A Conversation with Jacque Fresco

A wonderful and intelligent conversation with Jacque Fresco. A must see! He explains a resource-based economy clearly, what is wrong with our current system and steps we need to take to make the change.


A Conversation with Jacque Fresco from Joel on Vimeo.

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The Venus Project - Cities

The Venus Project is very close to my heart. The ideas are incredible and feasible. What makes them impossible right now is greed and societies inability to change age old concepts and beliefs. I want to post as many Venus Project clips, articles and book lists that I can. I would like to focus and help spread the word that we must evolve as a civilization.

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Monkey's Have More Writing Talent Than I Do!

We've heard the old saying...if you put so many monkeys in a room with typewriters, how long would it be before they recreated the works of Shakespeare? A programmer is close to finding out. I guess my question would be why was this important to know. Aren't there more pressing questions right now in the world? Well, here is the article if you are interested.

26 September 2011 Last updated at 07:31 ET

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Virtual monkeys write 

Shakespeare

Continue reading the main story

A few million virtual monkeys are close to re-creating the complete works of Shakespeare by randomly mashing keys on virtual typewriters.

A running total of how well they are doing shows that the re-creation is 99.990% complete.

The first single work to be completed was the poem A Lover's Complaint.

Practical experiments show monkeys have poor keyboard skills

Set up by US programmer Jesse Anderson the project co-ordinates the virtual monkeys sitting on Amazon's EC2 cloud computing system via a home PC.

Mr Anderson said he started the project as a way to get to know the Hadoop programming tool better and to put Amazon's web services to the test.

It is also a practical test of the thought experiment that wonders whether an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of typewriters would be able to produce Shakespeare's works by accident.

Mr Anderson's virtual monkeys are small computer programs uploaded to Amazon servers. These coded apes regularly pump out random sequences of text.

Each sequence is nine characters long and each is checked to see if that string of characters appears anywhere in the works of Shakespeare. If not, it is discarded. If it does match then progress has been made towards re-creating the works of the Bard.

To get a sense of the scale of the project, there are about 5.5 trillion different combinations of any nine characters from the English alphabet.

Mr Anderson's monkeys are generating random nine-character strings to try to produce all these strings and thereby find those that appear in Shakespeare's works.

Mr Anderson kicked off the project on 21 August using Amazon's cloud computers. Each day of virtual monkey keyboard mashing processing cost $19.20 (£12.40).

The project has been moved to a home PC to speed up text string generation and to cut the cost. To make the task even easier the text being sampled has had all the spaces and punctuation removed.

Mathematicians said the constraints Mr Anderson introduced to the project mean he will complete it in a reasonable amount of time.

"If he's running an evolutionary approach, holding on to successful guesses, then he'll get there," said Tim Harford, popular science writer and presenter of the BBC's radio show about numbers More or Less.

And without those constraints?

"Not a chance," said Dr Ian Stewart, emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Warwick.

His calculations suggest it would take far, far longer than the age of the Universe for monkeys to completely randomly produce a flawless copy of the 3,695,990 or so characters in the works.

"Along the way there would be untold numbers of attempts with one character wrong; even more with two wrong, and so on." he said. "Almost all other books, being shorter, would appear (countless times) before Shakespeare did."

Earlier experiments have shown how difficult the task is. Wikipedia mentions a 2003 project that used computer programs to simulate a lot of monkeys randomly typing.

Monkeys: More interested in throwing faeces than writing sonnets




After the equivalent of billions and billions and billions of monkey years the simulated apes had only produced part of a line from Henry IV, Part 2.

Also in 2003, Paignton Zoo carried out a practical test by putting a keyboard connected to a PC into the cage of six crested macaques. After a month the monkeys had produced five pages of the letter "S" and had broken the keyboard.

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Video Games Used For Science!

I don't know about your children, but my son loves video games. I grew up playing pong, then Atari, then Colecovision, Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Gameboy Advance (my son's),  PlayStation 2, X Box 360 ...I never completely stopped playing. Since Jacob loves to play, I have the excuse that video games are in the house so....
I know that there are people who think video games are a waste of time. This next article can be used to argue for gamers and their world. Maybe gamer powers can be used for good.

20 September 2011 Last updated at 08:33 ET

Online game Foldit helps anti-Aids drug quest

By Katia MoskvitchTechnology reporter, BBC News

Continue reading the main story

An online game has helped determine the structure of an enzyme that could pave the way for anti-Aids drugs.

The game, called Foldit, allows players to create new shapes of proteins by randomly folding digital molecules on their computer screens.

In the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, scientists write that they have been puzzled by the protein's structure for over a decade.

Retroviral proteases have a critical role in the development of an Aids virus

But it took the online community just a few days to produce the enzyme's model.Proteins are extremely complex organic compounds that everything is made of, and an enzyme is a particular type of protein.The enzyme the gamers were presented with is called M-PMV retroviral protease - an enzyme that plays a key role in the development of a virus similar to HIV.Scientists have been trying to determine its precise structure for years.

The result could be an important step forwards in the development of anti-Aids drugs.

