The Search for a More Perfect Kilogram | Magazine The official US kilogram — the physical prototype against which all weights in the United States are calibrated — cannot be touched by human hands except in rare circumstances. Sealed bene…

Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz - tech - 27 December 2011 - New Scientist Your login is case sensitive…

The results of the study suggested when you get rewarded based on how well you perform a task, as long as those reasons are made perfectly clear, rewards will generate that electric exuberance of intrinsic validation, and the higher the reward, the better the feeling and the more likely you will try harder in the future. On the other hand, if you are getting rewarded just for being a warm body, no matter how well you do your job, no matter what you achieve, the electric feeling is absent. In those conditions greater rewards don’t lead to more output, don’t encourage you to strive for greatness. Overall, the study suggested rewards don’t have motivational power unless they make you feel competent. Money alone doesn’t do that. With money, when you explain to yourself why you worked so hard, all you can come up with is, “to get paid.” You come to believe you are being coerced, paid off, bought out. In the absence of what the scientists called “competency feedback” there is no story to tell yourself that paints you as a badass. Quotas and overtime and hourly pay don’t offer such indications of competency. Bonuses based on a reaching a specific number of completions or reaching a quantified goal make you feel like a machine.*

Schneier on Security: A Link between Altruism and Fairness A blog covering security and security technology.…

Dissolve My Nobel Prize! Fast! (A True Story) : Krulwich Wonders... : NPR

CERN - CNGS: On the track of particle �chameleons� Can you spare a minute to help us improve the cern.ch website? If so, please take part in our short survey.…

Astrophotography by Anthony Ayiomamitis Strange as it may seem, only seven times has someone ever managed to successfully image the solar analemma as a multi-exposure on a single piece of film. For those not familiar with the term, an a…

Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the Wizard of Schenectady | Past Imperfect

The Ben Franklin and the Gulf Stream Drift Mission: Captain's Log Ben Franklin: Captain's Log Ben Franklin Gulf Stream Drift Mission Report Grumman Aerospace Corporation Ocean Systems Department Document OSR-69-19 …

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Inventables: Find new materials …

NASA’s real news: bacterium on Earth that lives off arsenic! | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine [Update (13:30 MT Dec. 2): I misunderstood a part of this research dealing with arsenic when I read the journal paper, which was made more clear during the press conference. I have corrected the relev…

Print - The Brain That Changed Everything - Esquire The laboratory at night, the lights down low. An iMac streams a Pat Metheny version of an Ennio Morricone tune while Dr. Jacopo Annese, sitting in front of his ventilated biosafety cabinet, a small pa…

Whodunnit? | UK news | The Guardian Please activate cookies in order to turn autoplay off…

The Nottingham Caves Survey Homepage

YouTube - 360Production's Channel

Procrastination « You Are Not So Smart The Misconception: You procrastinate because you are lazy and can’t manage your time well.…

http://www.oldweather.org/

YouTube - Putting your hand in the Large Hadron Collider...

'Mythbusters': On A Healthy Fear Of Propane And The State Of Special Effects : NPR

'The Question Is More Complicated Than The Answer': Making 'Mythbusters' : NPR

James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation, excerpt "James A. Secord's Victorian Sensation is one of those books that transforms the way we think about what it would have been like to be alive in the 19th century. Secord traces the genesis, production,…

You and Your Research At a seminar in the Bell Communications Research Colloquia Series, Dr. Richard W. Hamming, a Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and a retired Bell Labs scientist, g…

The Airfoil Misconception in K-6 Textbooks

Watching TV Could Shorten Your Life : NPR

At SIGGRAPH this year, a team from the University of Tokyo demoed holograms with a tactile presence. The 3-D objects are projected using low-energy ultrasound transducers. Looks like the isn't isn't very high resolution yet, but it promises countless engineering and entertainment applications.

There's slightly more info and another video at FastCompany.

A robot navigated the streets of Munich by asking for directions from strangers on the street, without the aid of internal maps or GPS. Excellent. Hopefully a more extensive video of its travels surfaces on the internet.

These bionic penguins are amazing, particularly the lighter-than-air ones shown briefly in the video. They remind me of these ALAVs.

A transcript from instant messages:

(10:00:07 AM) paul: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.300-our-world-may-be-a-giant-hologram.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news
(10:00:28 AM) paul: We are all holograms, and the universe is shapped like a Pringle.
(10:01:28 AM) Jake: oh thats a relief
(10:01:50 AM) paul: LMAO

Holy crap! Imagine hiking through the woods, then seeing that thing walking towards you. When it slips and tries to regain its footing: very uncanny valley.