Owl Pellets for January 28th through February 1st

These are my undigested internests for January 28th through February 1st:

• The iPad’s Closed System: Sometimes I Hate Being Right | Popular Science – “Remember that groundbreaking Apple Super Bowl ad from 1984? The one where the woman throws a hammer at Big Brother, signifying a new era of freedom that would be ushered in with Macintosh? My, how times have changed. Here we are more than 25 years later and the despotic, all-knowing face up there on that giant screen now belongs to Steve Jobs—and Big Brother Steve is holding an iPad.”
• Study finds reduced brain gray matter concentration in patients with severe obstructive sleep apnea – A study in the Feb. 1 issue of the journal SLEEP found gray matter concentration deficits in multiple brain areas of people with severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). The study suggests that the memory impairment, cardiovascular disturbances, executive dysfunctions, and dysregulation of autonomic and respiratory control frequently observed in OSA patients may be related to morphological changes in brain structure.
• Slashdot Hardware Story | Evolving Robots Learn To Prey On Each Other – “Dario Floreano and Laurent Keller report in PLoS ONE how their robots were able to rapidly evolve complex behaviors such as collision-free movement, homing, predator versus prey strategies, cooperation, and even altruism. A hundred generations of selection controlled by a simple neural network were sufficient to allow robots to evolve these behaviors. Their robots initially exhibited completely uncoordinated behavior, but as they evolved, the robots were able to orientate, escape predators, and even cooperate. The authors point out that this confirms a proposal by Alan Turing who suggested in the 1950s that building machines capable of adaptation and learning would be too difficult for a human designer and could instead be done using an evolutionary process. The robots aren’t yet ready to compete in Robot Wars, but they’re still pretty impressive.”
• Homeopathy: Overdosing on nothing – opinion – 29 January 2010 – New Scientist – AT 10.23 am on 30 January, more than 300 activists in the UK, Canada, Australia and the US will take part in a mass homeopathic “overdose”. Sceptics will publicly swallow an entire bottle of homeopathic pills to demonstrate to the public that homeopathic remedies, the product of a scientifically unfounded 18th-century ritual, are simply sugar pills.
• BUNNY ROGER | ENGLISH STYLE ICON YOU’VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF « The Selvedge Yard – He invented the tight-cut Capri trousers while on holiday on the island in 1949, and by the 1950s he was sponsoring a neo-Edwardian silhouette – four-button jackets with generous shoulders and mean waists, lapelled waistcoats, high-cut trousers – for plain, checked and striped suits. Accessories, whether a high-crowned bowler or ruby cuff-links, were indispensable.
• Web-Surfing Chimp Target of Porno Spam | GlossyNews.com – “I have to check Charlie’s laptop several times a day to make sure he isn’t exposed to any media, especially explicit photos, that would confuse him and compromise the progress he is making,” said Lively. “Already we are seeing him using new, inappropriate signs, like balling up his hands into fists, holding them at his sides, and thrusting his pelvis in a ‘to and fro’ in a highly suggestive manner.”

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 6:00 am and is filed under owl pellets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.