World's Biggest Snake Ate New Prehistoric Croc Species
Whats not to like? You've got the world's biggest snake, a prehistoric croc -- and not just one of those tired old prehistoric crocs, but apparently a new one!
A good headline, to be sure, but probably not among the all-time greats.
]]>“You’re looking at the surface in the solar system where there are the biggest changes we’ve ever seen,” Brown said.The color of the surface of Pluto changed so markedly, particularly between 2000 and 2002, that Buie has spent years checking and rechecking his work, just to make sure the differences weren’t an artifact of faulty equipment or calculations.
“I got that result years ago but it’s just so hard to understand and believe that I’ve been checking everything that I can think of,” he said. “I’m still nervous about it. It could be that I’ve just completely screwed this up, but I can’t find where.”
Until someone can provide a plausible reason why a planet (dwarf or otherwise) would just up and change color like that, I have to lean in the "he screwed up" direction.
But it's intriguing...
Check out this composite video of Pluto rotating.
This apparently shows Pluto post-color-change. I wonder what it looked like before?
]]>Speaking of Harvey's contributions to the culinary world, we were talking in the chat room after last week's podcast and everyone agreed that he has summed up the coming economy very well with the technology he has been predicting: the sandwich printer.
]]>This is huge because the qbits that drive this particular design of quantum computer are electrons. Isolating individual electrons gets us much closer to finding out if it will work.
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And don't miss Phil's post, "Hobbyist to Transform the World Again."
The long fail of the tablet computer.
The College Humor iPad satire video.
There are six different iPad models (and six different prices).
The future of the iPad: Living in the iPad's World
Via Alex Tabarrok.
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Back in the day, a file that size was something of an extravagance -- too big to fit on a floppy! Now how many hundreds, thousand of files this size do we all have?
A more important question -- how long before the principles that have made us all rich in storage of image files can be applied to material goods? Or is it happening already?
]]>Either because he lacks the sense of humour to realize that is the standard short form question for "Yeah, this future baloney sounds like it might be awesome - when does it freakin' happen?" or because he's way smarter than I and realizes that the future is all around us, he answered literally. Paraphrasing closely, his answer was something like 'right now - if you want to spend a million dollars.'
I realized after that the question I really wanted to ask was "When do I get to be a sexy, immortal, billionaire, with superpowers? and Can it be incremental because, really, any one of those four would pretty well rock."
But in terms of personal transportation, I want a much more efficient way to get around that does not require either Mr. Fusion or some other heretofore impossible technology and is still safe and can be operated on my city streets and highways, safely. Cheap and durable are good.
So while I would totally dig on a flying car in the price range of a typical car, I've been waiting anxiously for an electric car. This should be the year.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/06/business/AP-US-Auto-Shop-Buying-Electric-Cars.html?_r=1
Several big automakers plan to start introducing a range of electric vehicles in late 2010, giving the broader public its first chance to buy the vehicles that rely more on the electrical outlet than the gas pump.
Because I've been disappointed on this kind of thing before, I've learned to be doubtful. But it looks promising. Of course, if I was willing and able to spend $100K+ on car that can only cary two, the Tesla is available now.
But the Volt, Leaf and a few others should be way closer to "typical" car performance than the golf carts and Neighborhood Electric Vehicles available today. Neither of which, BTW, I could license and drive on my city streets.
Now I haven't been much of an earlier adopter, preferring to buy proven, cheap durability. And while the NYT article linked above is an ok intro to the subject, it leaves out two important considerations for the cost/benefit analysis.
1) life expectancy and replacement cost of the battery pack. unknown
2) Yes, you pay more at purchase than a comparable gas or diesel car. Do you make up for that over the life of ownership by buying less liquid fuel?
Because the answers here are unclear, I'm guessing when my 20+ year old antique dies (next time it breaks it's gone) a clean diesel may well be my choice.
I mean there's sexy, immortal billionaire with superpowers. And then there's cheap, dependable transportation. And a man's got to know his limitations.*
]]>Number one on the list is the only human being ever to be nuked twice. Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima in the when the first bomb hit and Nagasaki when the second one hit and lived (until quite recently) to tell the tale. The link to this story comes via Jim Elvidge, who espouses an interesting variation on the Simulation Hypothesis. Per Elvidge, anomalies such as these can be viewed as Easter eggs -- little clues that our universe may be, if not an outright practical joke, perhaps an excessively elaborate work of performance art.
