collision detectioncontent | discontentWhy is the science of interrogation so neglected- March 9, 2008 I've read a ton about the debate over torture, but in a piece in today's New York Times Week In Review, Scott Shane makes a new and excellent point: The government has spent virtually nothing studying the sciences of influence and persuasion and how they apply to interrogation. Shane points out that well-known fact that the Army Field Manual explicitly advises against torture; it offers instead a set of observations about human motivation that an interrogator can exploit. ("People..http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2008/03/ive_read_a_ton.html Study: Musical improvisation shuts down your brain's "overthinking"- March 7, 2008 I admit, I'm a sucker for brain-scanning experiments. But this one is particularly intriguiging: A group of scientists scanned several jazz keyboardists while they improvised solos. The finding The parts of the musicians' brains that monitor their performance shut down, while the sections that organize "self-initiated thoughts and behaviors" were highly activated. Soloing is, of course, one of the more spontaneous and creative moments in music. You have to follow the basic structure..http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2008/03/the_brain_scien.html Spambots keep shutting down my comments script. Anyone know a good way to solve this- March 7, 2008 My comments are down again. I need help! Apparently the spambots are slamming my comment script so rapidly that Pair, my hosting service, keeps on disabling the script. That's why comments aren't working right now. Anyone have any advice on dealing with this I currently use Autoban (version 1.2.3), which is supposed to throttle any spambots that try to post zillions of time in a row. I've been using it for about a year now, with great success. But something's changed in the...http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2008/03/spambots_keep_s.html Cool screensaver monitors the health of the power grid- March 6, 2008 So, you're living in Florida, and you just suffered through a massive blackout. Want advance warning of the next one Then go to the website of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and download the "Grid Monitor" -- a screensaver that shows you the stability of the power grid, in real time, via a series of totally gnarly graphics, such as the Oscillatory Mode Graph above. You can actually watch the grid begin to buckle and collapse when a blackout is approaching. Since grid...http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2008/03/_so_youre_livin.html Scientists replicate traffic-jam "shockwaves" in real-world experiment- March 6, 2008 This is fascinating to watch: A team of Japanese researchers have created "shockwave traffic jams" that replicate the dynamics of real-world highways. For 15 years, researchers have known that traffic jams can emerge out of the blue. All it takes is for one driver to momentarily slow down, at which point the person behind him hits the brakes, forcing the person behind him to hit the brakes even harder, and so on, and so on. One teensy butterfly flaps its wings, and pretty soon the...http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2008/03/post_4.html Will DIY geeks save American ingenuity My latest Wired magazine column- March 6, 2008 Can you fix things that break in your household Probably not. Our schools systematically stream "smart" people away from working with their hands, and I think that's a huge problem for the US, on pretty much every level -- commercially, globally, intellectually and spiritually, really. My latest column in Wired magazine is on the stands now, and it tackles this precise problem. There's a copy of it on the Wired web site, and one archived below -- but of course you should also...http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2008/03/can_you_fix_thi.html $6 million euro robot can make coffee- March 6, 2008 I'm coming to this one late, but apparently some Italian scientists have spent $6 million euros building a robot that makes coffee. You laugh. (Well, I did, anyway.) But part of the challenge of producing robots that help people, of course, is mastering some of the unexpectedly complex motions of human limbs -- and making coffee is precisely this sort of unexpectedly complex task, so it's actually kind of a cool thing to try and achieve. As the scientists note in this designboom...http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2008/03/im_coming_to_th_1.html Video games are "post-Turing": My latest Wired News video-game column- March 6, 2008 Last week, Wired News published my latest video-game column -- and this one's about the peculiar relationships we strike up with AI characters inside games. It's online free at the Wired site, and a copy is archived below! Going Gunning With My Imaginary Friends by Clive Thompson Can a machine think That's the question that mathematician Alan Turing posed in 1950, when he posited his famous Turing Test. He argued that artificial intelligence could be thought of as intelligent..http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2008/03/going_gunning_w.html |