Textile expert Simon Peers undertook the daunting project to create the eleven by four foot cloth — the only large cloth made from spider silk. Looking at the research of French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who designed a small device capable of extracting spider silk without harming the spiders, Peers built similar machines to extract silk from Madagascar’s female golden orb spiders, which have a naturally golden silk. The cloth ultimately took four years and one million spiders to produce, not to mention the dozens of spider handlers who collected the spiders and kept them from attacking and killing one another.

While its tensile strength, on par with steel and Kevlar, and the ability to stretch to 40% beyond its original length without breaking, spider silk would have numerous practical applications if it could be harnessed on a large scale. But researchers have been unable to duplicate the material, either chemically or by inserting spider genes into bacteria or more domesticable animals. So for now, this feat of stunt weaving is mostly an aspirational bit of cloth. It is currently on display at New York’s Museum of Natural History.

Pretty much the fastest consumer broadband in the world is the 160-megabit-per-second service offered by J:Com, the largest cable company in Japan. Here’s how much the company had to invest to upgrade its network to provide that speed: $20 per home passed.

The cable modem needed for that speed costs about $60, compared with about $30 for the current generation.

By contrast, Verizon is spending an average of $817 per home passed to wire neighborhoods for its FiOS fiber optic network and another $716 for equipment and labor in each home that subscribes

Such stories are becoming commonplace. A coachload of English schoolchildren bound for the historic royal palace at Hampton Court wasted an entire day battling through congested central London as their sat-nav led them stubbornly to a narrow back street of the same name in Islington. A Syrian lorry driver aiming for Gibraltar, at the southern tip of Spain, turned up 1,600 miles away in the English east-coast town of Skegness, which has a Gibraltar Point nearby.

Two complementary things are happening in these stories. One is that these people are displaying a woeful ignorance of geography. In the case of Stamford Bridge, one driver and two passengers spent well over two hours in a car without noticing that instead of passing Northampton and swiftly entering the built-up sprawl of London, their view continued to be largely of fields and forests, and they were seeing signs for Nottingham, Doncaster and the North. They should have known.

The other is more subtle. Everybody involved in these stories has consciously handed over responsibility for knowing geography to a machine. With the sat-nav on board, they believed that they did not need to know about north or south, Spain or England, leafy Surrey or gridlocked Islington. That was the machine’s job. Like an insurance company with its call centre or a local council with its bin collections, they confidently outsourced the job of knowing this stuff, or of finding it out, to that little computer on the dashboard.

Here is another story. A former winner of the BBC quiz show “Mastermind” recently took part in a pub quiz which came down to a tiebreaker between his team and a group of young people who were relying on BlackBerrys. Anyone familiar with quizzes these days knows that this can happen, whether it is under the table or outside in the smokers’ zone; the combination of wireless internet access and Google searching is simply too powerful for some to resist and for others to prevent. In this case, happily, virtue triumphed and the team led by the Mastermind champion won. Then afterwards a young woman from the losing side came over and asked in baffled tones: “How did you get that?” So attuned was she to the idea that answering quiz questions was a task to be outsourced to the internet that she seemed not to understand the idea of general knowledge that was kept in the head.

Keep reading to find out whether Google is killing general knowledge.

A few weeks ago, I switched my development environment from Windows to Linux, on a project which was developed so far on Windows only. In this post, I want to describe the issues that brought me to this switch, a short overview how I did the actual port, and some observations on Linux for developers. This is the first post in a series of at least two, the second post will describe the tools I use on Linux right now.

In a paper published last week in Physical Review Letters, he attempts to provide a solution to what has been called the mystery of “the arrow-of-time”.
Briefly, the problem is that while our laws of physics are all symmetrical or “time-reversal invariant” – they apply equally well if time runs forwards or backwards – most of the everyday phenomena we observe, like the cooling of hot coffee, are not.

They never seem to happen in reverse.

We have a statistical law that describes these everyday phenomena called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law tells us that the “entropy” or degree of disorder of a closed system never decreases. Roughly speaking, a process in which entropy increases is one where the system becomes increasingly disordered. Windows break, thereby increasing disorder, but they will not spontaneously unbreak. Gases will disperse but not spontaneously compress.

However, entropy describes what happens with large numbers of particles. We presume that it must arise from what happens with individual particles, but all the laws that govern the behaviour of individual particles are time-reversal invariant. This means that any process they allow in one direction of time, they also allow in the other.

So why will your coffee spontaneously cool down, but not heat up?
Maccone’s solution is to suggest that in fact entropy-decreasing events occur all the time – so there is no asymmetry and no associated mystery about the arrow of time.

He argues that quantum mechanics dictates that if anyone does observe an entropy-decreasing event, their memories of the event “will have been erased by necessity”.

The first alarms about the sudden widespread disappearance of honeybees came in late 2006, and the phenomenon soon had a name: colony collapse disorder. In the two years that followed, about one-third of bee colonies vanished, while researchers toiled to figure out what was causing the collapse. A study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences surmises that there may not be a single pathogen involved but a collection of culprits. What have entomologists and beekeepers learned in the last few years of dealing with the crisis?

apparently they’ve also been preparing for an overnight collapse and making research into replacing the honeybee. pretty impressive.

