The Codex of Alchemical Engineering [game]

Wanted to share "The Codex of Alchemical Engineering", which is a great Flash game!

Like Alchemy, but More Tangible!

The Codex of Alchemical Engineering is a puzzle game about programming “manipulators” to move, transmute, and bind alchemical “atoms” into complex compounds.
A few notes about the game:

• After completing a level, your progress is saved so long as your Flash “cookies” aren’t deleted. Your design, however, is not; if you want to keep your design, you must go to the Save screen and save the text shown there (I keep my solutions in a text file on my desktop). You can reload a saved design by pasting the design code into the Load window and pressing the load button.
• The music playing is Evan’s “Rever… Peut-etre…”, which you can find here on jamendo.com.

Requires: Flash

Increasing processor efficiency by 'shutting off the lights'

To promote energy-efficient multitasking, Harvard graduate student Wonyoung Kim has developed and demonstrated a new device with the potential to reduce the power usage of modern processing chips.

Image courtesy of Wonyoung Kim

The multicore voltage regulator responds almost instantaneously to changes in power demand from each core of the processor. As a result, the power supply matches the demand more closely, conserving energy.

There was a time when a laptop could weigh 10 pounds and still sell, a time when a cell phone was larger than a pocket, and a time when an iPod played only music.
Today’s consumers expect mobile devices that are both smaller and more powerful. All the bells and whistles, however, suck up energy — and a phone that lasts only four hours because it’s also a GPS device is only so useful.
To promote energy-efficient multitasking, Harvard graduate student Wonyoung Kim has developed and demonstrated a new device with the potential to reduce the power usage of modern processing chips.
The advance could allow the creation of “smarter” smartphones, slimmer laptops, and more energy-friendly data centers.
Kim’s on-chip, multicore voltage regulator (MCVR) addresses what amounts to a mismatch between power supply and demand.
“If you’re listening to music on your MP3 player, you don’t need to send power to the image and graphics processors at the same time,” Kim says. “If you’re just looking at photos, you don’t need to power the audio processor or the HD video processor.
“It’s like shutting off the lights when you leave the room.”

 Continue reading here...

Also on Physorg here...

Top 10 DIY Food Geek Projects

Kevin Purdy @ Lifehacker posts:

The best-tasting food is the kind that comes from your own efforts, because victory tastes oh-so-sweet. Conquer KFC-style fried chicken, smoky barbecue, wood-fired pizza, five-minute bread, and other DIY delicacies with these great food-focused projects.
Photo from The Pizza Hacker.
We've previously tackled 10 clever kitchen repurposing tricks and food and drink hacks, but this here is a compendium of more involved, fare more awesome projects that actually create food and drinks you can brag about.

10. Put Your Chicken on a "Throne" for Crispy Skin and Moist Meat

It's a pretty light project, but you certainly get your hands dirty. Cooking chicken so that it's standing up, with a can of liquid inside its carcass, ensures that the skin gets the perfect kind of crisp you're looking for, but the inner meat stays juicy, thanks to the steam coming from the can. You can watch Christopher Walken—yep, that Christopher Walken—demonstrate a fancier indoor method in the video, or read up on how to make it on the grill.

9. Make Crispy Wings at Home in the Oven

Chicken wings you get at the bar are crispy, but their sauce sticks right to them. Wings you make at home in the oven are slick, and you're lucky if half the sauce stays on. The solution? Baking powder, along with some overnight, open-air refrigeration before cooking. You get healthier wings you can cook at home, and a great feeling of having somehow beaten the takeout economy. (Original post)

8. Brew Your Own Beer and Soda

You'd think homebrew beer or soda would be a pretty huge undertaking, but it doesn't have to be. Starting out with either project is nothing more than a weekend afternoon spent with some beginner's materials. Guided tours and cost analyses of DIY brew are provided by the Wise Bread and The Simple Dollar, while a great video on making your own 2-liter soda experiments is offered at Howcast. (Original posts: beer, soda).

