Happy Island Updates

A personal blog that chronicles various aspects of what Studio Artist creator John Dalton is up to. The Studio Artist User Forum is at studioartist.ning.com The main Synthetik Software site is www.synthetik.com More WMF at www.myspace.com/wmfrocks and wmfrocks.bandcamp.com

Nov 23
“What your citizens imagine now matters more than ever because they can act on their own imaginations farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before — as individuals. In such a world, societies that can nurture people with the ability to imagine and spin off new ideas will thrive.” Op-Ed Columnist - Advice From Grandma - NYTimes.com

“Carbon dioxide concentrations this fall are hovering at around 385 parts per million, on their way to a near-certain record high above 390 in the first half of next year, at the annual peak. “For the past million years we’ve never seen 390. You have to wonder what that’s going to do,” said physicist John Barnes, the observatory director.” Carbon dioxide emissions near record levels at Mauna Loa Observatory | honoluluadvertiser.com | The Honolulu Advertiser


Nov 22

“Drinking alcohol every day cuts the risk of heart disease in men by more than a third, a major study suggests.
The Spanish research involving more than 15,500 men and 26,000 women found large quantities of alcohol could be even more beneficial for men.”
BBC News - Alcohol ‘protects men’s hearts’


Nov 21

The mishap was the latest in a series of setbacks to have blighted the project – problems that came as no surprise to Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya, reports Time magazine. These respected physicists believe the attempt to create large numbers of the God particle – also known as the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle believed to be responsible for giving everything mass – is so abhorrent to the universe that the universe is sabotaging the experiment from the future.

The collider does seem cursed. Originally intended to start bashing atoms together in 2006, the experiment has been delayed by exploding magnets, electrical faults, vacuum leaks, the death of a technician when a crane load was dropped on him, the arrest of a physicist on suspicion of working for al-Qaeda and now a rogue baguette. The creation of Higgs sends ripples back in time to destroy itself, Nielsen and Ninomiya have speculated.

Scientists have assured worried members of the public that, contrary to media speculation, the world won’t go down the tube with it. While there is a possibility that the collider will create a black hole or two, the organisation insists the holes would be microscopic and short-lived, and highly unlikely to suck the Earth into oblivion. Likewise, the organisation has played down the risk of the machine creating dangerous “strangelets”, which sound like a sub-group of emos, but are in fact hypothetical microscopic lumps of “strange matter” that could theoretically attach to normal matter and make it “strange” too. Nor is the collider likely to turn the currently unstable universe into a more stable form known as a “vacuum bubble”, in which we could not exist. But nothing’s certain in the collider business.

Simon Webster


Nov 20

Nov 19
“An interdisciplinary team of researchers at IBM have presented at paper at the SC09 supercomputing conference describing a milestone in cognitive computing: the group’s massively parallel cortical simulator, C2, now has the ability to simulate a brain with about 4.5 percent the cerebral cortex capacity of a human brain, and significantly more brain capacity than a cat.” IBM makes supercomputer significantly smarter than cat - Ars Technica

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