Luc Montaigner, a Nobel Prize winner, has published a new paper on Teleporting DNA (pdf on ArXiv). The paper follows an underused methodology of “staring at digitizer noise until you start seeing stuff that will rock the foundations of science.” Highly recommended. Another welcome addition to the scientific community: International Journal of High Dilution Research.… Continue reading This week in interdisciplinary science
Category: Blog
Hooray for USPTO
United States Patent 5,443,036 Current U.S. Class: 119/707 Current International Class: A01K 15/02 (20060101); A01K 15/00 (20060101); A01K 029/00 ()
Building the most useless machine
Over the past weekend, I finally found some time to grab some scrap parts and put together my version of The Most Useless Machine Ever. One of the more popular Instructables around, it is loosely based on Shannon and Minsky’s Ultimate Machine concept from the early 1950s. Aligning the parts was a bit tricky, but… Continue reading Building the most useless machine
User Beware
Today’s NY Times has a familiar “The-Future-Is-Here-But-With-Caveats” pop-sci article on the Predator drone fleet: Drones Are Weapons of Choice in Fighting Qaeda. A new point is that the military seems to be moving more towards quick-and-dirty ad-hoc solutions that work mostly as expected, as opposed to the expensive and protracted perfectionist way. As is common… Continue reading User Beware