The Betacantrips Travelogue

Towards the conception of non-human living systems. The story on Slashdot.

destinyland writes “After 13 years, the creator of the Noble Ape cognitive simulation says he’s learned two things about artificial intelligence. ‘Survival is a far better metric of intelligence than replicating human intelligence,’ and “There are a number of examples of vastly more intelligent systems (in terms of survival) than human intelligence.” Both Apple and Intel have used his simulation as a processor metric, but now Tom Barbalet argues its insights could be broadly applied to real life. His examples of durable non-human systems? The legal system, the health care system, and even the internet, where individual humans are simply the ‘passive maintaining agents,’ and the systems can’t be conquered without a human onslaught that’s several magnitudes larger.”

The post on Grafodexia.

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/86637/emi-quits-selling-cds-to-indie-record-stores/

From Overheard in New York.

Child: I turned on the channel and then mommy started yelling “no, no, turn it off!”
Mother: She found a porn channel.
Child: I liked it, because everyone was kissing.

Cities! The post on JWZ’s Livejournal.

Low-Rise is a precarious assemblage of thousands of free-standing stacks of staples densely tessellated to create a city-like mosaic. Like a city, the staples are subject to the elements, on a micro scale. The slightest breath or vibration and the domino effect kicks in.

USB entropy generators? Is this the future? The original post.

As already reported, while at Debconf9 this week, I succumbed to peer pressure, and have generated a new 4096-bit RSA key. Doing this was made substantially more pleasant (and certainly a bit more amusing!) by the fact that I was loaned a prototype of the new Simtec Entropy Key to play with.

Can’t wait until they’re in production and available for sale…

Basically, it’s “just” a very high quality hardware random number generator that sits on a USB interface. Associated with this is a small MIT-licensed daemon that gets loaded along with some udev configuration (all in a Debian package in my case), such that any time you plug it in, your system available entropy goes way up and stays up until you unplug it. It really is that easy! My new 4096-bit GPG key generated without perceptable delay, while the one my daughter made at the same time on her similar notebook required lots of mouse wiggling and I/O traffic generation to accumulate enough bits. A dramatic difference, to say the least!

File under: Exciting Career Opportunities in Nostalgia Harvesting! The story on Slashdot.

KingofGnG writes “Disney has chosen the San Diego Comic-Con International to present its new sci-fi project: the sequel to Tron. The classic movie from 1982 dealt with video games, virtual reality and 3D graphics when none of those things were widely popular. The new movie has got an official title and synopsis now, and they’ve released the very first trailer from the movie (this time without silly censorship) together with some concept art and the teaser poster.” No matter how silly the movie is, they’ll at least get my money for sheer nostalgia.

File under: the advance of ubiquitous computing, augmented reality, etc. The post on Slashdot.

zeazzz writes to mention that the folks over at UMPC have a very cool little writeup and pictorial of a user’s latest wearable PC. With the surge in smart phone adoption it seems that enthusiasm for wearable computers has dropped off a bit, which is too bad.

Snake + robot + techno, three great tastes that taste great together (don’t watch the whole thing). The post on JWZ’s site.

Skip forward to 0:23 to see the snakebot hump some guy’s leg.

From Overheard in New York.

Girl shopping for vegetables: What’s the difference between these two kinds of broccoli rabe?
Asian farmer: One is Chinese broccoli rabe. It’s more sweet. The other kind is bitter.
Girl: Why are some of them yellow and some of them green?
Asian farmer: That’s just different names, like how some mens is short and some mens is tall.

And all wimmenz be crazy.

Useless — doesn’t even mention 3hive or netlabels like 8bitpeoples (although they do mention Hype Machine). The article on CNN.

Online music is confusing these days.