7. Fry Some KFC-Style Chicken at Home

The Colonel's 11 secret herbs and spices do a good enough job when you want the bucket, but if you want the good stuff at home—or you're not a huge fan of MSG—you can pick up the mix provided by the Guardian UK's Word of Mouth blog. Many testers claim it to provide the same kind of mouth-filling feeling as the KFC's version, though if you disagree, the theoretically secret recipe is offered at the post, too, coming from Ron Douglas' America's Most Wanted Recipes. (Original post)

6. Make Fresh Bread Without a Bread Maker

First came the no-knead bread, and it was declared good. Then there came faster and whole wheat remixes, and it couldn't seem to get better. But then came another no-bread-machine-needed recipe, a mix-once, break-off-and-bake dough recipe that our own Jason tested and loved, and then a recipe that rises while you're at work for about a minute of prep time. There is nothing quite like fresh-baked bread, and that's all we have to say on that. (Original posts: no-knead, faster and whole wheat, five minutes, one-minute).

Continue reading here...

Richard Dawkins: the truth dogs reveal about evolution

Richard Dawkins had a great article about evolution a while ago..

Richard Dawkins: the truth dogs reveal about evolution
The way in which wolves adapted to the environment to turn into dogs reveals another insight into evolution
by Richard Dawkins

We can turn to the example of dogs for some important lessons about natural selection. All breeds of dogs are domesticated wolves: not jackals, not coyotes and not foxes. But I need to qualify this in the light of a fascinating theory of the evolution of the dog, which has been most clearly articulated by the American zoologist Raymond Coppinger. The idea is that the evolution of the dog was not just a matter of artificial selection. It was at least as much a case of wolves adapting to the ways of Man by natural selection. Much of the initial domestication of the dog was self domestication, mediated by natural, not artificial, selection. Long before we got our hands on the chisels in the artificial selection toolbox, natural selection had already sculpted wolves into self-domesticated “village dogs’ without any human intervention.
Only later did humans adopt these village dogs and transmogrify them, separately and comprehensively, into the rainbow spectrum of breeds that today grace (if grace is the word) Crufts and similar pageants of canine achievement and beauty (if beauty is the word).

Coppinger points out that when domestic animals break free and go feral for many generations, they usually revert to something close to their wild ancestor. We might expect feral dogs, therefore, to become rather wolf-like. But this doesn’t happen. Instead, dogs left to go feral seem to become the ubiquitous “village dogs” — “pye-dogs” — that hang around human settlements all over the Third World. This encourages Coppinger’s belief that the dogs on which human breeders finally went to work were wolves no longer. They had already changed themselves into dogs: village dogs, pye-dogs, perhaps dingos.

Real wolves are pack hunters. Village dogs are scavengers that frequent middens and rubbish dumps. Wolves scavenge too, but they are not temperamentally suited to scavenging human rubbish because of their long “flight distance”. If you see an animal feeding, you can measure its flight distance by seeing how close it will let you approach before fleeing. For any given species in any given situation, there will be an optimal flight distance, somewhere between too risky or foolhardy at the short end, and too flighty or risk-averse at the long end. Individuals that take off too late when danger threatens are more likely to be killed by that very danger. Less obviously, there is such a thing as taking off too soon. Individuals that are too flighty never get a square meal, because they run away at the first hint of danger on the horizon. It is easy for us to overlook the dangers of being too risk-averse. We are puzzled when we see zebras or antelopes calmly grazing in full view of lions, keeping no more than a wary eye on them.
We are puzzled, because our own risk aversion (or that of our safari guide) keeps us firmly inside the Land Rover even though we have no reason to think there is a lion within miles. This is because we have nothing to set against our fear. We are going to get our square meals back at the safari lodge. Our wild ancestors would have had much more sympathy with the risk-taking zebras. Like the zebras, they had to balance the risk of being eaten against the risk of not eating. Sure, the lion might attack; but, depending on the size of your troop, the odds were that it would catch another member of it rather than you. And if you never ventured on to the feeding grounds, or down to the waterhole, you’d die anyway, of hunger or thirst. It is a lesson in economic trade-offs.
The bottom line of that digression is that the wild wolf, like any other animal, will have an optimal flight distance, nicely poised — and potentially flexible — between too bold and too flighty. Natural selection will work on the flight distance, moving it one way or the other along the continuum if conditions change over evolutionary time. If a plenteous new food source in the form of village rubbish dumps enters the world of wolves, that is going to shift the optimum point towards the shorter end of the flight distance continuum, in the direction of reluctance to flee when enjoying this new bounty.

