The Worlds Top Dissidents

9 May, 2010 |

Garry Kasparov: Arguably the world’s greatest chess player, Kasparov’s political career has not been nearly as successful. Founder of the United Civil Front and a leader of the loose opposition coalition the «Other Russia,» Kasparov planned to challenge then-President Vladimir Putin’s handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, in the 2008 Russian presidential election. But he was forced to withdraw in the face of a campaign of harassment that he says was directed by the Kremlin. Kasparov, like many other Putin-era Russian dissidents, has proved much more popular in the West than in Russia. And Putin, now a very powerful prime minister, has proved to be an even tougher opponent than Deep Blue.

The Worlds Top Dissidents: Aung San Suu Kyi, the Dalai Lama, and more | Foreign Policy.

¿Por qué las hallacas de mi mamá son las mejores?

8 May, 2010 |

It’s a matter of olfactory evoked nostalgia. We looked at 989 people from 45 states and 39 countries, and we found the number-one odor that made people nostalgic for their childhood was baked goods; the smell of mom's baking.

Sigue leyendo Why Mom really does make the best cakes – Food Psychology – Salon.com.

Futurity.org – Why computers crash but we don’t

7 May, 2010 |

The reason living organisms tend to malfunction less than computers may have something to do with the way software engineers create control systems—compared to nature’s approach.

Both E. coli and the Linux networks are arranged in hierarchies, but with some notable differences in how they achieve operational efficiencies. The molecular networks in the bacteria are arranged in a pyramid, with a limited number of master regulatory genes at the top that control a broad base of specialized functions, which act independently.

In contrast, the Linux operating system is organized more like an inverted pyramid, with many different top-level routines controlling few generic functions at the bottom of the network. Gerstein says that this organization arises because software engineers tend to save money and time by building upon existing routines rather than starting systems from scratch.

Sigue leyendo Futurity.org – Why computers crash but we don’t.