Japan to Spend $21,000,000,000 on a Power Plant in F%#king Space

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I can't beat either the headline or the blog entry from Gizmodo on this amazing story. My picture is kind of irrelevant, though- I'm out of time.

The future of computing

You have to watch this. Amazing stuff. More info at Gizmodo, here.

Our interesting times

Thoughtware.tv

Thoughtware.tv is a site that collects "only the best videos and news on Human Progress, ranging from topics such as Transhumanism, Artificial General Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Robotics, Nanotechnology, Life Extension, Biotechnology, Genetics, Ethics and many other fields of Social, Scientific and Technological interest." There is some interesting stuff here. Some of it makes me think of the futurist Ray Kurzweil.

The Second Man-Machine Poker Competition

Last year, the University of Alberta's Poker Playing program, Polaris, was narrowly defeated by top human poker players. The re-match is about to begin! The way they set this up is very clever. The machine plays 500 hands against a human, while at the same time in another game, it plays against a different human with the hands flipped (so the computer gets the hands the other human got, and the human gets the hands the computer got). This is clever because it eliminates any element of luck: both humans and the computer play exactly the same hands against exactly the same hands. Will machine triumph over man? Tune in July 4-6, 2008.

Exoskeleton: A human-robot hybrid

Kilian Nakamura

This site you can learn all the new inventions in Japan. Or buy them (they are NOT cheap).