We can imagine wild wolves scavenging on a rubbish tip on the edge of a village. Most of them, fearful of men throwing stones and spears, have a very long flight distance. They sprint for the safety of the forest as soon as a human appears in the distance. But a few individuals, by genetic chance, happen to have a slightly shorter flight distance than the average. Their readiness to take slight risks — they are brave, shall we say, but not foolhardy — gains them more food than their more risk-averse rivals. As the generations go by, natural selection favours a shorter and shorter flight distance, until just before it reaches the point where the wolves really are endangered by stone throwing humans. The optimum flight distance has shifted because of the newly available food source.
Something like this evolutionary shortening of the flight distance was, in Coppinger’s view, the first step in the domestication of the dog, and it was achieved by natural selection, not artificial selection. Decreasing flight distance is a behavioural measure of what might be called increasing tameness. At this stage in the process, humans were not deliberately choosing the tamest individuals for breeding. At this early stage, the only interactions between humans and these incipient dogs were hostile. If wolves were becoming domesticated it was by self-domestication, not deliberate domestication by people. Deliberate domestication came later.

We can get an idea of how tameness, or anything else, can be sculpted — naturally or artificially — by looking at a fascinating experiment of modern times, on the domestication of Russian silver foxes for use in the fur trade. It is doubly interesting because of the lessons it teaches us, over and above what Darwin knew, about the domestication process, about the “side effects” of selective breeding, and about the resemblance, which Darwin well understood, between artificial and natural selection.
The silver fox is just a colour variant, valued for its beautiful fur, of the familiar red fox, Vulpes vulpes. The Russian geneticist Dimitri Belyaev was employed to run a fox fur farm in the 1950s. He was later sacked because his scientific genetics conflicted with the anti-scientific ideology of Lysenko, the charlatan biologist who managed to capture the ear of Stalin and so take over, and largely ruin, all of Soviet genetics and agriculture for some 20 years. Belyaev retained his love of foxes, and of true Lysenko-free genetics, and he was later able to resume his studies of both, as director of an Institute of Genetics in Siberia.

Wild foxes are tricky to handle, and Belyaev set out deliberately to breed for tameness. Like any other animal or plant breeder of his time, his method was to exploit natural variation (no genetic engineering in those days) and choose, for breeding, those males and females that came closest to the ideal he was seeking.
In selecting for tameness, Belyaev could have chosen, for breeding, those dogs and bitches that most appealed to him, or looked at him with the cutest facial expressions. That might well have had the desired effect on the tameness of future generations. More systematically than that, however, he used a measure that was pretty close to the “flight distance” that I just mentioned in connection with wild wolves, but adapted for cubs. Belyaev and his colleagues (and successors, for the experimental program continued after his death) subjected fox cubs to standardized tests in which an experimenter would offer a cub food by hand, while trying to stroke or fondle it. The cubs were classified into three classes. Class III cubs were those that fled from or bit the person. Class II cubs would allow themselves to be handled, but showed no positive responsiveness to the experimenters. Class I cubs, the tamest of all, positively approached the handlers, wagging their tails and whining. When the cubs grew up, the experimenters systematically bred only from this tamest class.

After a mere six generations of this selective breeding for tameness, the foxes had changed so much that the experimenters felt obliged to name a new category, the “domesticated elite” class, which were “eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs”. At the beginning of the experiment, none of the foxes were in the elite class. After ten generations of breeding for tameness, 18 per cent were “elite”; after 20 generations, 35 per cent; and after 30 to 35 generations, “domesticated elite” individuals constituted between 70 and 80 per cent of the experimental population.
Such results are perhaps not too surprising, except for the astonishing magnitude and speed of the effect. Thirty-five generations would pass unnoticed on the geological timescale. Even more interesting, however, were the unexpected side-effects of the selective breeding for tameness. These were truly fascinating and genuinely unforeseen. Darwin, the dog-lover, would have been entranced.
The tame foxes not only behaved like domestic dogs, they looked like them. They lost their foxy pelage and became piebald black and white, like Welsh collies. Their foxy prick ears were replaced by doggy floppy ears. Their tails turned up at the end like a dog’s, rather than down like a fox’s brush. The females came on heat every six months like a bitch, instead of every year like a vixen. According to Belyaev, they even sounded like dogs.

