Dinosaur Feathers in Canadian Amber
Our friends north of the border have been kind enough to dig up some amber and notice that it had a bunch of what appeared to be feathers embedded. Research suggests that they're dinosaur feathers showing quite a bit of evolution. Turns out there was a broad array of color as well."These specimens represent distinct stages of feather evolution, from early-stage, single filament protofeathers to much more complex structures associated with modern diving birds . . . They can't determine which feathers belonged to birds or dinosaurs yet, but they did observe filament structures that are similar to those seen in other non-avian dinosaur fossils."
http://io9.com/5840854/dinosaur-feathers-discovered-in-canadian-amber
Is Our Universe Really Part of the Membrane of a Collapsing 4-Dimensional Star?
"If a “big bang” event had created the universe, then according to some explanations, there hasn’t been enough time between then and now for it to have reached that temperature equilibrium."That seems to be a pretty big problem. One possible solution:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/physics/collapsing-4-d-star-could-have-spawned-universe/
Vomitorium: It Doesn't Mean What You Think it Means:
http://www.woot.com/forums/viewpost.aspx?postid=5557717Linux: It Was Good While It Lasted. Is This Better?
"At CloudOpen in New Orleans, KVM veterans Avi Kivity and Dor Laor revealed their latest venture, a new open-source (BSD license) operating system named OSv. OSv can run existing Linux programs and runtime environments such as a JVM, but unlike Linux, OSv was designed from the ground up to run efficiently on virtual machines. For example, OSv avoids the traditional (but slow) userspace-kernel isolation, as on the cloud VMs normally run a single application. OSv is also much smaller than Linux, and breaks away from tradition by being written in C++11 (the language choice is explained in in this post)." -- http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/09/17/2113211/new-operating-system-seeks-to-replace-linux-in-the-cloudhttp://www.osv.io/
Fun With Compounding Interest
A friend recently wondered on Facebook when she could retire. Somebody joked that the only way to retire before age 65.5 is to win the lottery. While it can certainly feel that way, aggressive investing can provide a faster path to retirement. This spreadsheet shows one possible scenario: take 20% of your earnings and invest it in instruments yielding 20%/yr. If you compound that monthly, you can replace the rest of your income within 10 years. Of course, that's a hyper-aggressive strategy which takes on quite a bit of risk, but there you go.https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvlYQa0ZmrjldDI4M0lfNWZlTmhoVE5aRGNHeVJYMEE#gid=0
Don't Look Now, But Capitalism Has Saved Another Species
A common misconception is that capitalist greed is wrecking the environment. In reality, of course, capitalism is all about efficiency, and it is often in a capitalist's best interest to find less ecologically harmful ways of doing business. Why spew by-products into the nearby river when you can pipe them into some new machinery which converts them into something useful? Anyway, here's one concrete example of where capitalism not only didn't destroy the environment, but it actually saved a species from extinction:
http://perc.org/articles/bisonomics
I'm Man Enough To Admit When I've Been Beaten
A couple of years ago, I built a fairly large fire breathing dragon as a Halloween decoration. The budget was essentially nil, but the effect was something to be proud of. Our neighborhood goes kinda nuts for Halloween, with visitors from all over, and this item stood out quite a bit. But that build pales in comparison to what Zollner Elektronik AG in Germany has done. They've made a radio-controlled, walking, bleeding, fire-breathing robotic dragon. Weighing in at 11 tons, powered by a 2 liter turbo-diesel engine, Tradinno was made to star in a 500 year old folk play named "Drachenstich."
http://makezine.com/projects/20ft-tall-40ft-long-fire-breathing-dragon/
http://www.ibtimes.com/worlds-largest-walking-robot-fire-breathing-dragon-tradinno-stars-500-year-old-german-play-video
No comments:
Post a Comment