Babbage
Science and technology
Fibre to the home
A highway too super
Dec 6th 2012, 10:40 by G.F. | SEATTLE
A BUSINESS with a popular website might happily bring a gigabit-per-second (Gbps) fibre-optic connection into its server room. After all, thousands of simultaneous connections, each consuming a sliver of data, quickly add up.
But on the flip side of the equation, the results aren't quite as rosy. Gigabit broadband is becoming available in a few select areas of the world. Millions of South Koreans can receive it, assuming they want it, as can some Swedes. City-run projects like Chattanooga, Tennessee's fibre network ($300 per month for gigabit rates), and Google Fiber's Missouri and Kansas experiments ($70 per month) are bringing such speeds to parts of America, too.
Babbage: A lucrative accident
December 5th 2012
Dec 5th 2012, 20:26 by economist.com
IN THIS week's programme: a drone-powered internet of things, Facebook under fire and the twentieth anniversary of the text message
Mars exploration
Curiosity and Curioser
Dec 5th 2012, 17:43 by O.M. | SAN FRANCISCO
ATTENDEES at the American Geophysical Union's autumn meeting in San Francisco were expecting to hear some big news about Mars. Sure enough, they got some—just not the sort they had anticipated. Until expectations were firmly damped down last week, they had thought they would hear about some sort of exciting discovery from Curiosity, the rover NASA landed on Mars this summer. In the event, the big—and, to some, not entirely welcome—announcement was that NASA plans to send Mars a second version of Curiosity to Mars in 2020, at a cost of about $1.5 billion.
Digital photography
Difference Engine: True to its image
Dec 3rd 2012, 8:25 by N.V. | LOS ANGELES
A SIGN of the times... After nearly nine years with Nokia, Damian Dinning, the programme manager for imaging at Finland’s stumbling mobile-phone giant, jumped ship on November 30th, taking his technical know-how with him to, of all places, Jaguar Land Rover. That probably says as much about the motor industry’s growing fascination with all things digital as it does about Nokia’s legacy of squandered opportunities.
Those in the know may recall that it was Mr Dinning—formerly with Kodak and Minolta—who oversaw Nokia’s drive to catch up in smartphones by using superior photo and audio features as a distinguishing mark.Cheap sensors
Laser sight
Nov 29th 2012, 19:25 by D.H. | LONDON
DIGITAL photography has made the creation of two-dimensional images a trivial task. Adding a third, however, is still expensive. The traditional approach is stereoscopy, which combines two or more flat pictures taken from different angles, to create an illusion of depth in a way similar to that which the brain employs in processing the different perspectives seen by the left and right eyes. The problem with this method is that, like the brain, it is subject to optical illusions. Separating objects of interest from the background, and shadows from holes, is hard. So is determining distances precisely.
An alternative—and in many ways better—approach is lidar.
The end of analogue film
Rage, rage against the dying of the dark
Nov 29th 2012, 15:43 by G.F. | SEATTLE
WHEN Robert Burley began documenting the global implosion of the silver-halide roll-film industry in 2005, he used an analogue camera. A digital one would have been a quirky choice for his style, unable to deliver the same precise results he was used to after decades of photographing architecture and landscapes. But as Mr Burley's journey progressed, he watched the ecosystem of film rapidly dissolve around him. "I was starting to feel like a blacksmith," he says, recalling the large-format camera kit he would unpack in order to capture his waning industrial subjects.
Continue reading "Rage, rage against the dying of the dark" »
Babbage: November 28th 2012
If looks could kill
Nov 28th 2012, 20:35 by Economist.com
OUR correspondents discuss Nintendo's latest games console, the many uses of eye-tracking technology and cardboard bikes
The Q&A: Samuel Arbesman
The half-life of facts
Nov 28th 2012, 13:56 by R.D.A. | LOS ANGELES
IN PRIMARY school Babbage learned that there were nine planets in the solar system. None were known to exist outside it. Since then, astronomers have spotted over 800 planets around other stars (and thousands more "candidates") and demoted Pluto to a mere "dwarf planet". Even a cursory glance at other fields reveals similar patterns.
Samuel Arbesman, a mathematician at Harvard, calls this "The Half-life of Facts", the title of his new book. In it he explains that this churn of knowledge is like radioactive decay: you cannot predict which individual fact is going to succumb to it, but you can know how long it takes for half the facts in a discipline to become obsolete.
