Over at Charles Stross’ blog is a great post about Singularity theory and the state of AI. The post and the many comments that follow it are a good read for a lazy weekend (which this one isn’t for me, but hey). Artificial Intelligence has long fascinated me and early on when I started programming [...]
Thanks to MapSkip it’s not really much of a secret anymore that I am permanently fascinated by maps. I always loved to look at maps, trace routes across them, read the foreign-sounding place names… As a young boy I spent many hours traveling across the beautiful, large maps in my parent’s world atlas, imagining myself [...]
Take a look at this picture taken by the Spirit Rover on Mars. That’s where we are… All your life from birth to the grave will happen on a little tiny bright spot in the Marsian sky. It’s a good thing to adjust our perspective from time to time…
Ever heard of the Antarctic Snow Cruiser? Thought so… The Snow Cruiser is a one-of-a-kind vehicle that was developed in the 1930s to help conquer the Antarctic continent. It featured built in bunk beds for four and a galley and was one big piece of machinery. Oh – it also had a roof rack to [...]
In one of those happy googling accidents I stumbled over this transcript of a panel discussion: Great Terraforming Debate Several distinguished planetary scientist and two of my favorite science fiction authors, Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson, are discussing the question: Are we morally and ethically allowed to terraform another planet? It’s an interesting dilemma [...]
While googling around for something completely different, I stumbled over this little site: Color Matters. This is a collection of essays and about colors, how the brain processes them and how they are used in our modern world. It’s a small enough collection to go through during a lunch break, but filled with startling little [...]
With all the amazing images coming in on a daily basis from Mars now, it is easy to forget that other planet close-by… Venus. The Soviet robotic missions to Venus have never been covered very well in the West, and even nowadays it is hard to get solid information or good pictures from these expeditions. [...]
Not many people have taken notice, but – astronomically speaking – we are currently in an age dominated by Mars. Not only are there several robotic missions on their way to the red planet, but Mars is also going to be as close to Earth as it has not been in 59.600 years. Coming August [...]
A Java zoom from outer space all the way down to subatomic particles. I remember seeing the original film with that title (same subject – a zoom from a galactic scale all the way down into an atom) a long time ago back in Germany on TV and I was mightily impressed with how such [...]