Greetings and Lamentations, I AM Lord Malignance, and you WILL Crouch! before me Now,
(Villains excepted of course)
The Accounting is here, and One will now travel for a month or so around my Colorado Holdfast, looking to receive tribute for my Great and many services to those under My iron rule. While away, comment moderation is on - One hates it, but after last year's mischief, it hardly seems wise to leave that door open a second time. Facebook account is deactivated, but if you WANT to call me names, you can critique the YouTube Videos. Hint: The earliest, incredibly, are far worse than the newer ones.
In my absence, the Great Shadow of One's influence recedes with me, and opportunities for villains to rise and be found worthy in the eyes of peers, presents itself. This year RLSV - reflections of the RLSH are about, looking for ways to earn recognition for their creating names and Facebook accounts. Wildtards are flopping around like fish on a sidewalk. Groups are out there, looking for ways to do anything.
One wishes them success, to the greater glory and sustainability of Villainy.
To the Minions and Henchmen, in One's employ, One will be seeing you soon. To my friends in Villainy, One wishes you success and safety. And happiness! And Fun! If you aren't having fun, then One suggests you stage your own Accounting. Find time to touch the things that matter to you. Cherish them, and enjoy them (and you know, take them, own them, and Rule them without pity or remorse).
A dead shot of ~200 posts to Malignopalooza3 in August, so save up for your Cognac now.
This isn't goodbye, it's
"One WILL RULE the WORLD, and Enslave ALL humanity, all too soon enough".
-Lord Malignance
Tyrant, and Dire Ruler of the Colorado Holdfast
February 29th, 2012
(Leap Day!)
And you may Rise.
To the Reality Show One has apparently signed up for; One is still waiting for that to appear somewhere. Anywhere.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Outsourcing Comes to Management
APES GET APPS AND IPADS
- Analysis by Tracy Staedter Tue Feb 28, 2012 02:27 PM ET (0) Comments | Leave a Comment
Orangutans are considered to be one of the most intelligent of all primates. And so maybe it's no surprise, then, that app developers are now creating programs for these animals. It's not a marketing scheme, but a way to stimulate the apes. As part of Orangutan Outreach, founder Richard Zimmerman has donated iPads to zoos in Milwaukee, Florida, Houston and Atlanta.
The interactive technologies allow the apes to play drum noises or fingerpaint in electronic mediums. Zimmerman says he hopes the animals will also be able to use Skype Face Time to communicate remotely with other orangutans at zoos in other cities. For more details, visit Apps for Apes, where you can also donate money.
Credit: Redapes.org
Shameless Screen Grab Courtesy of Discovery News
Yes. One said it. Management can be replaced by apes with iPads. This is actually a step up from previously held beliefs that "Management Can be Replaced with Cats" of a few years ago.
-Lord Malignance
And a note to Minions and Henchmen in One's employ: One is NOT a Manager. One is your Dire Lord and Master. If you are not quite clear on the difference, take yourself down to the dungeon, and beat yourself to unconsciousness. If that doesn't work, apply to Me later for your free iPad.
Chess Prodigy Describes His Thinking
A chess prodigy explains how his mind works
"That's the most amazing thing I've ever seen." That's what 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon said after witnessing chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen play 10 opponents simultaneously-- with his back turned and all 10 boards out of sight!
What's the secret to Magnus' magic? Once an opponent makes a move, Magnus instantaneously knows his own next move. But he often waits 30 minutes or so to physically make his move on the board. Why? Hear Magnus explain his methods in this 60 Minutes Overtime feature, filled with interviews and footage that you didn't see on the 60 Minutes broadcast.
What do you think, chess fans? Do the superhuman feats of 21-year-old Norwegian chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen rival those of chess giants like Bobby Fischer?
Shameless Screen Grab courtesy of CBS News
Never had the chance to challenge the ArchNemesis to a Chess Game - but One is horrible - just rank amateur horrible at chess. Astoundingly bad. But an interest in it all the same. Much can be learned in 64 squares. Which by itself is a beautiful mathematical number.
-Lord Malignance
SciTech Saturdays: Google Goggles and Augmented Reality
Behind the Google Goggles, Virtual Reality
By NICK BILTON
Published: February 22, 2012
SAN FRANCISCO — It wasn’t so long ago that legions of people began walking the streets, talking to themselves.
Richard Downs
Related
Bits Blog: Google to Sell Heads-Up Display Glasses by Year's End(February 21, 2012)
Times Topic: Google Inc.
Readers’ Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
On closer inspection, many of them turned out to be wearing tiny earpieces that connected wirelessly to their smartphones.
What’s next? Perhaps throngs of people in thick-framed sunglasses lurching down the streets, cocking and twisting their heads like extras in a zombie movie.
That’s because later this year, Google is expected to start selling eyeglasses that will project information, entertainment and, this being a Google product, advertisements onto the lenses. The glasses are not being designed to be worn constantly — although Google engineers expect some users will wear them a lot — but will be more like smartphones, used when needed, with the lenses serving as a kind of see-through computer monitor.