These dog-like features were side- effects. Belyaev and his team did not deliberately breed for them, only for tameness. Those other dog-like characteristics seemingly rode on the evolutionary coat-tails of the genes for tameness. To geneticists, this is not surprising. They recognise a widespread phenomenon called “pleiotropy”, whereby genes have more than one effect, seemingly unconnected. The stress is on the word “seemingly”. Embryonic development is a complicated business. As we learn more about the details, that “seemingly unconnected” turns into “connected by a route that we now understand, but didn’t before”. Presumably genes for floppy ears and piebald coats are pleiotropically linked to genes for tameness, in foxes as well as in dogs. This illustrates a generally important point about evolution. When you notice a characteristic of an animal and ask what its Darwinian survival value is, you may be asking the wrong question. It could be that the characteristic you have picked out is not the one that matters. It may have “come along for the ride”, dragged along in evolution by some other characteristic to which it is pleiotropically linked.

The evolution of the dog, then, if Coppinger is right, was not just a matter of artificial selection, but a complicated mixture of natural selection (which predominated in the early stages of domestication) and artificial selection (which came to the fore more recently). The transition would have been seamless, which again goes to emphasise the similarity — as Darwin recognised — between artificial and natural selection.
Selection — in the form of artificial selection by human breeders — can turn a pye-dog into a Pekinese, or a wild cabbage into a cauliflower, in a few centuries. The difference between any two breeds of dog gives us a rough idea of the quantity of evolutionary change that can be achieved in less than a millennium.

The next question we should ask is, how many millennia do we have available to us in accounting for the whole history of life? If we imagine the sheer quantity of difference that separates a pye-dog from a peke, which took only a few centuries of evolution, how much longer is the time that separates us from the beginning of evolution or, say, from the beginning of the mammals? Or from the time when fish emerged on to the land? The answer is that life began not just centuries ago but tens of millions of centuries ago. The measured age of our planet is about 4.6 billion years, or about 46 million centuries. The time that has elapsed since the common ancestor of all today’s mammals walked the Earth is about two million centuries. A century seems a pretty long time to us. Can you imagine two million centuries, laid end to end? The time that has elapsed since our fish ancestors crawled out of the water on to the land is about three and a half million centuries: that is to say, about 20,000 times as long as it took to make all the different — really very different — breeds of dogs from the common ancestor that they all share.
Hold in your head an approximate picture of the quantity of difference between a peke and a pye-dog. We aren’t talking precise measurements here: it would do just as well to think about the difference between any one breed of dog and any other, for that is on average double the amount of change that has been wrought, by artificial selection, from the common ancestor. Bear in mind this order of evolutionary change, and then extrapolate backwards 20,000 times as far into the past. It becomes rather easy to accept that evolution could accomplish the amount of change that it took to transform a fish into a human.

© Richard Dawkins 2009
Extracted from The Greatest Show on Earth, to be published by Bantam Press on September 10 at £20. To buy it for £18 contact 0845 2712134 or timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
www.richarddawkins.net

No Country for Old Men

Wikipedia has a great article about the movie "No Country for Old Men" (2007), I think it's one of the best movies of the past decade and deserves all the accolades that it has received.

The Script of Script of No Country for Old Men by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, based on the Novel by Cormac McCarthy (Draft) also makes for fascinating reading!

