I’ve never heard anything about this until just now (this is something quite distinct from conventional bioluminescence). Learn more here.

Biologists have long puzzled over the ability of bacteria and social insects to sense not only the presence of compatriots but their number and to synchronise their behaviour.

It turns out that these creatures perform this synchronisation using a process called quorum sensing. This works by constantly releasing signalling molecules into the environment while at the same time measuring the local concentration of these molecules.

This concentration rises as more creatures join the local population and so is an effective measure of population density. When the concentration rises over some threshold level, it triggers a different behaviour such cell division, pathogen production and nest building.

Now [Patrick Bechon and Jean-Jacques Slotine at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge] say a similar approach provides a robust way to synchronise humanoid robots. The ideal approach to synchronisation is for each robot to have access to every other robot’s position. Instead, the quorum sensing approach gives, each robot access to a global variable such as the average position or average clock time. Each robot can also change this variable because it contributes to the average.

The idea is that if each robot attempts to synchronise with this global average, the swarm as whole should keep good time.

This insight seems applicable to much more than the dancing robots shown in the linked article. For example, the movement of the center of gravity of social and cultural trends over time surely involves some “quorum sensing” on the part of individuals, followed by “attempts to synchronize with this global average”.

The exhibit includes floor-to-ceiling photos of nude toddlers, children, teens and adults, and an array of heated, flavoured and textured condoms rolled over wooden dildos. There’s also a ‘climax room’ with a round, low, leather bed, red curtains, a video screen showing animations of aroused genitals, and the voice of a man describing an orgasm.

Next to close-up photos of adult genitals are video screens using animations to explain masturbation.

Attendees are asked to write their own words for penis and vagina on a digital screen, and slang-terms like c— and pussy for female genitalia and c— for male body parts, are displayed above it in large letters.

There are listening stations with pre-written questions and push button audio answers.

Next to a printed question asking, ‘Why do many boys always want to have anal sex?’ sexologist Jamy Ryan responds that not all boys want to do it, but: “If you are comfortable trying that activity, go ahead and do it. It could be fun for you, but if you are not, you don’t really have to do it.”

Next to a question about pregnancy, the recording assures listeners that abortions are available at medical clinics and at 14 years old, you don’t need to tell your parents.

Seems to me the staid Great White North has changed a bit since I left in 1956. All for the better, I’m sure.

If you aren’t familiar with it, you can read it here.

Are you going to want a pair of these?

In this demo the user talks to his glasses. But what’s the endpoint here? Once the interface is fast and intuitive enough, so that we can send and receive data as thoughts, and we can connect our thoughts to everyone else’s (ten years from now? five?), what then? The hive mind of the Borg?

Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale [the site of the facility] is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)

It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

This rang a very old bell: a short story that I’d read as a boy in a science-fiction anthology called 17 x Infinity, published in 1963. This prescient tale, MS fnd n a Lbry, was written by Hal Draper in 1961, and was in the form of a report, written far in the future by alien archaeologists, on the collapse of our civilization (always a hot topic, of course, here at waka waka waka). The cause? Well, it’s short enough that you might as well just go read it yourself.

One item that might have slipped under the casual observer’s radar is this one, in which a team of researchers have developed an artificial womb to which a blastocyst can successfully attach.

The day cannot be terribly far off when we can successfully gestate an infant entirely outside the human body. I wonder what the implications of that will be.

Well, geezers, take heart: there’s still a manned-spaceflight program in America, and it’s just taking off. Bill Whittle explains in this encouraging video, now two years old.

(As with our previous link, thanks to Derb for this one.)

See it in action here.

The app has apparently irked various interest groups, who I suppose think that gathering crime-rate statistics and making them available them to the public gives high-crime areas a bad name, or something.

In the article, we read:

Sarah E. Chinn, author of ‘Technology and the Logic of American Racism,’ told AOL the app is ‘pretty appalling.’

‘Of course, an application like this defines crime pretty narrowly, since all crimes happen in all kinds of neighborhoods.’

‘I can’t imagine that there aren’t perpetrators of domestic violence, petty and insignificant drug possession, fraud, theft, and rape in every area.’

