"Dean Hickerson's original block-deleting 2c/3 termination almost certainly wasn't designed with this in mind, but it happens to absorb a double-length signal in exactly the same way as a standard signal — the final stable state is the same in either case. This means that communication speeds approaching 2c/3 can be implemented over long distances in any direction, not just diagonally.

In the accompanying diagram, the input Herschel signal is circled in red. The output signal can be any of a number of optional glider outputs in the Herschel circuit at the bottom.

Two elbows in a row will not work (there's no known way to turn a double-length 2c/3 signal). But in the absence of layout constraints, a single elbow is sufficient to send a 2c/3 signal anywhere in the universe."

"In our opinion, Valdes nails it on the head. Twitter has raised tens of millions of dollars that allows them to focus on building the product. They do not need to rush into a business model, especially with their eye-popping growth. Prematurely implementing a business model could upset millions of users and put a halt to Twitter’s success quickly."

"While demurrage is a natural feature of private commodity money it has at various times been deliberately incorporated into currency systems as a disincentive against hoarding of money, as well as to achieve other perceived benefits. In particular, with regards to long term investment financing it has the effect of changing the dynamics of net present value (NPV) calculations. All else being equal, a currency system with demurrage places an increased emphasis on the value of long term returns on an investment. As such it may create an incentive to invest in initiatives which offer more in the way of longer-term returns."

"Here's how it works: I'm going to donate a bunch of money, but I want random people on the Internet to decide where it goes."

"But the point, I hope, is clear.
The old means of control don’t work.
The old categories don’t work.
The old ways of thinking won’t work.
We all need to come to terms with that.

Fundamentally, the old media won’t control news dissemination in the future. And organisations can’t control access using old forms of accreditation any more."

"You may hope that this bone-headed decision will push millions of people into the warm embrace of Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, but it probably won’t. Most people, especially most working people, don’t have a choice about their operating system or browser. Ditto their corporate email platform."

"This piece nicely argues that it's not the loss in income that matters to most Americans (we can adjust) but the loss of certainty. We can always belt-tighten and money only makes you so happy (no rise in happiness above $20k per capita per year–the world over), but this sense that we don't know what's coming next in the economy is truly paralyzing."

"The State, South Carolina's dominant newspaper, had a collection of (barely printable) emails between Sanford and his honey six months ago, and didn't publish. Remind me again why we need newspapers? Oh, yeah, I remember: to protect us from stuff we don't really need to know."

"We need more than the passive ideal of easy access to published knowledge; we need the active ideal of improved methodologies for advancing knowledge. In the Enlightenment Francis Bacon had the boldness to call for a Novum Organum, a "new instrument" of knowledge (in contrast to Aristotle's old Organum); similarly, we must devise new instruments of knowledge to match our cyber environment. Ours is a knowledge revolution on par with the introduction of empirical research itself or even the codification of the scientific method. But are we conceptualizing and establishing the new methodologies to the same degree that we are fighting for the free circulation of traditional materials? We are not. That's why we need Scholarly Inquiry Optimization."

"See, this is the problem with Amazon's Kindle—even they can't tell their customers exactly how the DRM works. They blame the publishers, but we're not sure that publishers have ever been given adequate information either. (We know the press hasn't.) From what we understand, publishers are contractually forbidden to share any information about their licensing agreements with Amazon, which creates a convenient way for Amazon to redirect all inquiries into a black hole of "it's the publisher's fault.""

"Welcome to Al Zimmermann's Programming Contests. You've entered an arena where demented computer programmers compete for glory and for some cool prizes.

I run one or two contests per year. Each contest asks that you come up with your best solutions to a set of related computationally intensive problems. Although I speak of "programming contests", technically you don't need to write a computer program to enter. You can enter whether you use a computer, manual calculations, or tea leaves to solve the problems. You send me solutions, not programs."

Definitely some targets for genetic programming

"I write for free because there seems to me to be no meaningful relationship between whether a publication pays me and whether it’s worthwhile for me to write for them. I’ve been skillfully edited and I’ve been allowed to babble on painfully unchecked by paying and non-paying publications alike. I’ve garnered indirect material benefit from paying and non-paying publications alike. I’m not suggesting that anyone follow my example or positing that I know what The Future of Journalism entails, but I do know, barring catastrophe, what my particular future is: I am going to keep getting paid to write when I can and writing for free when I can’t. If/when this situation becomes untenable for me as a way of actually making my living, I’ll start making more of my money with my non-writing endeavors. People have been doing exactly that, and writing sad essays about the injustice of having to do exactly that, for much longer than the Internet has been around."