Some notable insights from the Wikipedia article [among many others, including Themes and analysis]: 

Title

The title is taken from the opening line of 20th-century Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium.":

”THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect”

Richard Gilmore relates the Yeats’ poem to the Coens’ film. “The lament that can be heard in these lines,” he says, “is for no longer belonging to the country of the young. It is also a lament for the way the young neglect the wisdom of the past and, presumably, of the old … Yeats chooses Byzantium because it was a great early Christian city in which Plato’s Academy, for a time, was still allowed to function. The historical period of Byzantium was a time of culmination that was also a time of transition. In his book of mystical writings, A Vision, Yeats says, ‘I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical life were one, that architect and artificers…spoke to the multitude and the few alike.’ The idea of a balance and a coherence in a society’s religious, aesthetic, and practical life is Yeat’s ideal …It is an ideal rarely realized in this world and maybe not even in ancient Byzantium. Certainly within the context of the movie No Country for Old Men, one has the sense, especially from Bell as the chronicler of the times, that things are out of alignment, that balance and harmony are gone from the land and from the people.”

Differences from the novel

Tasha Robinson lists the differences between the Coen brothers award-winning script and the Cormac McCarthy novel:
“• The book is less removed about the end of the interaction between Chigurh (the Javier Bardem character) and Moss' wife …; it spells out the fact that he shoots her. She also doesn't refuse to call heads or tails on his coin: She calls it incorrectly, though they then have pretty much the same conversation they have in the film, about how he, not the coin, is deciding her fate.
• The book is also more specific about how Chigurh ended up in the car of the deputy he kills at the beginning of the film; he murdered a man for a snotty remark, then permitted himself to be captured ‘to see if I could extricate myself by an act of will.’ Explaining some aspects of his life to Carson Wells (the Woody Harrelson character) before killing him, Chigurh describes this as a vain, foolish act.
• The first hotel confrontation between Moss and Chigurh plays out very differently; rather than punching out the lock and wounding Moss, Chigurh apparently steals a key from the murdered clerk and quietly enters Moss' room, and Moss hides and takes him captive at gunpoint, so they have a chance to see and know each other. Then Moss runs and the chase/shootout begins.
• There's a scene where Chigurh delivers the recovered cash to some higher-up whom he's never met before, but whom he's clearly decided is now his employer; he presents the money and they come to terms after a brief ‘How did you find me?’ ‘What difference does it make?’ conversation.
• There's also a protracted scene toward the end where Sheriff Bell interviews one of the kids who witnessed Chigurh's car accident, and apparently stole Chigurh's gun out of his car afterward.
• The chase scene with the dog that follows Moss downstream until he manages to dry out his gun and shoot it is an invention of the film, and doesn't appear in the book in any way.
• Where the film last sees Moss alive heading off to have a beer with a lady who calls to him from poolside at her hotel, the book has a lengthy interlude between him and a young female hitchhiker, whom he gives money and advice ... He actually dies because he puts down his gun when the Mexicans following him take her hostage.”
Robinson adds that “the list of plot changes above may seem long, but they represent a small percentage of the actual story, which mostly plays out in the film exactly as McCarthy puts it on the page, scene for scene, conversation for conversation. A lot of the speeches and wittiest exchanges are verbatim from the book.”
Other listed differences include:
“• [The film] omits all references to Bell's experience in World War II, which is a key to understanding his character in the novel. In the novel, in the scene with Uncle Ellis, Bell tells a long story about how he received a medal of honor in the war, which he feels he did not deserve because he ran away and left his men. Bell is haunted by his guilt about this incident, which the film completely omits.
• The opening [voice-over narration] is composed of lines taken from 3 different passages of first-person narration: (90; 63-4; 3-4). As one can see from the page numbers, the filmmakers took passages out of their contexts and reworked them into one coherent statement.
• [In the] shoot out between Chigurh and Moss after Moss escapes from Hotel Eagle: This scene intensifies the dramatic action in which Moss barely escapes in the truck and then waits for Chigurh and wounds him, momentarily turns the tables as Moss hunts Chigurh who escapes. In the novel, Chigurh gets involved with battling the Mexicans and loses track of Moss.”
Craig Kennedy adds that “one key difference is that of focus. The novel belongs to Sheriff Bell. Each chapter begins with Bell’s narration, which dovetails and counterpoints the action of the main story. Though the film opens with Bell speaking, much of what he says in the book is condensed and it turns up in other forms. Also, Bell has an entire backstory in the book that doesn’t make it into the film. The result is a movie that is more simplified thematically, but one that gives more of the characters an opportunity to shine.”
Jay Ellis elaborates on Chigurh’s encounter with the man behind the counter at the gas station. “Where McCarthy gives us Chigurh’s question as, ‘What’s the most you ever saw lost on a coin toss? (55)’, he says, ‘the film elides the word ‘saw’, but the Coens of course tend to the visual. Where the book describes the setting as ‘almost dark’ (52), the film clearly depicts high noon: no shadows are notable in the establishing shot of the gas station, and the sunlight is bright even if behind cloud cover. The light through two windows and a door comes evenly through three walls in the interior shots. But this difference increases our sense of the man’s desperation later, when he claims he needs to close and he closes at ‘near dark’; it is darker, as it were, in the cave of this man’s ignorance than it is outside in the bright light of truth.”

