HackingTheUniverse

1805 – Hamilton – bio

Omar Fink — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:52:17 +0000

William Rowan Hamilton was born in 1805 in Dublin, Ireland and was a mathematician, physicist and astronomer. In mathematics, he studied number theory and various forms of algebras, eventually producing an extension to complex numbers (combinations of real numbers and “imaginary” units that involve the square root of negative one) that is known as quaternions. [...]

Nano Quadrotor Swarm

Omar Fink — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:08:54 +0000

The GRASP (robotics and automation) lab at Univ Penn is doing some fascinating work with swarms of small flying quadrotors. A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors – [youtube.com] VIDEO Experiments performed with a team of nano quadrotors at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania. Vehicles developed by KMel Robotics. Special thanks to Professor Daniel Lee for [...]

Aristarchus Crater on the Moon

Omar Fink — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:36:00 +0000

There is a large impact crater on the Moon named after the Greek astronomer Aristarchus. It is about twenty five miles across and two miles deep and is one of the brightest lunar formations. Aristarchus crater is known for it’s history of exhibiting color changes that astronomers call “Transient Lunar Phenomonon” or TLPs. Luminescent glows [...]

Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors

Omar Fink — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:50:11 +0000

DARPA-Funded Hacker’s Tiny $50 Spy Computer Hides In Offices, Drops From Drones – [forbes.com] At the Shmoocon security conference Friday in Washington D.C., O’Connor plans to present the F-BOMB, or Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors. Built from just the hardware in a commercially-available PogoPlug mini-computer, a few tiny antennae, eight gigabytes of flash [...]

UDACITY is Sebastian Thrun’s Online University

Omar Fink — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 19:12:12 +0000

In the fall of 2011, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig decided to offer their “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course at Stanford in an online delivery and free. Responding to an email invitation that went viral in the blogosphere, over 160,000 students registered to take the course, although many of them dropped their participation early. The [...]

1903 – Kolmogorov – bio

Omar Fink — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 21:46:42 +0000

Andrey Kolmogorov was born in Russia in 1903 and was a mathematician who made contributions to the fields of probability, topology, turbulence, and complexity. He contributed over 300 hundred papers in most areas of mathematics and also supported creating special schools for gifted students. In 1933, Kolmogorov established a set of axioms that he considered [...]

Microbot Swarms

Omar Fink — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:47:19 +0000

Swarms of small robotic devices can be used to collect sensory data, gather samples, map terrains, and assemble and construct objects. The qualities of a swarm of small objects make these tasks applicable in a variety of forms. They may be used to perform medical diagnostics inside a body or explore objects in space. Ant-Sized [...]

Self-conscious Intelligence

Omar Fink — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:09:27 +0000

We use a variety of terms to qualify what we consider to be intelligent life: intelligence, consciousness, self-awareness, higher consciousness. There seem to be two primary ingredients common to most of the definitions of intelligent life and those are: Intelligence as some level of analytical reasoning ability and perhaps also the experience or knowledge necessary [...]

New Composites Formed Using Magnetic Particles

Omar Fink — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:50:49 +0000

Composites are made by combining two different materials with different properties: Concrete – concrete by itself is a composite of cement and crushed rock, which has a high strength against compression or crushing (like rock) but can be poured like a liquid into forms to create specific shapes before it hardens. Concrete does not have [...]

Data Mining

Omar Fink — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 23:10:05 +0000

Data mining is the process of searching through data sets (typically large) and extracting smaller data sets that often show some form of pattern or relevance to the data that was not obvious before the extraction. As data sets grow larger, the need for automated tools also grows. Usually, the purpose of data mining is [...]