Soft robots and the origins of life
A different approach
Nov 28th 2012, 3:59 by Economist.com
GEORGE Whitesides, head of the Whitesides Research Group at Harvard University, builds robots that move like octopuses and investigates the chemical beginnings of life
The wisdom of crowds
Volumetric analysis
Nov 27th 2012, 11:53 by G.F. | SEATTLE
ONE expects a new book from an accomplished author to turn out all right. The more data points conform to a high standard, the more confident the prediction. Based on that logic, your correspondent picked up a well-reviewed science-fiction tome (which shall remain anonymous until the end) from an author he loves. Halfway through, though, he is baffled.
Call it a superposition of states (appropriate for the book in question). Babbage hears the writer's distinct voice, yet the plot, characterisation and basic scientific accuracy (or lack thereof) do not chime with earlier works. The writing seems scattered and thin with strange character development and picaresque, inexplicable chapters.
Internet games
Immobile gaming
Nov 22nd 2012, 20:28 by G.F. | SEATTLE
IN "WRECK-IT Ralph", an animated film about the off-duty life of video game characters, the titular bad guy winds up in a racing program called Sugar Rush, and ultimately befriends an unpopular character named Vanellope von Schweetz. Her flaw? She is a "glitch", and therefore a hazard to herself and the game's future, as she regularly fritzes into clumps of code disrupting the function of those around her.
In real life, the internet multiplayer video-game named "Glitch" has faced its own popularity contest and lost. A year go Tiny Speck, the game's developer, opted to pull back from a full release into beta testing.
Babbage: November 21st 2012
Rapid innovation
Nov 21st 2012, 17:55 by Economist.com
ELON MUSK, founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, discusses rockets, electric cars and the blueprint for an ultra-high-speed mode of transport
Organic molecules on Mars
Interesting, but...
Nov 21st 2012, 8:39 by J.P.
RUMOURS are flying that the NASA's Curiosity rover has found some organic molecules on Mars. In his occasional Mainly Martian blog, our briefings editor and in-house Mars buff argues that if true, then it is interesting but not in itself epoch making. The surprise was that previous missions had not detected organic materials.
...thousands of tonnes of organic material arrive at the surface of Mars every year. Once it gets there, it either has to be got rid of or it accumulates.
Holiday spreadsheets
Managing a vacation
Nov 21st 2012, 8:21 by N.G. | SEATTLE
THINK about preparing for a family holiday to Disney World and a spreadsheet is not the first thing to spring to mind. But heeding advice from a relative, Lois Mentrup consulted the office database software to manage her recent vacation to the Orlando resort. She was warned that if she didn’t, she (and her children) would end up missing the best attractions.
Ms Mentrup is not alone. A simple online search pulls up scores of spreadsheets to help manage a trip to the amusement park. Some offer pre-selected itineraries, packed with activities. Others let users create their own. The character finder spreadsheet lists 150 Disney characters and where they are likely to be found.
More Babbage in "Jeopardy!"
Odd facts and figures
Nov 20th 2012, 17:20 by G.F. | SEATTLE
BABBAGE had $5,000 to his credit in the final moments of his third match of the game show "Jeopardy!" that aired a few weeks ago. The category was 19th-century female authors. Trailing the leader by $3,600 with a couple of minutes left in the game, he was faced with a "Daily Double" wager that allowed him to bet from $5 to the full $5,000 in his kitty. A fraction of a second later he bet the whole lot. Would IBM's Watson supercomputer, which in 2011 defeated the programme's two all-time best human contestants, have done the same?
Almost certainly, according to Gerald Tesauro, a researcher at IBM, and four colleagues.
In this blog, our correspondents report on the intersections between science, technology, culture and policy. The blog takes its name from Charles Babbage, a Victorian mathematician and engineer who designed a mechanical computer.
Advertisement
Economist video
Comments and tweets on popular topics
- Analects | China
- Americas view | The Americas
- Babbage | Science and technology
- Banyan | Asia
- Baobab | Africa
- Blighty | Britain
- Buttonwood's notebook | Financial markets
- Charlemagne | European politics
- Democracy in America | American politics
- Eastern approaches | Ex-communist Europe
- Feast and famine | