future of fansubbing

I found a very intriguing article via slashdot. It's about IBM's efforts in creating superhuman translations systems using computers. They already have a system called "Tales" running, which subtitles arabic television on the fly. So if computers can subtitle arabic on the fly, I'm sure japanese won't be a big problem. According to IBM you'll have to pay several hundred to thousands of dollars per month to enjoy that service. I guess in the near future there will be a lot similar services with pricetags similar to digital-cable tv today.

glow-in-the-dark pork

Now this is hilarious! According to BBC News taiwanese scientist have created fluorescent pigs. They want to use their genetic material in stemcell research, since it's glowing it's of course easily trackable. But there are many more uses for glowing pork, like for example geek food. Ever tried to eat in a dark computer room? Now it's possible! :) They could even create fluorescent sheeps and make glow-in-the-dark clothes out of their wool.

BOfH on Channel 4

British TV station Channel 4 will air a new series next month called The I.T Crowd. It will be about Two guys and a girl sitting in the basement some corporation and doing the dirty IT work. Yup, a female IT worker. Judging from the picture on Channel 4's website she could be some scary goth chick who is into femdom. :) Channel 4 is so kind to offer a stream/download of the show a week prior to its tv premiere. I hope they don't use some weird codec only Windows supports. Oh and the BOfH part is just a wild guess of me. ;)

Dangerous Minds

Yesterday Slashdot led my to a nice collection of essays published by edge.org, which asked their annual question and over a hundred great minds responded. This years Question was "What is your dangerous idea?". All essays together comprise about 75k words and I have read most of them. I planned to write earlier about this, but it took me one whole day to read all the articles. Unlike that bloke who posted about this on Slashdot I won't just give you a few names, but a list of interesting essays, so you get a picture of what will await you. Twelve rather unsorted pages full of text can be quite overwhelming. :) You will spot the names Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein and Freud quite often while reading through the pages. I suppose the following essays are interesting for other nerds:

• "The Greatest Story Ever Told" by Carolyn Porco, science as a religion and has some very funny idead about how scientific religous could look like (NOT scientology)


• "Myths and fairy tales are not true" by Todd E. Feinberg, why it is dangerous to proof that Santa Claus does not exist


• "Cyber-disinhibition" by Daniel Goleman, giving some insight on childish behaviour on the net


• "After several generations of living in the computer culture, simulation will become fully naturalized. Authenticity in the traditional sense loses its value, a vestige of another time." by Sherry Turkle, robots could replace living things in the future


• "When will the Internet become aware of itself?" by Terrence Sejnowski, the net (all computers connected to it) shares roughly the same bandwidth and storage capacity as the human brain


• "Let's all stop beating Basil's car" by Richard Dawkins, the human psyche can be fixed like a car


• "Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox" by Geoffrey Miller, aliens have much better things to do than visit us


• "Free will is going away. Time to redesign society to take that into account." by Clay Shirky, what marketings executives always knew


• "A 24-hour period of absolute solitude" by Leo Chalupa, how to not get a dull zombie playing WoW all day long


• "A Science of the Divine?" by Stephen M. Kosslyn, how god could be descriped in a scientific way is you presume his existence


• "Science as just another Religion" by Jordan Pollack, a more serious take on science as a religion


• "Government is the problem not the solution" by Matt Ridley, wouldn't a state governed by Vogonsbe horrible? :)


• "Media Violence Induces Imitative Violence: The Problem With Super Mirrors" by Marco Iacaboni, violence in games and movies could cause real violence if his findings are correct


• "The Evolution of Evil" by David Buss, everyone is a potential killer

22C3

So, this year was the first time for me to visit the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. I choose the second day of the event for my event and combined the trip with a visit to my relatives who live in Berlin. Since I consider my interaction with relatives extremely boring I'll just talk about my day at the Congress. I went by train and had to get up early in the morning after getting just three hours of sleep, which wasn't that bad, since i had enough caffein with me. After having a second breakfast at my relatives' place I headed over to Alexanderplatz where the Congress Center is located. Surprisingly I had to wait in line a couple of minutes to get my ticket. After having walked around the whole place failing to find my pals with whom I wanted to meet, I sat down at some round table in the Hackcenter and set up my notebook. As soon as I entered our usual IRC hangout channel, my pals told me they are just few meters away. So I switched places and got a nice seat right in front of a Gigabit-Gateway called "George Bush". There I spend most of the day, except for a quick visit to the mall to get more coke and a "Currywurst". In the evening I heard two interesting lectures, one was about anonymity in the internet and the other one about identity in the real and digital world. There were some more interesting lectures in parallel and on the other days, but luckily you can download recorded streams.
There were also quite a few ftps set up in the local lan containing several terabyte of movies, music and other stuff. I grabbed three seasons of Monty Python's Flying Circus from one of them. Actually I'm watching Monty Python while writing this text. It's a nice change to my Daria addiction (a 24/7 stream can be very time consuming).
Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures worth showing to you, but there are plenty of galleries linked in the wiki.