Film ending and final scene

"Aren't you so pleased to see a different take on the same cat and mouse game?"

–Actor Josh Brolin on the film's ending

Dana Stevens of Slate criticized the film ending. “Even in their best films”, she said, “the Coens have trouble with endings (witness the mood-destroying Sam Elliot speech that weighs down the final minutes of the otherwise delightful The Big Lebowski). The last scene of No Country for Old Men, in which [Sheriff] Bell recounts his dreams to his wife Loretta (Tess Harper) is a tacked-on chunk of Meaning that seems to bear no relation to the tragically futile bloodbath we've just witnessed.”
Curt Holman of CL Atlanta also argues that “there's something deflating about the film's final scenes. McCarthy raises the ancient problem of human evil: Is it an inherent flaw of human nature, or the net result of random fate? McCarthy seems to conclude that it's a generational thing. ‘Anytime you quit hearing 'Sir' and 'Ma'am’, the end is pretty much in sight,’ says [Sheriff] Bell, and you suspect he's only half-kidding.”
Actor Josh Brolin, however, defended the ending of the film. "I love that people are talking about this movie. I love that people leave the movie saying, 'I hate the ending. I was so pissed.' Good, it was supposed to piss you off," the 39-year-old star told MTV News. "You completely lend yourself to [my] character and then you're completely raped of this character. I don't find it manipulative at all. I find it to be a great homage to that kind of violence." After being chased by Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh the entire movie, Brolin meets his violent end off-screen. Soon after, his wife is brutally murdered off-screen as well. After all that build-up, all that destruction, the film ends, not with an orgasmic culmination of violence, but with a quiet monologue from Sheriff Tom Bell Tommy Lee Jones. "If you were expecting something different, Brolin argues, that "says more about you than the movie. You wanted to see his death, why? Because you're used to it. Aren't you so pleased to see a different take on the same cat and mouse game?" he asked.
Ciro Discepolo emphasizes that “the key to understand the whole film … is the two dreams that Tommy Lee Jones relates to his mate in the final scene,” he said. “In his first dream, the sheriff sees his own father handing over some money that he would lose: old generations handed over to us values we have lost. The other dream shows the sheriff and his father riding a horse. They have to pass through a narrow and dark mountain pass. His father overtakes him and lights a natural torch; he then settles down and lights a fire that gives light and warmth, then he waits for his son. This is the hope that the country – that country and every country – could eventually find out the right way to a place with a warm fire and much more light.”
Lucia Bozzola explains the meaning of the "dream" in the final scene. "Considering that [Sheriff] Bell opened the film by musing that his law enforcement progenitors wouldn’t know what to make of the violence nowadays", she said, "not to mention all of the references to Chigurh as a ghost, it’s not that tough to figure out why Bell’s dream matters, or why he’s chosen this path. He’s never going to be able to do what his father did as far as law and order because there’s always going to be a specter that’s ahead of him. Or a Terminator. If he’s going to survive in this country, a good man has to give up. I suppose this is how the West was lost."

Lines from The Princess Bride that Double as Comments on Freshman Composition Papers.

Jennifer Simonson over at mcsweeneys.net writes:

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
“At a time like this that’s all you can think to say?”
“Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”
“I don’t think I’m quite familiar with that phrase.”
“I would not say such things if I were you!”
“I do not suppose you could speed things up?”
“Skip to the end!”
“That is the sound of ultimate suffering.”
“Inconceivable!”

read more articles by  Jennifer Simonson here...