Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Concerned that developments in human technology may soon pose new, extinction-level risks to our species as a whole, Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, Cambridge University philosopher Huw Price, and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn have formed The Cambridge Project for Existential Risk … “These dangers have been suggested from progress in AI, from developments in biotechnology and artificial … Read more
The exciting thing about topics such as dark matter and dark energy is that it very strongly highlights how little we really know. We do of course now understand a great deal, but there is still much that is simply not known. Look up and you see the stars, so exactly how many stars are … Read more
The news is that Lonesome George, the last remaining tortoise of his kind and a conservation icon, died on Sunday of unknown causes, the Galapagos National Park said. He was thought to be about 100 years old. New Scientist reports … The rarest animal in the world is no more. Lonesome George, the last of … Read more
About one week ago a whole new batch of web suffixes were made available and so the opportunity to screw up has been extended. Supposedly as part of this process a UK-based internet registrar highlighted their top 10 disasters and suggested that unless you think carefully about it, you might end up attracting a very different, unwanted audience. (Yes OK, … Read more
Pirate Bay has been formally blocked in the UK by all the ISPs (BT, O2, Sky, Virgin Media etc…). They have done so for legal reasons, a High Court ruling in April directed them to do so. So now of course nobody can access the Pirate Bay from the UK and so their UK traffic … Read more
A team of smart folks in Japan have found a mathematical model for the ‘hit’ phenomenon in entertainment. It basically uses the advertisement budget time distribution and also word-of-mouth (WOM) to work things out. Oh wait, how the heck do you measure WOM? Well they went for the number of posts on social network systems such as … Read more