The Gravity Express

About four hundred years ago– sometime in the latter half of the 17th century– Isaac Newton received a letter from the brilliant British scientist and inventor Robert Hooke. In this letter, Hooke outlined the mathematics governing how objects might fall if dropped through hypothetical tunnels drilled through the Earth at varying angles. Though it seems that Hooke was mostly interested in the physics of the thought experiment, an improbable yet intriguing idea fell out of the data: a dizzyingly fast transportation system.

Site – http://www.damninteresting.com

Can Internet communication sustain us?

For some, it would be unthinkable — certain social suicide. But Gabe Henderson is finding freedom in a recent decision: He canceled his MySpace account. No longer enthralled with the world of social networking, the 26-year-old graduate student pulled the plug after realizing that a lot of the online friends he accumulated were really just acquaintances. He’s also phasing out his profile on Facebook, a popular social networking site that, like others, allows users to create profiles, swap message and share photos — all with the goal of expanding their circle of online friends.

Site – http://www.cnn.com

Scientists look to place a pro-science president

Frustrated by their government’s position on the environment, climate change and stem cell research, a group of US scientists have decided to take matters into their own hands and actively promote the election of a president in 2008 who is more receptive to science. Scientists and Engineers for America plunged into politics last week with the aim of campaigning for particular candidates, starting with the 2006 mid-term elections. SEA says that “scientists and engineers have a right, indeed an obligation, to enter the political debate when the nation’s leaders systematically ignore scientific evidence and analysis.”

Site – http://www.newscientist.com

$10 million prize for mapping human genomes

The foundation that inspired a private sector race to space announced a new $10 million prize on Wednesday — this time to inspire a race to sequence the human genetic map faster and cheaper. Although scientists have mapped one person’s genome — by both public and private efforts — it was time-consuming and expensive. The X-Prize Foundation wants to inspire someone to map 100 different human genomes in just 10 days. And just to spice things up, it is offering another $1 million if the team can decode the genomes of 100 more people, including some wealthy donors and celebrities such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Google co-founder Larry Page.

Site – http://www.cnn.com

Google Code Search

Google Code Search is now live — it gives programmers a single place to search publicly accessible source code. It includes: Support for precise searches using regular expressions Restricts by language, license, or filename with advanced operators A search index that includes billions of lines of code Code Search crawls and indexes publicly hosted archives (.tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar, and .zip) and CVS and Subversion repositories, making them searchable in one place. Results are also accessible via a GData feed, which we hope people will use to create plugins for their favorite editors and IDEs.

Site – http://www.google.com

How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot in Any Programming Language

The proliferation of modern programming languages (all of which seem to have stolen countless features from one another) sometimes makes it difficult to remember what language you’re currently using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers who find themselves in such dilemmas.

Site – http://www.fullduplex.org

Wikimapia

Awesome news from Alexandre and Evgeniy at Wikimapia: They have created a Google Earth layer that will allow you to see Wikimapia places! Wikimapia now has more than 1.5 million places marked with new ones being added all the time! This new merging will allow you to see them all! [UPDATE: Sorry if things are slow around here, I am poor so don’t have expensive servers and the Digg Effect has caused some slowdown and outages (I don’t think the problem is with bandwidth, I think it is with the amount of SQL queries). Please be patient!]

Site – http://wikimapia.mattjonesblog.com

Ubuntu, VMWare, and WinXP

At work, I run Ubuntu Linux Drapper Drake with VMWare player.  I had to go to http://www.easyvmx.com/ in order to create the virtual machine for WinXP.  Then the install was easy using a regular Windows XP cd.  In order to get the VGA drivers working I also used vmware-tools with the vmware player.  Makes a great environment to build those installers and such at work.  When running my virtual machine my boss asked if I switched back to windows.  I minimized the window and right back into Ubuntu!

Site – http://www.vmware.com

Musical robot composes, performs and teache

A professor of musical technology at Georgia Tech, Gil Weinberg, enlisted the support of graduate student Scott Driscoll to create Haile — the first truly robotic musician. In this way, he became a sort of Geppetto creating his musical Pinocchio. “Computers have been playing music for 50 years,” Driscoll said. “But we wanted to create something that didn’t just play back what it heard, but play off it, too.”

Site – http://www.cnn.com

Americans win Nobel physics prize

Americans John C. Mather and George F. Smoot have won the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics for work that helped cement the big-bang theory of the universe. Mather, 60, works at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Smoot, 61, works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Their work was based on measurements done with the help of the NASA-launched COBE satellite in 1989. They were able to observe the universe in its early stages about 380,000 years after it was born. Ripples in the light they detected also helped demonstrate how galaxies came together over time.

Site – http://www.cnn.com

In Baghdad life moves online

In the endless daily battle against the fear and isolation of life under lock-down, the people of Baghdad have found a way to keep their city alive: moving it online. Instead of enjoying an outdoor meal at one of the fish restaurants along the Tigris embankment, 28-year-old housewife Dunya Saad spends her evenings at the computer in her living room, chatting with her friends on Yahoo! Messenger. Most of her relatives and friends live on the far side of the Tigris, and seeing them in person is nearly impossible. “It’s sad not to see your friends like in the good old days,” she sighed. “But online chatting has made things better.”

Site – http://www.cnn.com

100 Fearless Forecasts

The standard dreams of future technology, such as intergalactic spaceships and do-everything robot servants, are still a ways off, but plenty of exciting technology advances will be here fairly soon. We collected our forecasts into eight categories: Desktops and Laptops, Storage, Chips and Components, Audio and Video, The Net, Cameras and Cell Phones, and Fun Stuff. Feel free to read the list straight through, or just skip around in your favorite categories.

Site – http://www.pcworld.com