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Weirdness
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Tuesday, 02 December 2008 |
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I always admire initiative among the young people, particularly when it comes to Internet pranks. So I find this inspirational: At the extremely orchestrated, extremely annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in NYC, those rascals at the Cartoon Network managed to Rickroll a crowd of millions, both in person and via the live broadcast on NBC. If you're not familiar with the concept of Rickrolling, there's a good primer here.
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Thursday, 20 November 2008 |
Faithful readers are aware that my stalwart Doberman guard dog, Copernicus, often gets us in trouble here at Dyscern World HQ Labs. He's forever nosing around into the experiments and knocking things over. But great scientific discoveries often result from accidents. Just ask Rontgen. Or Fleming.
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Wednesday, 05 November 2008 |
I understand there was an election of some sort recently? We haven't been getting much outside news lately. We're in lockdown here at Dyscern World HQ Labs. My faithful guard dog, Copernicus, chewed through some power cables and shut down the cryofreezer, releasing a cloud of retroviral farandolae spores. Now the lab monkeys are mutating every 45 minutes, and none of us can blink for some reason. It's always something around here…
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Thursday, 26 June 2008 |
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Counted them up today, and realized I now have four PCs and three Macs
in the main office here at Dyscern World HQ. All are in various stages
of decay and disrepair, and some are quite old indeed. The real
artifact of the collection is a Macintosh 128K, which still works,
barely, and which can still occasionally beat me at Risk.
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Thursday, 29 May 2008 |
A couple of update items this week. You will remember our discussion from a few months ago regarding monkey-controlled robots. Well, believe it or not, they're back in the news. This time, in an apparently unrelated study, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have once again attached electrodes to monkey brains and wired them up to robots. Must be an emerging field.
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Thursday, 22 May 2008 |
Clicking around, looking for various solar powered gadgets (they make lovely gifts during the wedding season), it occurred to me that one could easily operate an entire retail store offering only solar powered equipment. I figured I ought to google this up before jumping into another hastily-considered entrepreneurial project. Good thing I did, as several dozen such stores already exist, most in the Southwest, predictably.
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Wednesday, 14 May 2008 |
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I haven't jumped on the iPhone wagon yet, but many friends and
colleagues have, and so I am relentlessly subjected to this unique
brand of tech fetishism. These guys can have entire conversations about
what kind of wallpaper they're considering. Even the lab monkeys here
at Dyscern World HQ Labs have gotten into it. One of the rhesus
females, we call her Wilma, just downloaded a set of Hannah Montana
themes. This place is weird sometimes.
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Thursday, 01 May 2008 |
Oh, I like this story: Nature magazine recently released the results of a study that suggests the next doping scandal could come from a rather unlikely place -- the hallowed halls of geekdom. The magazine polled 1,400 scientists in 60 countries to determine whether the practice of "brain doping" was real. My friends: It is real.
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Tuesday, 22 April 2008 |
Turns out they don't let physics majors into surgery class. I found this out the hard way in my undergraduates days. And they really don't appreciate forging an ID to get into the class anyway, then spending half a semester practicing neurosurgery on cadavers. I don't know everyone was so uptight; I knew what I was doing. In fact, I was on the cusp of a major breakthrough regarding the reanimation of dead tissue, but then the CIA recruited me to work out of the Berlin office.
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Tuesday, 11 March 2008 |
Fans of the movie Blade Runner, widely acknowledged here in the Dyscern World HQ Labs as being the Best Movie Ever Made, may remember the Voight-Kampff machine. This was a device invented by author Philip K. Dick in his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It is a polygraph-like device used to detect emotional states -- specifically, empathy -- by registering bodily changes such as respiration, eye movement, and blush response. The Voight-Kampff machine was used to identify replicants, or androids, who supposedly had no capacity for human empathy.
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Friday, 29 February 2008 |
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I'm very attached to my USB flash drive. In terms of portable storage, it's the only way to go -- small, simple, durable, largely standardized across various platforms; what's not to like? Of course, security is always a concern. I used to keep my pet AI, "Ian," on my key ring flash drive. But then my nephew unknowingly plugged the drive into a public terminal at Kinko's, and Ian escaped to the Internets. Remember that Florida blackout earlier this week? That was Ian. He's kind of mischievous.
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Thursday, 21 February 2008 |
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When it comes to comedy, I'm an old-school sort of fellow. I remember many a Saturday morning watching Abbot and Costello movies as a kid. Even then, my instincts ran to science and technology. Dissatisfied with my parents' cabinet-style cathode ray television, I did a little tinkering and accidentally invented digital HDTV several decades too soon. Unfortunately, I spilled chocolate milk all over my notes, got distracted with other things, and history had to wait.
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Tuesday, 12 February 2008 |
A slight diversion today, from our Thought You Might Like To Know Bureau: Check out this fascinating archive story from Popular Science: The Top-Secret Warplanes of Area 51. Author Bill Sweetman has been tracking secret "black aircraft" projects for decades, and here he speculates on what's really happening at the top-secret government airbase in southern Nevada.
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Monday, 11 February 2008 |
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An interesting product concept is making the rounds on various tech, design, and gadget blogs. It's the Yuno PC, and it's essentially a touchscreen-computer-slash-coffee mug. Actually, the concept itself isn't as interesting as the discussion trailing in its wake. Much disagreement over whether the Yuno is (a) real, (b) possible, (c) desirable, or (d) flatly ridiculous.
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Friday, 01 February 2008 |
The nature of websurfing has, at its essence, a certain quality of lateral drift that I much enjoy. I might start out the day browsing for recent trends in sub-symbiotic artificial intelligence, say. Or major league baseball. And within a few dozen clicks I find I'm scanning Swiss real estate ads, or downloading Gaelic instrumental covers of Led Zeppelin songs. You just never know.
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