So it takes about 25 kilobits — 3.2 kbytes — of data to code for a virus that has a non-trivial chance of killing a human. This is more efficient than a computer virus, such as MyDoom, which rings in at around 22 kbytes.

It’s humbling that I could be killed by 3.2 kbytes of genetic data. Then again, with 850 Mbytes of data in my genome, there’s bound to be an exploit or two

Facebook as Evidence

In today’s modern world of technology which includes Internet-based social networking and the accompanying rise in the sharing of personal information, a recent Ontario Court of Appeal decision, Leduc v. Roman (“Leduc”), has concluded that such personal information is a legitimate form of documentary evidence for civil litigation cases.

Social networking websites, such as Facebook, provides the opportunity for millions of internet users to connect, interact and, at times, share personal information with other online users ultimately creating “online communities” of individuals that share common interests. The sharing of personal information is done via postings on community member “walls” (a space on users’ profile pages that allows community members to post messages for the user or other members to view), “photos” and “videos” (where users can upload albums, photos and videos); and “status” which allows users to inform community members of their whereabouts and actions.

Leduc was involved in a motor vehicle accident wherein he alleged that as a result of Roman’s negligent driving his enjoyment of life had lessoned, in particular his personal life.

Leduc maintained a Facebook account but with restricted access permitting only those who were personally authorized by him (Facebook “friends”) to view his personal information. Those who did not receive Leduc’s authorization were not categorized as a Facebook “friend” and subsequently only able to view information commonly available for all to see such as his name, photo and city of residence. Despite not having “friend” status, Roman’s counsel requested that Leduc produce contents of his Facebook profile pages to ascertain whether or not his claim was genuine. Leduc refused to produce the Facebook pages on his private setting. As a result Roman sought an order from the court to obtain access to the information on the private setting.

The Court of Appeal granted Roman the opportunity to cross examine Leduc to determine if any information on his private setting would be relevant to the litigation and if so, to produce it. In making this order the court stated, “to permit a party claiming very substantial changes damages for loss of enjoyment of life to hide behind self-set privacy controls on a website, the primary purpose of which is to enable people to share information about how they lead their social lives, risks depriving the opposite party of access to material that may be relevant to ensuring a fair trial.”

The Court of Appeal appears to have been persuaded by the fact that Facebook, as a social networking site, is a means by which one can reveal one’s personal life to others, and for that reason is likely to contain relevant information about how one leads their life. Accordingly, despite privacy controls and settings, the contents of a social networking website can be disclosed to a third party but only if the contents are relevant. One cannot go on a fishing-expedition of all profile materials that do not relate to the matter or are overly broad.

This case illustrates that the development of social networking sites opens the door to new sources of evidence; evidence which litigants may now obtain and rely on as potentially key information that would have only been previously captured through surveillance. The information of course has to be relevant.

For employers, information contained on an employee’s profile may be useful in cases involving disability management whereby an employer may have the ability to obtain valuable information regarding the employee’s daily physical activities, or in cases involving wrongful dismissal claims whereby an employer may be able to obtain information regarding the employee’s efforts, or lack thereof, to find alternate employment.

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

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previous q&a here.

“We got a call for a suspicious person,” Buble said. “It was pouring rain outside, and I was right around the corner so I responded. By that time he was walking down the street. I asked him what he was doing in the neighborhood and he said he was looking at a house for sale.”

“I asked him what his name was and he said, ‘Bob Dylan,’ Buble said. “Now, I’veseen pictures of Bob Dylan from a long time ago and he didn’t look like Bob Dylan to me at all. He was wearing black sweatpants tucked into black rain boots, and two raincoats with the hood pulled down over his head.

“So I said, ‘OK Bob, what are you doing in Long Branch?’ He said he was touring the country with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp. So now I’m really a little fishy about his story. I did not know what to believe or where he was coming from, or even who he was. We see a lot of people on our beat, and I wasn’t sure if he came from one of our hospitals or something,” Buble said.

The carpenter ants in question build hives in trees and forage on the forest floors. When they are taken over by the zombification fungus, however, they stick exclusively to the ground. A study reported in the American Naturalist says that this is because the fungus knows it will prosper closest to the ground, so it compels the ants to stay out of the trees.

That’s the heart of what is happening here: the fungus somehow forces the ant to do exactly what it wants. The ant first acts as a personal transportation service, conveying the fungus to exactly where it wants to be (the leafy forest floor), and then the ant dies and becomes an abundant food source for the fungus. The fungus even forces the ant to clamp its mandibles onto a desirable leaf habitat, where it stays locked until its death.

Imagine if this happened on a human scale: the fungus would compel you to walk out into a forest, grab tightly onto a tree, and slowly die curled up on the forest floor, probably driving you mad as it ate your brain from the inside.