Sunday, October 14, 2007

Sunday Links


Evolving to circumvent patents.


The 4 things that make people tick.

The new moon race.

The beginner's guide to earnings calls.

Why are supernovas growing dimmer?

Nokia-Navteq and the future of cellphones.

Is recorded music the new buggy-whip?

Plant-waste electricity.

How to read a painting.

15 useful websites.

PE ratios in bull markets.

3 comments:

Bob Hawkins said...

RE "Evolving to circumvent patents." Many years ago, I attended a talk by the spectroscopist Tomas Hirschfeld, who had used a crude form of this.

He had been hired to come up with a fast way to determine the protein content of grain (much faster than wet chemistry). So he took infrared spectra of a lot of grain samples whose protein content was determined the old-fashioned way, and wrote a program to evolve a way to predict the protein from the spectra. He said that the program came up with a method that was good enough for his employer, and that he would never even have thought to try.

He put up a slide of the title page of the paper he published on the method, pointed at his name as the sole author, and said "But I'm taking all the credit, because I am NOT going down in history as the first person to co-author a paper with an IBM 4341!"

Luther said...

MHA... That story on the "Secret war of the French, down below, was excellent. Wonder why the "Times" doesn't pick up on that.... oh... never-mind.

Bob's Blog said...

Thanks for these!