Strange Loops

How do financial markets influence the blogosphere? How does the blogosphere influence financial markets? I lined up some S&P500 charts with outputs from the Nielsen Buzzmetrics BlogPulse Tool.

F-35 Joint Striker Fighter helmet renders the plane nearly invisible

"This ain't your papa's flight helmet. Designed for pilots of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the helmet you see above will allow pilots to virtually see through the aircraft around them, giving them a wide field of view ahead and superimposing an Infared image of the world below onto their visors at night."

Children of the Cave

"Children attend class at the Dongzhong (literally meaning "in cave") primary school at a Miao village in Ziyun county, southwest China's Guizhou province, November 14, 2007. The school is built in a huge, aircraft hanger-sized natural cave, carved out of a mountain over thousands of years by wind, water and seismic shifts." (Reuters)

Video Game or Interactive Music Video?

The enjoyment of Transmigration doesn't come from shooting things (your guns always find their target) or winning (collisions don't seem to matter) but the interplay between the scenarios, the music, and your limited interaction with both.

2 of Every Kind

The scientific truth behind the flood myth.

An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything by Garrett Lisi

Surfer dude (with a ton of degrees) stuns physicists with geometrical theory of everything

Bigger Than The Sun

No longer is the Sun the biggest object in the Solar System.

Bin Laden relative to get supersonic business jet

Saudi businessman Tarek bin Laden, half-brother of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, became the first customer to sign up for the $80 million Aerion supersonic business jet on Monday. (Reuters)

Poker Bots on the Rise

In the very near future, online poker may become a suckers’ game that humans won’t have a chance to win. Bots are quite scale-able and it will be virtually impossible to prohibit computer or computer-assisted online playing.

Poker sites are trying to assure customers that they will kick bots off their site and seize their assets. But unlike the statistical trail left by crude poker cheats at Absolute Poker, it is possible for bots to randomize their strategies and even hire individual humans to run them. (NY Times)

The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush

This month's Vanity Fair has an interesting article by Nobel prize-winning American economist Joseph E. Stiglitz on how the Bush administration has impacted the world economically.

(An interesting side note: the essay's title, The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush, appears to be derived from that of John Maynard Keynes' 1919 work, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In his work, Keynes argued against the harsh sanctions placed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I -- sanctions that would, arugably, later cause World War II.)

"In London, hedge funds that invest solely in art are plentiful — and profitable."

Before the Big Bang

"The Big Bang theory of the origin of our universe is widely accepted by the physics community. The idea that our universe started out as some infinitesimally small point, which expanded out to what we see today, makes a lot of sense. Except for one small thing. That initial point, called a singularity by physicists, is a physical impossibility. According to the models we have today, the temperature of the universe at that first moment would have had to be infinite, which mathematically makes no sense. Also, the singularity doesn't do a good job of explaining where all the matter and energy we see today in the universe came from. So, physicists are increasingly starting to look at other branches of physics to see what they can do to replace the singularity with a more reasonable proposition, one which can actually be explained by existing science." (CBC Radio)