Scientific American has just published a comprehensive article on how to switch the United States substantially over to sunlight. The headline: "By 2050 solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions." The cost of this immense clean-energy-producing plan would be $420 billion. That's a HUGE…
I remember when the FBI unleashed their "Carnivore" internet monitoring system in the 1990's. Everyone was up in arms because the FBI could listen in to all email and run it through filters to store a database of all emails containing suspicious phrases, or from specific addresses. The controversy got…
I have a box before me, the determination of the disposition of which is at hand. "Huh?" you may well ask. I need room, and gotta choose stuff to throw away. This box is from my first job out of school, when I was as an industrial robotics designer. I…
Dangerous intersection is now more than 1 1/2 years old. We currently have a couple dozen active authors who have contributed 1,500 posts on 60 categories. These posts have drawn almost 7,000 comments. Many of these posts (I'm guessing perhaps one-third of them) make reference to news of the day,…
Check out this video. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIFCV2spKtg[/youtube] Isn't this exciting? This new technique is called seam carving. Seam carving is an image resizing algorithm developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. This algorithm alters the dimensions of an image not by scaling or cropping, but rather by intelligently removing pixels from (or…