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The Tyranny of the Extroverts

Society rewards extroverts. They get the job, the money, the girl (or boy), and the front page. Fortune 500 companies are run by 499 extroverts, plus Bill Gates. There are 435 extroverts in the House of Representatives and 100 in the Senate, two from each state. In fact, the only introvert in th

Click to view the original at allendowney.com

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Eternally Confuzzled - Red Black Tree Tutorial

Welcome back! Or if this is your first experience with my tutorials, get ready for a good time. But first, why another red black tree tutorial? Anyone who searches for red black trees on Google will be rewarded with a slew of resources that include tutorials, general descriptions, Jav

Click to view the original at eternallyconfuzzled.com

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Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine - The Long Now

One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. His reaction was unequivocal, "That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard." For Richard a crazy idea was

Click to view the original at longnow.org

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Reality touchscreen University of Groningen

This is the curved (!) screen in our reality center of the University of Groningen. We just finished building our own touch detection for it. We used six Optitrack v120 slim camera's which have a good sensitivity for infrared light. We used 16 cheap infrared emitters (the kind used for security syst

Click to view the original at gdata.youtube.com

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Wow, Microsoft And Google Are Punching Each Other In The Face In Front Of Us!

By now, you've undoubtedly heard the news. Google set up a sting operation (how cool is that?) in an attempt to catch Microsoft red-handed stealing their search results. And according to them, they did just that — and made it known. Microsoft has seemingly both sidestepped and denied the claim — and

Click to view the original at techcrunch.com

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Finite formula found for partition numbers | The Language of Bad Physics

So this isn’t physics*, but if you squint hard enough, you can probably make a connection. The hot topic today is Ken Ono‘s latest work on the partition function:

Click to view the original at blogs.plos.org

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Twitter Gets Sued For Letting Famous People Interact Online

Part of Twitter's appeal is that people can 'connect' and engage with celebrities online, even if most of them consider it to be, and treat it like, just another push marketing channel rather than a multi-dimensional communication system. Be that as it may, but Twitter owes a lot of its populari

Click to view the original at techcrunch.com

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Skynet meets the Swarm: how the Berkeley Overmind won the 2010 StarCraft AI competition

StarCraft, one of the most popular games ever made, also serves as the perfect proving ground for artificial intelligence. Here's the inside story of how a Berkeley team won the world's first StarCraft AI competition with code that can beat even pro-level human players.

Click to view the original at arstechnica.com