~About Linkfilter
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linkfilter.net is just what the name implies, a link filter. All links are posted and moderated by
users. Links can be ranked on several levels: clicks, votes, age, or a combination of all three called
points. Questions or comments about linkfilter.net can be directed to beaglebot.
If you're new to linkfilter, you probably should read the
FAQ,
and Otterella.
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~chatter
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r03> by holding down the right ctrl key and pressing scroll lock twice
r03> neato bandito
r03> quit laughing at my pretzel
AB> that sounds almost useful
AB> this is windows, of course?
!! devnull is around.
r03> oh yes, of course
r03> I am sure it can be useful for debigguing or something
r03> what the hell did i just type?
AB> debiggening
AB> aka ensmallening
AB> unensmallenation may require certain pills
AB> ...certain pills that the discerning enbiggener can purchase at my not-at-all shady website for a measly $100/box
!! cornpone is around.
!! Dyskolos is around.
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~Linkfilter News
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beaglebot is the administrator of linkfilter.
Everything is groovy. Be cool.
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There is no place for God in theories on the creation of the Universe, Professor Stephen Hawking has said.
He had previously argued belief in a creator was not incompatible with science but in a new book, he concludes the Big Bang was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics.
cc: some dude/some chick
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In a letter to Los Angeles County Sheriff Leroy D. Baca, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California called the Assault Intervention Device - which focuses a softball-sized beam that makes inmates feel “intolerable heat” - a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s protection against “cruel and unusual punishment.”
The new device, according to Osborne and Raytheon, penetrates only 1/64th of an inch into the skin, causing “controllable pain” but no injury. As soon as the heat beam is switched off, the pain stops, they say, leaving no lasting burns or physical damage. The test device’s range is 85 feet, compared to 800 feet for the truck-mounted Active Denial System developed for the military.
Company link to pdf / short video on Silent Guardian
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Reverse-engineering the human brain so we can simulate it using computers may be only a decade away, says Ray Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of the best-selling book The Singularity is Near.
It would be the first step toward creating machines that are more powerful than the human brain. These supercomputers could be networked into a cloud computing architecture to amplify their processing capabilities. Meanwhile, algorithms that power them could get more intelligent. Together these could create the ultimate machine that can help us handle the challenges of the future, says Kurzweil.
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In 2003 a groundbreaking historical genetics paper reported results which indicated that a substantial proportion of men in the world are direct line descendants of Genghis Khan. By direct line, I mean that they carry Y chromosomes which seem to have come down from an individual who lived approximately 1,000 years ago. As Y chromosomes are only passed from father to son, that would mean that the Y is a record of one’s patrilineage. Genghis Khan died ~750 years ago, so assuming 25 years per generation, you get about 30 men between the present and that period. In more quantitative terms, ~10% of the men who reside within the borders of the Mongol Empire as it was at the death of Genghis Khan may carry his Y chromosome, and so ~0.5% of men in the world, about 16 million individuals alive today, do so. Since 2003 there have been other cases of “super-Y” lineages. For example the Manchu lineage and the Uí Néill lineage. The existence of these Y chromosomal lineages, which have burst upon the genetic landscape like explosive stars sweeping aside all other variation before them, indicates a periodic it “winner-take-all” dynamic in human genetics more reminiscent of hyper-polygynous mammals such as elephant seals. As we do not exhibit the sexual dimorphism which is the norm in such organisms, it goes to show the plasticity of outcome due to the flexibility of human cultural forms.
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A group from the University of British Columbia recently published an enormous meta-analysis on the danger of assuming that all of humanity closely matches the behaviors of 20-something college students. They call this the WEIRD population—Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic—and say that they are the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans.
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A field near Gretna in Dumfriesshire might not be an obvious place to find the world's oldest living creatures, but a team of scientists has done just that.
Two colonies of a prehistoric shrimp that evolved when the dinosaurs ruled the Earth have been found alive and well in the Caerlaverock nature reserve on the Solway coast.
The discovery has led experts to think there could be more of the little crustaceans, which are listed as endangered species, elsewhere in the area.
The ancient creatures, known as Triops cancriformis or tadpole shrimps, are thought to have the oldest pedigree of any living animal. Fossil evidence suggests they have hardly changed in the more than 200m years that they have been around.
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Biding their time, no doubt.
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The reproductive success of both men and women is influenced by our personality traits, according to new research from the University of Sheffield.
The study, which was published June 7, 2010 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that women with higher levels of neuroticism and more extravert men, are likely to give birth to a larger number of children in societies with traditionally high birth rates.
The study also found evidence of a link between maternal personality traits and offspring’s physical condition, as women with higher neuroticism levels were more likely to have children with a decreased body mass index (BMI), reflecting malnutrition.
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Here’s bright spot in the news of the day: energy from new solar installations has, for the first time, become cheaper than energy from new nuclear plants, according to a new Duke University study. Thanks to cost-saving technologies and economies of scale, price can no longer be an excuse to invest in nuclear power rather than solar.
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New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way people see the world; a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish
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Octopuses “make decisions all the time, complicated decisions,” says Roger Hanlon, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. “People don’t expect that from a creature related to an oyster.”
What scientists are discovering about the octopus calls into question many of our assumptions about intelligence. Partly this is because the creatures are so different from the kinds of animals — social vertebrates, especially mammals — that have long been seen as having a monopoly on smarts. Octopuses are members of a class of creatures known as cephalopods, which appeared on the planet even before the first fish, and they are almost as far removed from us primates as another animal can get. And although it has long been theorized that intelligence evolved in social creatures as a way for species that live in groups to navigate the complex social world, the octopus leads a solitary life.
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WE COULD be living inside a black hole. This head-spinning idea is one cosmologist's conclusion based on a modification of Einstein's equations of general relativity that changes our picture of what happens at the core of a black hole.
In an analysis of the motion of particles entering a black hole, published in March, Nikodem Poplawski of Indiana University in Bloomington showed that inside each black hole there could exist another universe (Physics Letters B, DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2010.03.029). "Maybe the huge black holes at the centre of the Milky Way and other galaxies are bridges to different universes," Poplawski says. If that is correct - and it's a big "if" - there is nothing to rule out our universe itself being inside a black hole.
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A panel discussion on arguing with non-skeptics at the recent Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism in New York City featured James Randi, George Hrab, DJ Grothe and podcast host Steve Mirsky (picture at left). Julia Galef moderated. Part 1 of 2. Websites related to content of this podcast include www.nature.com/nature/podcast and www.necsscon.org
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In theory, if you have the free time, you can calculate any statistic you might need using nothing more than a pencil and paper. After all, it’s just matrix mathematics. With a lot of data or a complicated procedure, though, you might need a lot of free time. A generation ago, that’s how most statistics were calculated. Most people didn’t have computers, or calculators for that matter. Slide rules … maybe. Now, there is an abundance of hardware and software to ease the tedium. Having a statistician’s version of Norm Abram’s workshop to use actually makes analyzing data a lot of fun.
Whether you’re planning a career in statistics or just looking to analyze your current dataset, you’re going to need software to do the calculations. Yes, there are some people who still calculate descriptive statistics manually, but this practice is so prone to errors that it’s only applied to very small datasets. And yes, there are some people who develop their own statistical routines, usually with R, a programming language for statistics available for free under a General Public License, or matrix manipulation software like matlab, maple and mathematica. Unless you’re a mathematical statistician developing a new statistical technique, though, you won’t need to take this approach if you don’t want to. There’s plenty of software available. All you need to know is the kind of statistical analyses you’re likely to use and your price range.
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