I'm not sure that any of these coincidences rise to the bizarreness level required to question the universe around me, but the guy who got struck by lightning seven times is pretty interesting. I can't quite get my head around the odds against that, as stated in the linked article. It seems that human history could have run many times over without this ever happening.
So it's an outlier, for sure. But proof that the world is a simulation? I'll need something even weirder, I'm afraid.
We interviewed Elvidge a while back and are looking to have him back on the podcast soon.
]]>| As a frequent guest and occasional co-host -- not to mention our official Hollywood correspondent -- PJ Manney brings a unique perspective to FastForward Radio. She is a writer and futurist, and a leading voice in the Humanity+ movement. She has written extensively on H+ topics, having previously been involved in motion picture development (Hook, It Could Happen to You, Universal Soldier) and writing for television (Hercules: the Legendary Journeys, Xena: Warrior Princess). |  |
They were here on the planet contemporaneously with us. They had great big heads and cute little faces. They were smarter than us. How much smarter? Well, it says here that we are Homo Erectus to their Homo Sapiens.
Put your head around that one.
We spend a lot of time here at the Speculist pondering the next stage of human evolution. What if that next stage arrived 10,000 years ago and then mysteriously disappeared?
Or perhaps not so mysteriously. It's possible that:
They were a small population that never really caught on. (Those big heads were not doubt hard to deliver, making fecundity problematic.)
Some catastrophe got the better of them.
They were out-competed, or simply wiped out by smaller-brained contemporaries (i.e., us).
That final possibility is a bit chilling. Neanderthals had bigger brains than we do, too. Were they smarter than us? Were smarter strains of humanity nicer than dumber ones? Nah, it couldn't be that simple. If dumber humans always won out over smarter ones, Homo Erectus would have kicked our Sapien butts. And Erectus was no slouch when it came to the business of survival. They hung in for 1.5 million years -- making them by far the most successful (at least in terms of longevity) strain of humanity. No doubt there were many factors in play that determined which strain of humanity became dominant, including luck.
But please note that not everyone agrees that Boskops were a separate strain of humanity. The consensus view is that they were a few outliers within the Homo Sapiens -- kind of a big brain high water mark:
To be sure, there has been a reduction in the average brain size in South Africa during the last 10,000 years, and there have been parallel reductions in Europe and China -- pretty much everywhere we have decent samples of skeletons, it looks like brains have been shrinking....[It] is hardly a sign that ancient humans had mysterious mental powers -- it is probably a matter of energetic efficiency (brains are expensive), developmental time (brains take a long time to mature) and diet (brains require high protein and fat consumption, less and less available to Holocene populations).
What the -- brains are shrinking? Now ask yourself this question. Which scenario do you prefer: the one where mean old H. Sapiens wiped out the smarter, more peaceful contemporary humans, or the one where we're the small-brained descendants of big-brained, smarter ancestors?
Luke McKinney provides much-needed perspective:
The fundamental flaw, the assumption that a bigger brain automatically means increased intelligence, is more suited to Dr Freud than a modern professor - and embarrassingly crude launching point for a discussion of sophisticated mental processes. A sperm whale brain is 6 kilograms of raw neural matter capable of little more than "swim. eat. repeat", while Albert Einstein's skullbox was actually a smidgen smaller than average.
The point is not the volume of the brain, but the complexity of the wiring. The critical factor is the number of connections between different neurons, massively enhanced in humans by the distinctive folding pattern which increases the surface area of our brains. Animal brains have far fewer folds, down to the lower species which have no folds at all, just clumps of neurons.
Just like the old saying: "It's not the size that counts, it's how you use it to create a massively complicated neural network capable of planning and independent thought".
Yep, that's what I always say. So there probably was no big-brained human species, and if there was they probably weren't all that much smarter than we are.
All of which ought to tell us something. The fact that I can't say exactly what that is has less to do with the size of my brain than how it's folded.
Er, right?
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