Graph #2 is particularly interesting

Would like to train the squares to self-assemble to do the covering "themselves", while minimizing the number needed.

"This page contains a collection of small computer programs which implement one-player puzzle games. All of them run natively on Unix (GTK), on Windows, and on Mac OS X; they can also be played on the web, as Java applets.

I wrote this collection because I thought there should be more small desktop toys available: little games you can pop up in a window and play for two or three minutes while you take a break from whatever else you were doing. And I was also annoyed that every time I found a good game on (say) Unix, it wasn't available the next time I was sitting at a Windows machine, or vice versa; so I arranged that everything in my personal puzzle collection will happily run on both those platforms and more. When I find (or perhaps invent) further puzzle games that I like, they'll be added to this collection and will immediately be available on both platforms."

"This series of games has a consistent size and format, and any four will fit neatly into The Games Collection Stand (Pin's part number 02705)."

"An important addition to the growing international dialogue about the commons can be found in the new anthology, Genes, Bytes and Emissions: To Whom Does the World Belong? (discussed in this previous blog post). Recently released in German, the essays in this book are now available online in English.

The book was edited by Silke Helfrich and published by the Heinrich Boell Foundation; Helfrich is the former director of the Foundation’s Mexico City office, which hosted a major conference, Citizenship and Commons, in December 2006. The collection, whose title in English is To Whom Does the World Belong? offers a thoughtful and provocative array of viewpoints on the commons. (The links below connect to pdf files of the essays.)"

"A group of student entrepreneurs has opened a small-business incubator in the basement of a downtown Ann Arbor building. They'll spend the summer sharing space, equipment and ideas.

The incubator, called the TechArb, hosts 30 students running 10 different start-ups. The space came together with the help of Ann Arbor venture capital firm RPM Ventures, the University of Michigan College of Engineering's Center for Entrepreneurship, and a new student-run entrepreneurial organization on campus, Maize Ventures."

"Each of these examples is based on a story I've heard of an innovative project that died not because it was a bad idea, but because of societal inertia. Given how tough it is to start new projects (and find financing and support) under normal circumstances, innovators facing this kind of opposition often end up contenting themselves with incremental — sometimes downright meaningless — gains."

"Overlooked in tax strategy is the huge tax advantages owning and self-managing real estate. I prefer residential real estate. You have write-offs and phantom depreciation galore (which can be deferred until death via 1031 and similar property exchange programs, or simple refinancing)."

"So, to sum up: Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema, if not the greatest. You could easily argue that cinema, as an artform, has all been leading up to this. It will destabilize your limbic system, probably forever, and make you doubt the solidity of your surroundings. Generations of auteurs have struggled, in vain, to create a cinematic experience as overwhelming, and as liberating, as ROTF."

"China has 1/5 of the world's population. If life were fair, it would have 1/5 of the world’s water. It doesn’t — China has just 1/14 of the world’s water supplies, and much of that is rank, dank, and polluted. You think oil is important? Try living without water. Or with water too polluted to drink. And problems have worsened considerably in recent years as the population burgeoned and factories dumped toxic pollutants into rivers and lakes. A Chinese bureaucrat recently noted that 90 percent of China's cities and 75 percent of its lakes suffer from some degree of water pollution. They have water – they just can’t drink it."

"In Copenhagen this December, the Indians and the Chinese will be within their rights, and maybe even well-advised, to say "you spent the last eight years burning as much oil and coal as you could, and denying climate change was a problem. Now you enact legislation that forces use of corn ethanol that's more global warming intensive than gasoline, muzzles your scientists, and requires your regulatory agencies to lie to the public about greenhouse gas releases, all to put money in the pocket of your farmers and reelect a few rural legislators. You've made sure no-one who uses electricity from coal will have any reason to use any less of it. You expect us to do your climate stabilization for you, and even more to make up for the antics of these yokels, and to help you pretend you're being green when you're not? You trashed Kyoto and now you're here to trash Copenhagen: get a grip. We're out of here.""