“It will look very strange to onlookers when people are wearing these glasses,” said William Brinkman, graduate director of the computer science and software engineering department at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. “You obviously won’t see what they can from the behind the glasses. As a result, you will see bizarre body language as people duck or dodge around virtual things.”
Mr. Brinkman, whose work focuses on augmented reality or the projection of a layer of information over physical objects, said his students had experimented on their own with virtual games and obstacle courses. “It looks really weird to outsiders when you watch people navigate these spaces,” he said.
They have not seen the Google glasses. Few people have, because they are being built in the Google X offices, a secretive laboratory near Google’s main Mountain View, Calif., campus where engineers and scientists are also working on robots and space elevators.
The glasses will use the same Android software that powers Android smartphones and tablets. Like smartphones and tablets, the glasses will be equipped with GPS and motion sensors. They will also contain a camera and audio inputs and outputs.
Several people who have seen the glasses, but who are not allowed to speak publicly about them, said that the location information was a major feature of the glasses. Through the built-in camera on the glasses, Google will be able to stream images to its rack computers and return augmented reality information to the person wearing them. For instance, a person looking at a landmark could see detailed historical information and comments about it left by friends. If facial recognition software becomes accurate enough, the glasses could remind a wearer of when and how he met the vaguely familiar person standing in front of him at a party. They might also be used for virtual reality games that use the real world as the playground.
People flailing their arms in midair as they play those games is a potentially humorous outcome of the virtual reality glasses. In a more serious vein is the almost certain possibility of privacy issues and ubiquitous advertisements. When someone is meeting a person for the first time, for example, Google could hypothetically match the person’s face and tell people how many friends they share in common on social networks.
This month, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research and advocacy group for Internet privacy, asked the Federal Trade Commission to suspend the use of facial recognition software until the government could come up with adequate safeguards and privacy standards to protect citizens.
Mr. Brinkman said he was very excited by the possibilities of the glasses, but acknowledged that the augmented reality glasses could pose some ethical issues.
“In addition to privacy, it’s also going to change real-world advertising, where companies can virtually place ads over other people’s ads,” he said. “I’m really interested in seeing how the government can successfully regulate augmented reality in this sense. They are not really going to know what people are seeing behind those glasses.”
SciTech Saturdays: Crystals in Time As Well As Space
Crystals may be possible in time as well as space
Theory proposes objects in their lowest energy state can loop in the fourth dimension forever
Web edition : Thursday, February 16th, 2012
What sounds like the title of a bad fantasy movie — time crystals — could be the next big thing in theoretical physics.
In two new papers, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Frank Wilczek lays out the mathematics of how an object moving in its lowest energy state could experience a sort of structure in time. Such a “time crystal” would be the temporal equivalent of an everyday crystal, in which atoms occupy positions that repeat periodically in space.
The work, done partly with physicist Alfred Shapere of the University of Kentucky, appeared February 12 on arXiv.org.
“We don’t know whether such things do exist in nature, but the surprise is that they can exist,” says Maulik Parikh, a physicist at Arizona State University in Tempe.
Scientists don’t know how important time crystals may turn out to be, or whether they have any practical application at all. But Wilczek, of MIT, says the concept reminds him of the excitement he felt when he helped describe a new class of fundamental particles, called anyons, in the early 1980s. “I had very much the same kind of feeling as I’m having here,” he says, “that I had a found a new logical possibility for how matter might behave that opened up a new world with many possible directions.”
Wilczek dreamed up time crystals after teaching a class about classifying crystals in three dimensions and wondering why that structure couldn’t extend to the fourth dimension — time.
To visualize a time crystal, think of Earth looping back to its same location in space every 365¼ days; the planet repeats itself periodically as it moves through time. But a true time crystal is made not of a planet but of an object in its lowest energy state, like an electron stripped of all possible energy.
This object could endlessly loop in time, just as electrons in a superconductor could theoretically flow through space for all eternity. “It’s doing what it wants to do, and what it wants to do is move,” says Wilczek.
In a sense the time crystal would be a perpetual motion machine: If scientists could build one in a lab, it would run forever. Yet it wouldn’t violate the second law of thermodynamics because the crystal would be in its lowest energy state; no useful energy could be extracted from it.
Wilczek is already dreaming of extending the time crystal concept into imaginary time, a theoretical concept of the fourth dimension that runs in a different direction than the one people experience.
“I don’t know if this will be of lasting value at all,” he says, “but I’m having fun.”
Editor's Note: Frank Wilczek is a member of the board of Society for Science and the Public, which publishes Science News.
Shameless Screen Grab courtesy of Science News
Something to cheer up Time Travelers.
Science News - always a good read, and a good resource for your Science investigations and reporting.
Two more days, and then One is gone on the Accounting for about a Month (One has been trying to add efficiencies to the process to streamline travel schedules to minimize time out of Lair). Because last year was so enjoyable.
Two more days, and then One is gone on the Accounting for about a Month (One has been trying to add efficiencies to the process to streamline travel schedules to minimize time out of Lair). Because last year was so enjoyable.
-Lord Malignance
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