That’s just fantastic, and highly original, too. Just to be clear, because this is such a piercing insight that you might not get it right away: if you were to imagine that a neighborhood with, say, fifty street assaults a week is somehow a more dangerous place for a stroll than a neighborhood with five such crimes per decade, you’re thinking too narrowly. Instead, the right way to understand crime rates, in light of Ms. Chinn’s intellectual breakthrough, is to assign them only two possible values: 0 or 1. And since “all crimes happen in all kinds of neighborhoods” *, we can narrow the range even further: everyplace just gets a 1! Done.

(Somebody should tell Microsoft this, by the way — because as a professional software engineer, I can tell you it will make coding this app one hell of a lot easier. Fewer bugs, too, I’ll wager.)

So there you have it — a breathtaking unification, a Great Leap Forward in what was until now a dauntingly complex field of study: all crime happens equally, everywhere. Move over, James Clerk Maxwell!

Read the rest here.

* I’ll confess that I’m having trouble remembering the last time there was, for example, a gang-related drive-by shooting in Wellfleet, MA (pop. 2750), but just to be sociable I’ll defer to Ms. Chinn as to whether “all crimes happen in all kinds of neighborhoods”. She is, after all, a published author.

Read it here.

One thing we Windows programmers sometimes need to do is to generate C++ files representing the classes exported by a type library. Visual Studio 2010 has a tool for doing this, called the MFC Class Wizard. (You launch it from the menu bar: Project -> Class Wizard…)

When you use the Class Wizard to create these files, it does two things. First, it renames the exported classes according to the MFC naming convention, by dropping any ‘I’ or ‘_’ prefix and replacing it with a ‘C’. (E.g., an exported class called IBaseClass will be called CBaseClass in the output file.)

The other thing it does is to generate a separate header file for each exported class — so that two exported classes IBaseClass and IUtilityClass will end up in two files, CBaseClass.h and CUtilityClass.h.

But what if you want to keep the class names the same, and merge all the declarations and definitions into a single header file? You have to go through the classes one at a time, in each case explicitly changing the auto-generated class name back to the original class name, and replacing the auto-generated file name with name of the single file you want as the output. (The Wizard is smart enough to merge the code, Dieu merci, but you still have to tell it specifically what to do every time, one class at a time.)

Yesterday I needed to generate a wrapper file for the Outlook Redemption type library, which exposes zillions of classes and methods. I was retrofitting the wrapper classes into some legacy code, created long ago, so I wanted all the class names to match the names in the type library — and I wanted it all in a single header file. To munch through these classes one at a time would have taken me many, many hours, and would have been inexpressibly tedious. I knew that if I could somehow get the Wizard to skip the automatic renaming of the classes, and to generate the same output-file name each time, it would do the whole conversion in just a minute or two. But where was this configured? I looked online for a while, but couldn’t find what I needed. So I dug into the Visual Studio installation directory, and finally found what I was looking for: an HTML file that defines both the Wizard’s UI and the Javascript that does the actual work. A few quick hacks, and the problem was solved.

The file is here:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\VCWizards\CodeWiz\MFC\Typelib\HTML\1033\default.htm.

All of this auto-generation work is done in the function AddClass, which starts at line 527.

The per-class filename generation is done at line 590:

Files_Array[oGeneratedClasses.options.length-1] = strClass + “.h”;

To force the Wizard to merge all the classes into the single file ‘YourFileName.h’, just change this to:

Files_Array[oGeneratedClasses.options.length-1] = “YourFileName.h”;

To prevent the renaming of the generated classes, look at these lines, starting at 559:

var strInterfaceName = oInterfaces.options[i].value;
var strClass;
if( strInterfaceName.charAt(0) == ‘_’ || strInterfaceName.charAt(0) == ‘I’ || strInterfaceName.charAt(0) ==’i')
       strClass = “C” + strInterfaceName.substr(1);
else
       strClass = “C” + strInterfaceName;

if (IsInGeneratedList(strInterfaceName))
…

Change this to:

var strInterfaceName = oInterfaces.options[i].value;
var strClass = strInterfaceName;

if (IsInGeneratedList(strInterfaceName))
…

And that’s it! Don’t forget to put it all back, or at least to change the hard-coded filename next time you want to use it. (What would be even better would be to add some new code to expose all of these as options accessible directly from the UI, but I haven’t bothered.)

I hope this saves somebody out there a little time someday.