Gawker Media intern and soon to be infamous internet person, Alyssa Bereznak*, decided to share a dating story on Gizmodo, the site she writes for. Now, plenty of people share their dating tales of woe but for Bereznak, her story quickly turned into a tale of WHOA! See, Bereznak went on a date with a guy who is extremely accomplished at being what some people would call a nerd, identified the guy she dated in her piece, and BOOM went the internet. Continue reading
Tech
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In 1950, the mathematician Alan Turing came up with an elegant way of testing a computer’s ability to “act” like a human. If machines could truly “think,” they would surely be able to communicate in such a way that humans wouldn’t know they were interacting with a computer.
The Turing Test was born. Then in 1991, researchers and technologists turned Turing’s thought-experiment into an actual competition: The Loebner Prize.The goal is to trick human judges into believing they’re chatting (via text) with an actual human.
So Discover Magazine decided to arrange a conversation between of the world’s top-ranked computer chatbots, ALICE and Jabberwacky. Continue reading
A planet made entirely of diamond, prosaically known as PSR J1719-1438, has been discovered by an international team of astronomers led by Professor Matthew Bailes at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, and including researchers from Australia, Germany, Italy, the UK and the USA. The discovery was initially made using the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia; a radio telescope which will be well known to those who’ve seen the movie The Dish as a vital part of the network that received signals from the Apollo 11 mission, covering most of the moonwalk. The discovery was subsequently confirmed using telescopes in Hawaii and the UK. Continue reading
Carole Markin was a member of Match.com for seven years and generally had pleasant experiences. That was until she met Alan Paul Wurtzel. Continue reading
Steve Jobs has submitted his resignation as CEO of Apple this afternoon. His letter reads:
Google’s Android mobile operating system totally owned Apple’s iOS software in market share last quarter, research firm NPD has announced. According to the report, Android invaded 52 percent of all the smartphones sold in the U.S. last quarter, bitch slapping iOS down to only 29 percent market share. BlackBerry OS came in a cheap third at 11 percent share, according to NPD. Windows Phone 7, Windows Mobile, and WebOS all tiny piles of suck, each with under 5 percent market share. We know that number isn’t going up for WebOS anytime soon. [ CNET ] Continue reading
In a story probably familiar to the readers of this blog, Facebook has confirmed that its spam filters are responsible for the suspension of several accounts and pages run by environmental activists. Facebook denies that the bans were related to the content of the posts; instead blaming the automated algorithms that control it’s spam filter. Continue reading
Fig 1. Hubble True-Color Image of the Cigar Galaxy (M82)
When we gaze into the night sky, we typically see only the tiny white dots of stars surrounded by the vast blackness of an apparently-empty space, but in truth space has far more color and interest than our naked eye can reveal. One of the primary questions that students would ask me when I worked at Summers-Bausch Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, was “What is the magnification power of this telescope?” The answer was between a factor of 10 and 100, depending on which eyepiece was in use. What people need to understand is that a telescope is not a giant microscope turned upside down. The problem is not that the objects of interest in space are so small, but that they are so faint. Many of the nebulae and galaxies that we observe are nearly the same angular size as the Moon, but the telescope’s advantage is that it can gather a large quantity of light and funnel it right into your eye or onto film. Continue reading
Good news everyone! We now have an Android app for Crasstalk. Continue reading
Products and strategies fail sometimes, but rarely so quickly. Tech giant Hewlett Packard has, withing 6 weeks of launching the TouchPad tablet, not only ceased sale of the tablet but announced it is withdrawing from the tablet game completely and that it is ceasing to develop webOS tablets and phones – the very things which were meant to have been the reason it acquired Palm Inc for $1.2b just over a year ago. That’s a very expensive mistake. Continue reading