Amesj's Odditorium

[alkemical]

Instead of all my threads - i think i'm going to reduce it to a running thread - ala my other news thread(s) - but this one will include all matters of things that i find interesting. I am a fan of optimistic ideas, and ways we can get out of the jams we are in. Anyone is invited to participate.

~Amesj

[alkemical]

The Maltese cart ruts are considered to be one of the most enduring ancient enigmas. But could it be that they are precisely what their name suggests: cart ruts?

http://www.philipcoppens.com/cartruts.html

[Kaylore]

The Maltese cart ruts are considered to be one of the most enduring ancient enigmas. But could it be that they are precisely what their name suggests: cart ruts?

http://www.philipcoppens.com/cartruts.html

I always thought they were! It's usually the obvious, most-practical thing.

[alkemical]

Steampunk Rising

Steampunk Rising

ORIGINS OF STEAMPUNK
Steampunk as an active sub-culture arose from the science fiction sub-genre of the same name that became popular in the mid- to late-1990s. Novels like "The Difference Engine" by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling re-imagine a Victorian age where steam-powered technology is far more advanced than it really was in the 19th century. The rollicking, fantastical adventures created by Steampunk authors fit squarely in the tradition of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, but with the twist that modern writers know how technologies like computing actually developed and thus can retro-fit today's tech to an earlier time in an almost plausible fashion. The central conceit of "The Difference Engine," for example, is that Charles Babbage's designs for computational machines, which in reality were never built, have been developed to usher in the Information Age a full century before it actually occurred. Interestingly, the steam-powered computers in Gibson and Sterling's novel are inspired by Babbage's designs for what he called an "Analytical Engine," widely regarded today as the first architectural breakthrough in computing, not his separate plans for a Difference Engine, which was a very powerful but ultimately non-computational calculating machine. Did Gibson and Sterling simply make a mistake? Not likely, says Steampunk author G. D. Falksen, who guesses that the pair probably preferred the way "Difference Engine" rolls off the tongue to the clunkier "Analytical Engine." Falksen credits writers Kevin Jeter and Paul Di Filippo with coining the term "steampunk," a play on the sci-fi genre of "cyberpunk" that was popular in the 1980s and 90s.

[Odysseus]

Cool idea. Thank you.

[alkemical]

Cool idea. Thank you.

The steampunk thing? I've been seeing lots of posts and articles on it - and it's got my interest. One of my "secret" loves is victorian things.

[alkemical]

[Odysseus]

I love history and things that are old.

[alkemical]

I love history and things that are old.

Coolio man.....

[Odysseus]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Oedekerk

I just ordered the whole Thumbs Series and you think your cat is freaky. Geez. Those Thumbs were off the chain. I liked Frankenthumb the best. Must have been the mindless violence and all those weird looking thumbs!

Check it out.

[alkemical]

lol, i will seems interesting!

[alkemical]

Living computers solve complex math puzzle
Tweaked bacteria show promise in problem-solving applications

Scientists have genetically tweaked E. coli bacteria to create simple computers capable of solving a classic math puzzle, commonly called the “Burnt Pancake Problem.”

The resulting advance in synthetic biology, according to researchers, hints at the ability of tiny “living computers” to aid in data storage, evolutionary comparisons and even tissue engineering.

The mathematical problem imagines pancakes of varying sizes stacked in random order — each with a burnt side and a golden brown side. The solution requires using the minimum number of manipulations to stack the pancakes according to size, with their burnt sides all facedown. Each manipulation involves flipping one or more pancakes, reversing both their order and orientation.

[alkemical]

http://www.coloribus.com/paedia/prin...8/1/18/197352/

[alkemical]

Awesome Or Off-Putting: Homeless Japanese Lady Secretly Not Homeless In Victim’s Closet

[alkemical]

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/200...runc_sys.shtml

"Massive" Horizontal Gene Transfer In Animal Kingdom Revealed

If you're an animal, you inherit your genes from your parents at the moment of conception, right? Not quite, according to scientists from the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), who have uncovered evidence of "massive" horizontal gene transfer in the animal known as the bdelloid rotifer. Reporting their findings in Science, the researchers say they have discovered numerous chunks of foreign DNA in its genome, from bacteria, fungi, and even from plants. Gene transfer on such a large scale was, until now, thought impossible in the animal kingdom.

"It is quite amazing that bdelloids are able to recruit foreign genes, which were acquired from remarkably diverse sources, to function in the new host," says MBL's Irina Arkhipova. "Bdelloids may have the capacity for tapping into the entire environmental gene pool, which may be of [evolutionarily] adaptive significance during expansion into new ecological niches, and may even contribute to bdelloid speciation."

The new findings may help to explain why bdelloids, which are exclusively asexual, have managed to diversify into more than 360 species over 40 million years of evolution. Sometimes called an "evolutionary scandal," bdelloids contradict the notion that sex - which recombines the DNA from the parents in their offspring - confers diversity and greater adaptability on a population, thereby boosting its evolutionary success. Arkhipova's study suggests that if bdelloids can incorporate foreign DNA from their environment, they could also pick up DNA from other bdelloids which, from an evolutionary standpoint, is almost as good as having sex.