Both names start wit "S"... both gave us snow... hmmm.!!!

In a recent interview with BBC, Hawking said that the “development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/02...ef=science

At the link above is a Poll on the issue... i voted "go for it"... but the majority says "whoa".!!!

"In recent years, a growing body of evidence shows that photons play an important role in the basic functioning of cells. Most of this evidence comes from turning the lights off and counting the number of photons that cells produce. It turns out, much to many people’s surprise, that many cells, perhaps even most, emit light as they work.

In fact, it looks very much as if many cells use light to communicate. There’s certainly evidence that bacteria, plants and even kidney cells communicate in this way. Various groups have even shown that rats brains are literally alight thanks to the photons produced by neurons as they work.

And that raises an interesting question: what role does light play in the work of neurons? The fact that neurons emit light does not mean that they can receive it or process it.

But interesting evidence is beginning to emerge that light may well play an important role in neuronal function. For example, earlier this year, one group showed that spinal neurons in rats can actually conduct light."====http://www.technologyreview.com/view/422...the-brain/

Ahhh the unspoken ethics of linewaiting. We do it all the time, moreso during the holidays. This assumed ethics of standing single file and waiting our turn to get waited on. But there's always the tension about cutters. People who for one reason or another think that they are entitled to cut. At the airport, boarding the plane has this sort of high tension energy. Handicapped first. Then first class. Then special mileage gold club members. Then the usual group A, or B, or C, etc. People are generally huddled around the boarding gate nervous they won't get on the plane. People suspiciously eyeing one another to ensure the sacred order is not violated. The casual and humorous socializing with people next to you thrown into the same imprisoning stressful situation. Have you ever witnessed a cutter get ostracized by linewaiters? It's an ugly thing. Like how a murder of crows will violently tussle and peck on one particular crow for some bird-specific crime. But it's the right thing. It's a group effort to maintain the justice of linewaiting. Here's a brief video on the ins and outs of linewaiting:

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/line-ra...e-23480428

"In recent years, these advances have coalesced into some exciting developments. In 2009, a British team set a new steam-powered land speed record of 148 mph, finally breaking the Stanley Rocket’s record which had stood for more than 100 years. In the 1990s, a Volkswagen R&D spin-off called Enginion claimed it had built a steam engine that had comparable efficiency to ICEs, but with lower emissions. In recent years, Cyclone Technologies claims it has developed a steam engine that’s twice as efficient as an ICE. As of today, though, neither engine has found its way into a commercial vehicle.

Moving forward, it’s unlikely that steam cars will ever unseat the internal combustion engine, if only because of the massive momentum of Big Oil. One day, though, when we finally decide to take a serious look at the future of personal transportation, maybe the quiet, green, gliding grace of steam power will get a second chance."===http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/14841...c-comeback

Does theory count as real knowledge about the universe? We like to think so. We are certain that by knowing how or why something happened that we have increased our overall knowledge about reality. But have we really? It is certainly true that we can have knowledge of facts. We can know THAT certain events have happened or are happening. But as to the explanations for HOW those events occurred, what are we really doing other than forming generalizations and reasons based on those facts? Do these generalizations and laws and causal agencies really exist as empiricle facts? No. They are abstractions of thought and language which are inferred from empiricle fact, but not necessarily so. They are idealizations of events and properties that exist only as defined BY the theory itself.

There is thus always a probablistic quality to our theories, true only to the extent that they make plausible how empiricle events occur, while not corresponding to anything beyond the abstract schemata or model they are constructs of.So a theory or an explanation is more a way of putting empiricle facts together such that they form a coherent self-contained system of generalizations rather that any kind of true knowledge about reality. A scientist can thus never leave his house for three months and come up with a new theory without having increased one iota the total amount of information he has about the universe. Either we admit that he has somehow psychically divined actual states and events about the universe without perceiving, or we must concede that theory and explanation do not in fact reveal anything empirically true or factual about the universe at all.

"Haptic feedback has become a common feature of recent technology, but such systems usually rely on stimulation of parts of the user’s body via direct mechanical or acoustic vibration. A new technique being developed by researchers at the University of Bristol promises to change all of this by using projected ultrasound to directly create floating, 3D shapes that can be seen and felt in mid-air.

Building on previous work at the university, the researchers have used an array of ultrasonic transducers to create and focus compound patterns of ultrasound to shape the air at which it was directed. To make these shapes visible, the manipulated air was directed through a thin curtain of oil and a lamp was then used to illuminate it. According to the researchers, this results in a system that produces such accurate and identifiable shapes that users can readily match an image of a 3D object to the shape rendered by the prototype ultrasound system.

"Touchable holograms, immersive virtual reality that you can feel and complex touchable controls in free space, are all possible ways of using this system," said Dr Ben Long, Research Assistant from the Bristol Interaction and Graphics (BIG) department at the University of Bristol. "In the future, people could feel holograms of objects that would not otherwise be touchable, such as feeling the differences between materials in a CT scan or understanding the shapes of artefacts in a museum."

The system does not use the ultrasound frequency (around 40 kHz) to directly impinge on the surface of the skin when the haptic object is touched. Instead, vibrations are set up in the air upon which the array is focused to produce sensations oscillating anywhere from around 0.4 Hz to 500 Hz. In this way, when the various patterns are produced by the ultrasonic array, the user is able to discern the shape of an object in a similar way to feeling a solid article...."====http://www.gizmag.com/ultrasound-3d-hapt...ram/35032/