Following simple rules, gamers playing Foldit had to turn and flip a digital 3D model of the enzyme on their computer screens, to try out all folding combinations that were possible.

They eventually obtained the optimum one - the state that needed the lowest energy to maintain.

Continue reading the main story

“

Biochemist Firas Khatib of the University of Washington - where Foldit was created in 2008 - said that the goal was to see if "human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed".

The researchers were so impressed with the result that they even included some participating gamers as co-authors of the study.

Complex structures

Even a small protein is able to fold in a huge variety of different ways, and it is always a challenge, even for computers, to figure out which of the many possible structures is the best one.

"Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans' puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins," states the game's website.

"Since proteins are part of so many diseases, they can also be part of the cure.

"Players can design brand new proteins that could help prevent or treat important diseases."

Protein folding had proved to be
 one of the more popular uses
 for distributed computing

To play, no previous knowledge of proteins, biochemistry or biology is required - all a user has to have is a computer and an internet connection.

Once a gamer downloads an easy-to-install plug-in, he or she can start competing with other players, rotating complex three dimensional molecular structures with a click of the mouse.

The goal is either to design an entirely new protein, or to predict a certain structure, so that once an online model is generated, scientists and biotech companies take over.

The latest breakthrough, according to the paper's authors, is the first time that online gamers have solved a longstanding scientific problem.

Seth Cooper, a co-creator of Foldit and its lead designer, said that games provide a framework "for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans".

"People have spatial reasoning, something computers are not yet good at," Dr Cooper said.

"These results show that gaming, science and computation can be combined to make advances that were not possible before."

Results obtained by gamers playing Foldit have also helped scientists in Alzheimer's and cancer research.

Start Quote

These results show that gaming, science and computation can be combined to make advances that were not possible before”

Seth CooperFoldit

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I Am Proud of Them!

This article is about the young people that have been protesting at Wall Street in New York. I am so glad that this next generation is angry about the legacy that has been left to them. I wish them the strength to carry on with this. I want them to know that there are those of us of the older generation that support them and are angry at what has happened because of the bad choices that we made, our parents made, our grandparents made....
You will make the difference!

25 September 2011 Last updated at 06:06 ET

• • 
    

Anti-Wall Street protesters arrested in New York

At least 80 people have been arrested during an anti-Wall Street march in New York's financial district.

Several hundred people took part in Saturday's march, which was intended to draw attention to "corporate greed and corrupt politics" in the US.

Participants carried banners supporting a range of other issues, including healthcare reform, an end to US wars and the scrapping of the death penalty.

The march came after a week of protests by the Occupy Wall Street campaign.

The loosely organised group says it is defending 99% of the US population against the wealthiest 1%, and had called for 20,000 people to "flood into lower Manhattan" on 17 September and remain there for "a few months".

Protesters, who are mostly young, initially numbered some 1,500 but their numbers had fallen to about 200 by Saturday's march.

There was a heavy security presence in the district, with police deploying nets to block off major roads including Fifth Avenue and to protect the New York Stock Exchange.

Corporate 'enemy'

One protester, 21-year-old Ryan Reed, said he joined in "because what I see - and what I feel most people in this country see - is an economy and a system that's collapsing".

"The enemy is the big business leaders of Wall Street, the big oil company leaders, the coal company leaders, the big military industrial leaders."

A number of placards also called for "justice for Troy Davies", the US man executed in Georgia last week amid widespread criticism.

Police said most of Saturday's arrests were for disorderly conduct and blocking traffic, but one person was charged with assaulting a police officer. One officer also suffered a shoulder injury, said police.

They have not commented on protest organisers' comments that there had been an "unprecedented level of police aggression" on display.

A statement on the Occupy Wall Street website said the protesters have "an interest in returning the US back into the hands of its individual citizens".

"Our nation, our species and our world are in crisis. The US has an important role to play in the solution, but we can no longer afford to let corporate greed and corrupt politics set the policies if our nation."

Inspired by urban occupations in cities including Madrid, Cairo and Tunisia, they have said they will camp out in Zuccotti Park, a private park near the financial district, until their demands are met.

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Welcome To My Blog

My name is Debra. I live in Rutherfordton, NC. I am a single mother of a wonderful 13 year old son, Jacob. Sam Wise is our sweet and spoiled cat. I think that we are his pets sometimes.
I started a tiny business in March 2011. Jacob has Duchenne muscular dystrophy and I had been trying to find something I could do from home. I came up with Rediscovering Vintage. I love vintage items. Pictures, books, clothes...it just has so much history. It's not just an item...it's a piece of the past. I redesign vintage jewelry that has been broken or just unloved and no longer wanted and recreate it into a beautiful piece that has new life.
I have a lovely Etsy shop and have a photo album on my Facebook page that I like to update. I welcome visitors to my shop and even more, I welcome new friends on my Facebook page.
I am providing links and would love to hear from you.
Check back often. I am going to post pictures of our wonderful area, updates on new items, before and after photos of vintage jewelry I have redesigned and odds and ends (I love to read so I probably will add books and music and movies).
Have a great day!

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