriguing one, as interesting in its way as the origins of the industrial revolution. And, as with most such things, we have a creation myth – which starts with Alan Turing and his idea of “a single machine that can be used to compute any computable sequence” and then forks into two versions. One is British and goes via the “Colossus” computer built by Turing and his wartime colleagues at Bletchley Park to enable the cracking of German Enigma codes. The other version is American and starts with the construction of the ENIAC machine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1943 and continues through the industrialisation of that technology by companies such as Univac and IBM who made the huge mainframe computers that powered and shaped the industries of the mid-20th century. The two versions then converge with the arrival of Xerox, Apple, Intel and Microsoft on the scene, and we eventually arrive at a world in which nearly everything has a computer in it somewhere.
In a remarkable new book, Turing’s Cathedral, intellectual historian George Dyson sets out to give this creation myth a revisionist makeover. He focuses on a small group of mathematicians and engineers working on the hydrogen bomb, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey (but not at Princeton University), who not only built one of the first computers to realise Turing’s vision of a universal machine, but – more importantly – defined the architectural principles of a general-purpose “stored program computer” on which all succeeding computers were based. Dyson’s argument, crudely summarised, is that the IAS machine should be regarded as the fons et origo of the modern world rather than the ENIAC or Colossus machines that preceded it.
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MIT Learning Initiative “MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses for free to a virtual community of learners around the world.”
In Europe during the Middle Ages, the lord of the manor had a legal right to spend the first night with any non-noble bride on his land (‘le droit du seigneur’ or ‘right of the lord’). – Provided by RandomHistory.com
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Maybe this’ll pursuade you to do as you’re told and clean your damn room.
19-year-old Ryan Kitching says his mom had been on his case for weeks about his messy bedroom. When he finally got around to cleaning it up, he stumbled on a lottery ticket that ended up being worth £52,981 (~$84,000).
“My mum had been nagging me for weeks to tidy my room so I started cleaning up and found a pile of old tickets,” said Ryan. “I was about to bin them but at the last minute I got this strange feeling that I should get them checked.”
Good thing too, because one of them was worth nearly five times Ryan’s Tesco salary.
“Next time she nags me to tidy my room I won’t need telling twice,” he said.
And it only took half a hundred grand.
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Battle of the Bismarck Sea Begins (This Day in 1943)
This battle was an unparalleled victory for Allied air power in WWII. During the engagement, Allied planes attacked and nearly obliterated a Japanese convoy transporting thousands of troops to New Guinea. The Japanese loss of critical reinforcements and supplies changed the course of the Pacific War. The Allies were later criticized for strafing Japanese survivors, reportedly in retaliation for Japanese actions earlier in the battle. What new bombing technique did the Allies use in the battle? More…
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Smart talk has never been such a valuable commodity. It’s spawned conferences like TED, Davos, and now a slew of upstart competitors. It has made the eighteen‑minute TED lecture a viral online phenomenon. But are we running out of things to say?
Had any bystanders witnessed the attack on Duncan Davidson late one evening three years ago, they could never have guessed its epochal significance. It was a February night in Long Beach, California, and Davidson was walking to his hotel after a long day of work. West Ocean Boulevard was unusually dark. The streetlights were out. The sidewalks, thickly over-treed, were invisible from the road. As Davidson made his way through the gloom, a man grabbed him from behind and said, “I need your badge right fucking now!”
Had any bystanders witnessed the attack on Duncan Davidson late one evening three years ago, they could never have guessed its epochal significance. It was a February night in Long Beach, California, and Davidson was walking to his hotel after a long day of work. West Ocean Boulevard was unusually dark. The streetlights were out. The sidewalks, thickly over-treed, were invisible from the road. As Davidson made his way through the gloom, a man grabbed him from behind and said, “I need your badge right fucking now!”
Dangling from Davidson’s neck was an all-access staff badge for TED, the four-day ideas conference he had been hired to photograph. TED is best known for its eclectic eighteen-minute talks, videos of which often go viral online, and the expensive and clubby annual event where the talks are given. Davidson was also carrying a backpack containing cameras and lenses worth tens of thousands of dollars, but it went ignored. The man squeezed tighter. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will,” he warned.
Davidson thought quickly. At this hour, it would be difficult to notify everyone that a violent, credentialed TED impostor was at large. The attendees included famous people like Bill Gates, Al Gore, and Meg Ryan. Davidson told the mugger he couldn’t give him the pass.
“No, you don’t understand,” the man said. “I’ve got to get in there and meet those people.”
Dangling from Davidson’s neck was an all-access staff badge for TED, the four-day ideas conference he had been hired to photograph. TED is best known for its eclectic eighteen-minute talks, videos of which often go viral online, and the expensive and clubby annual event where the talks are given. Davidson was also carrying a backpack containing cameras and lenses worth tens of thousands of dollars, but it went ignored. The man squeezed tighter. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will,” he warned
Davidson thought quickly. At this hour, it would be difficult to notify everyone that a violent, credentialed TED impostor was at large. The attendees included famous people like Bill Gates, Al Gore, and Meg Ryan. Davidson told the mugger he couldn’t give him the pass.
“No, you don’t understand,” the man said. “I’ve got to get in there and meet those people.”
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Who are these companies and what do they want from me? A voyage into the invisible business that funds the web.
