Today I watched a BBC video about a man who lost his hand to cancer, and now has an artificial hand that is connected directly to his brain, and more amazingly: is able to feel with it. This is cool for so many reasons, for example: giving someone the ability to have a hand again, one that feels, freedom of motion, oh yes – and basically being a cyborg is nifty too :)
Many props to the scientists and engineers who worked on this one.
Katie Couric recently interviewed Glenn Beck and it is available online. While it’s pretty clear that their views are very different, it was also a civil and interesting exchange.
Easily one of the most digestible works in Christian Apologetics ever written.
Joshua Cooper Ramo’s The Age of the Unthinkable investigates the necessity of a dynamical approach to political systems. What the book lacks in rigor is made up for with compelling narratives, personal experiences, and metaphors. In the midst of this NPR-paced volume, Ramo’s point is actually fairly simple: all political systems were built when a different metaphysical/social/etc. reality was dominant and thus no longer scale under current conditions. Even though I disagree with his conclusions, I think that this is a book worth reading (or even listening to) because it represents a thoughtful political commentary in the world of shock-jocks.
I’m a C and C++ sort of guy, the higher-level the language the most mystified I tend to be. One such example I found while building a class in Ruby:
This does not work, why? according to irb:
SyntaxError: compile error
(irb):8: class/module name must be CONSTANT
from (irb):10
Now as far as I can tell, this means that the first letter of the class must be capitalized. True enough, this works:
Clonezilla is excellent software, a great way to clone stuff (including virtual machines i.e. virtualbox) easily.
brian@bjl-dv9700t:~/src/bjl_mvc$ make
g++ -g Dispatcher.cpp Main.cpp Event.cpp I_Control.cpp
Delegate.cpp: In static member function ‘static void delegate::method_stub(void*, Event) [with T = My_Client, void (T::* TMethod)(Event) = cb_f]’:
Delegate.cpp:39: internal compiler error: in make_decl_rtl, at varasm.c:1256
Please submit a full bug report,
with preprocessed source if appropriate.
See for instructions.
make: *** [all] Error 1
An interesting editorial on CNN:
A title such as “Liberal Fascism” may seem like an oxymoron, but Jonah Goldberg makes a compelling case that fascism was not a phenomenon of the right, but of the left. As shocking of a presumption as this might be, Goldberg takes a well-researched approach to the facts and an explicit approach to his conclusions. While I doubt that any reader will entirely agree with Goldberg, the research and ideas he presents are something that are worth considering for both the political philosopher and layman.
