This Blog has Moved to NovaSpivack.com

Excellent Analysis of Weblog Tools Market

This article provides some very compelling and useful statistics about the growth of the Weblog tools market.

A Machine That Sees The Future?

This article provides an overview of the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton, which has found that the behavior of a network of specially shielded random number generators deviates from stasticial randomness prior to major world events. I have been following this project for several years and have made various suggestions for further experiments to test the system. It is very intriguing.

Chef Invents Printer that Prints Out Food

An unusual chef with a technical bent has modified an inkjet printer to print in edible colors on edible paper. He's printing out edible pictures, and even making his menus edible. But his ideas for the technology go far beyond this. Read the article here, then eat it!

An Incredible Flash Production -- Must See!

I was fortunate enough to wander across this amazing online Flash presentation that reveals the hidden meaning of the film, "2001." It's a thoroughly engaging, brilliantly produced, fascinating production -- one of the best uses of Flash animation that I've ever seen. It also makes some really interesting points about human evolution, our relationship to our tools, and the future. It's a must-see -- takes about 20 minutes to go through it, and well worth it! -- also make sure to answer their little survey at the end for a hint about their next production...

The Threat of Contaminated Money: Proposed Solutions

by Nova Spivack, Minding the Planet, http://www.mindingtheplanet.net

This news article reports that the FBI is investigating a situation in which mobsters deliberately contaminated their drug money with a virus in order to deter in-house theft by members of their organization. Several years ago, during the days of collective paranoia following 9-11, I started thinking about how to combat potential terrorist threats -- and one of the threats I came up with was precisely this threat of contaminated money. Because money travels in a "viral" manner along social and economic networks it represents a perfect vector for spreading a contaminant. While the effects of such an attack would be minimal in terms of actual fatalities, they would potentially be enormous in terms of panic and disruption to our way of life.

I knew it was only a matter of time before this threat materialized somewhere in the world: Now it seems that an actual case has emerged. While the money in question did not represent a large sum, and although viruses (at least) have a relatively short shelf-life, it is an example of a scary new kind of threat that governments need to prepare to defend against. Below are some thoughts about a potential worst-case scenario and various countermeasures that could be implemented to protect against it.

Cell chip coming soon

Big news coming -- a radical high-performance, ultra-miniaturized parallel processing chip is about to go mainstream in a variety of consumer devices, giving Intel some serious competition...

Semiconductor designers from International Business Machines, Sony and Toshiba will reveal on Monday the inner workings of a “supercomputer on a chip” they claim could revolutionise communications, multimedia and consumer electronics.

The Cell microprocessor has been under development by the three companies since 2001 in a laboratory in Austin, Texas.

Its unveiling at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco has been eagerly awaited and products containing Cell including Sony's PlayStation 3 games console are expected as early as next year.

Advance reports suggest the chip is significantly more powerful and versatile than the next generation of micro-processors announced by the consortium's competitors, Intel and AMD.

The two leading chipmakers are just moving from 32-bit to 64-bit computing and to dual-core processors essentially two “brains” on a single chip.Cell is understood to have at least four cores and be significantly faster than Intel and AMD chips.

“This is probably going to be one of the biggest industry announcements in many years,” said Richard Doherty, president of the Envisioneering research firm. “It's going to breathe new life into the industry and trigger fresh competition.”

Read the full article here