Archive for February, 2010

Podcast: The Apocalypse Will Be Clothing Optional

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

weird things podcast SM

Andrew, Brian and Justin answer some listener scenarios. After revealing Brian’s deep-seated desire that the world go pantless post apocalypse, we find out how shockingly willing Brian is to switch teams and genders without actually being asked to do so. We explore the practical problems of someone who looks like Justin claiming to have a magical genii and find out about his experience in the wild frontier of Chat Roulette where he is accorded the dignity and respect he deserves for going there in the first place. We also talk about our admiration for men in leather and sometimes no leather at all wrestling and trying to kill each other.

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http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings022310.mp3

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Posted in Podcast, Podcasts | 7 Comments »

Podcast: Monkey Man Begins

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

weird things podcast SM

The trio determines what would force them to become vigilantes. Andrew describes his frightening superhero creation that involves deranged circus animals and human dismemberment. Brian tries to retcon the creation in a most horrific way.

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Download url:

http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings021210.mp3

[podcast]http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings021210.mp3[/podcast]

Posted in Animal Attack, Podcast, Podcasts | 10 Comments »

Is this what’s left of the Lost City of El Dorado?

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Deep in the Amazon researchers are exploring the remnants of a city that dates back to 200 AD. Little is known about the inhabitants and some speculate that this could have been the source of the rumors of El Dorado. Click through for the video. Scientific American


Posted in Ancient Civilizations | 2 Comments »

Experts figure out how much time left before robot uprising

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

The always provocative h+ magazine surveyed the experts at the Artificial General Intelligence Conference to get a grasp of when they though machines would get really smart.

The results are very interesting:

While the median guess is the 2020’s, some are saying we won’t see any robo super geniuses for a century or more. While we can appreciate their optimism in the delay of our demise, it feels a little bit like surveys of physicists in the 1920’s about the use of atomic energy as a weapon. That was considered a far off thing too…

How Long Till Human-Level AI?


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Newton’s Balls! Teleporting Energy a Possibility!

Thursday, February 4th, 2010


Researcher Masahiro Hotta at Tohoku University has developed a framework by which it could be possible to teleport energy vast distances. The implications for this are pretty amazing. Could we use this to power deep space missions? Teleport power from the sun? Build a Death Star? One can dream.

He gives the example of a string of entangled ions oscillating back and forth in an electric field trap, a bit like Newton’s balls. Measuring the state of the first ion injects energy into the system in the form of a phonon, a quantum of oscillation. Hotta says that performing the right kind of measurement on the last ion extracts this energy. Since this can be done at the speed of light (in principle), the phonon doesn’t travel across the intermediate ions so there is no heating of these ions. The energy has been transmitted without traveling across the intervening space. That’s teleportation.

link: Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy


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Largest Snake Ate Crocs for Food

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

What’s more awesome than a giant ancient crocodile? A really giant snake that ate it for lunch.

A 60-million-year-old relative of crocodiles described recently by University of Florida researchers in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology was likely a food source for Titanoboa, the largest snake the world has ever known.

link: Ancient crocodile relative likely food source for Titanoboa, largest snake ever known


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