It feels odd to write about Microsoft Office. I am not an expert – because I don’t use it. I use editors, they just don’t cost $200 or whatever MS Office costs. Science 2.0 has a great editor, thankyouverymuch. This site has a WordPress editor. An XP desktop machine I use for programming has OpenOffice, for when someone sends me a Word document. I use Google Documents and...
read moreAre we on the road to uploading our brains to computers and living forever? Singularity proponents require a two-pronged approach to believing so; wildly overstating the technology curve of what future computers and programmers will accomplish and wildly understating the complexity of the human brain. If you believe strongly enough, the future looks bright for an...
read moreSince "The Avengers" is a giant movie this year, when you think of something that shoots lightning, you might think of Thor. If so, perhaps your clever joke would be "Can we name that Laser-Induced Plasma Channel "Mjolnir"?If you're old like me, "Star Trek" will be more your thing and "Set your phasers to fry" will be more your speed.(1) read...
read moreIs it possible to lose at Rochambeau, the millenia-old game of Rock, Paper, Sissors, every single time?It shouldn't be but a new Janken robot (Janken is the Japanese name for Rock, Paper, Scissors - why is the West stuck with a French name for an ancient Egyptian game? It's a mystery of linguistics) can win against humans without fail. Is it psychic? Are humans that predictable?...
read moreIs the world ready for a robot DJ?Sometimes you have to be bold. People laughed at Microsoft when they introduced Microsoft Bob too; people didn't know they needed a graphical image of their office showing a fax machine to send a fax - until it was available. read...
read moreAt my kid's graduation party on Sunday I had a chance to meet Tom Goddard who, it turns out, works on a tool used to look at the spatial organization of chromosomes in the cell nucleus and protein structures determined by electron cryo-microscopy.The tool is called Chimera (a fun name by any measure) and it is developed/maintained by the Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics...
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