This morning, if you opened your browser and went to NYTimes.com, an amazing thing happened in the milliseconds between your click and when the news about North Korea and James Murdoch appeared on your screen. Data from this single visit was sent to 10 different companies, including Microsoft and Google subsidiaries, a gaggle of traffic-logging sites, and other, smaller ad firms. Nearly instantaneously, these companies can log your visit, place ads tailored for your eyes specifically, and add to the ever-growing online file about you.
There’s nothing necessarily sinister about this subterranean data exchange: this is, after all, the advertising ecosystem that supports free online content. All the data lets advertisers tune their ads, and the rest of the information logging lets them measure how well things are actually working. And I do not mean to pick on The New York Times. While visiting the Huffington Post or The Atlantic or Business Insider, the same process happens to a greater or lesser degree. Every move you make on the Internet is worth some tiny amount to someone, and a panoply of companies want to make sure that no step along your Internet journey goes unmonetized.
Even if you’re generally familiar with the idea of data collection for targeted advertising, the number and variety of these data collectors will probably astonish you. Allow me to introduce the list of companies that tracked my movements on the Internet in one recent 36-hour period of standard web surfing: Acerno. Adara Media. Adblade. Adbrite. ADC Onion. Adchemy. ADiFY. AdMeld. Adtech. Aggregate Knowledge. AlmondNet. Aperture. AppNexus. Atlas. Audience Science.
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After spending more than $140 million, the Air Force is poised to pull the plug on its ambitious project to send a king-sized, all-seeing spy blimp to Afghanistan. Which is a bit of a strange move: Not only is the scheduled first flight of the 370-foot-long “Blue Devil Block 2” airship less than six weeks away, but just yesterday, a top Air Force official bragged to Congress about the blimp’s predecessor, the “Blue Devil Block 1″ program. In other words, the Air Force is set to ground its mega-blimp spy ship before it even gets off the ground — literally.
Not long ago, Blue Devil and its kind were being pushed as the future of aerial surveillance. Instead of a drone’s single sensor, Blue Devil would employ an array of cameras and eavesdropping gear to keep tabs on entire villages for days at a time. And with so much space aboard the airship, racks and racks of processors could process the data generated by those sensors in the sky, easing the burden on intelligence analysts currently overloaded by drones’ video feeds.
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Female bonobos use homosexual sex to increase social status
The researchers, Zanna Clay and Klaus Zuberbühler, observed bonobos in the naturalistic setting of the Lola Ya Bonobo Sanctuary at Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in central Africa. They found that high-ranking females rarely interacted sexually with other females, but low-ranking females interacted sexually with all females. Most of these sexual contacts were initiated by the female having higher status in the group; sexual contact initiated with lower-ranking females was usually ignored by those of higher rank.
The scientists also found that the “copulation calls” of squeals and screams, made by females during genital contact with other females, were affected by the social rank of both participants, and by the audience present. The calls were significantly more prominent if the alpha female was among the audience, and females of lower rank were more likely to make calls if they were interacting with high-ranking females. The call duration and volume were not found to be related to physical factors such as duration of the sexual contact or body position.
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[read in full and note how private contractor company spreads fear to grab power,money--our Top Secret Nation is filled with people who had worked for the govt and then went into private security outfits, making much more money and serving in conflict of interest capacity]
Well, we saw this one coming a mile away. Last week, in talking about the current fight in the Senate over the new cybersecurity legislation that’s making the rounds, we noted that the behind-the-scenes story appeared to be that the NSA was going to make a power play to try to get responsibility for cybersecurity handed to it, rather than Homeland Security. Over the last few days, it’s become clear that’s exactly what’s going on. While neither the NSA nor DHS inspire much confidence when it comes to heading up cybersecurity, the NSA plan is really crazy. It’s expected that Senator McCain will be introducing legislation shortly that would give cybersecurity responsibility to the NSA.
McCain is positioning his version of the bill as one that focuses on “a cooperative relationship with the entire private sector through information sharing, rather than an adversarial one with prescriptive regulations.” However, reports are that McCain’s version involves a plan that the NSA has been aggressively lobbying for to give it access to networks deemed “critical.” The NSA says that it wants to monitor these networks in case of attack so it can spring into action.
However, given the NSA’s other mandates (spying!) this certainly has raised some fairly significant concerns. Should every private company running a network deemed critical automatically be required to install a special NSA spying box? Even the White House and the Justice Department (no strangers to over aggressive monitoring) have pushed back that this would be “unprecedented government” intrusion into the civilian internet. It’s apparently gotten so bad, that the Obama administration has privately slapped down NSA boss General Keith Alexander (last heard talking about how Anonymous was going to shut down powerlines) for “advocating for something beyond that, that is undermining the commander in chief.”
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The world is filled with wattles ― 1,350 species, more or less. Of the Acacia genus, in the Mimosa family, wattle trees often have little puffy flowers and long seed pods. Six hundred are native to Australia, but many, such as Australian Blackwood, have been introduced throughout the world.
A hardy tree with strong timber and a shady canopy, the Australian Blackwood is cultivated in habitats from Chile to California. Its prized wood is carved into ukuleles in Hawaii, boats in South Africa, and a collection of small treasures ― pipes, pens, guitar picks ― that would fill a Blackwood-inlay cabinet. Meanwhile, in most of these countries, the trees ― and their seeds ― have spread far beyond their designated territory, making the Australian Blackwood yet another introduced species to embellish on the terms of its invitation.
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Harry Warnecke and Lee Elkins, “W.C. Fields,” 1938.
via.
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Here in text shorthand are the 10 commandments as they may appear on modern Moses’ cellphone
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