prostoalex writes “The Ray Kurzweil Reader is a collection of essays by Ray Kurzweil on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, radical life extension, conscious machines, the promise and peril of technology, and other aspects of our future world. These essays, all published on KurzweilAI.net from 2001 to 2003, are now available as a PDF document for convenient downloading and offline reading. The 30 essays, organized in seven memes (such as ‘How to Build a Brain’), cover subjects ranging from a review of Matrix Reloaded to ‘The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine’ and ‘Human Body Version 2.0.’”

* Slashdot | Ray Kurzweil 2001-2003 essays Available as a PDF

/. PingXao writes “The JPL Deep Impact mission has successfully slammed a sattelite into Tempel 1 at 23,000 mph. (37,000 kph). The autonomous navigation system was primed for up to 3 course corrections in the final 2 hours of flight but only had to execute two of them. The second was so small - expending less than a pound of propellant - that impact would have occurred without it. Initially thought to be shaped like a pickle, it came to resemble more of a banana shape as comet Tempel I drew closer. Impact was estimated to have released 19 Gigajoules of energy, or the equivalent of 4.5 tons of TNT.”

* Slashdot | Cometary Fireworks Go Off Without Hitch

BishopBerkeley writes “Nature has an interesting nugget about the second meeting of the Image and Meaning Initiative which was held at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It is about the use of graphics in presenting scientific data. I am also a big advocate of using nice graphics in scientific presentations, but I also agree with Felice Franel, the founder of I-M, that not all images are meaningful scientifically. In fact, one encounters (and I am ashamed to admit that I have published) images that look nice but have no scientific import at all. One very cool Harvard physics professor, Eric Heller, produces wickedly beautiful (and meaningful) images of quantum mechanical models. These images have made the covers of Science and Nature, and are featured in his online art gallery, which was reviewed in the New York Times in 2002.” And of course, any mention of graphic information should not go by without a big shout out to Edward Tufte.

* Slashdot | Graphics in Science

Also see
* Escherization

hardcoredreamer writes “These people spent 10 hours constructing their very own Imperial II-class Star Destroyer from LEGO and capturing over 7000 frames of the process with their webcam. The images were encoded with divx5 and are available to download in a 4 minute avi. mirror 1 , mirror 2 , mirror 3.”

* Slashdot | Star Destroyer Built Before Your Eyes

Excerpt from source: More on the University of Texas grid project’s mission to integrate numerous, diverse resources into a comprehensive campus cyber-infrastructure for research and education. In this article, the authors examine the idea of harvesting unused cycles from compute resources to provide this aggregate power for compute-intensive work. They will also place this concept in context by offering an overview of a popular commercial software package designed to help achieve this task: the United Devices Grid MP platform.

Several early grid computing projects were focused on the idea of harvesting unused cycles from compute resources and providing this aggregated computing power for work that comprised lots of tasks — from hundreds to millions — that could be executed individually.

Today, there are several commercial and open source grid computing software packages that support this form of distributed computing on the desktop or other nondedicated computing resources. In this article, we will take a look at a popular commercial software package designed to help execute this function: the United Devices Grid MP platform.

Grid MP has several interesting and unique features, including:

* Support for heterogeneous desktops/nodes
* Nonintrusive client execution
* Tolerance to failures of desktop resources

We will provide an overview of the Grid MP features designed for harvesting idle cycles from nondedicated resources, and we’ll describe the types of applications that can effectively use the type of “desktop grid” we’re discussing.

Read the full article:
* Grid in action: Harvesting and reusing idle compute cycles

Also see:
* BOINC (SETI@Home, Einstein@Home, ClimatePrediction.net, LHC@Home, Predictor@Home, Cell Computing (JP))
* Team GiGA Productions Computing Group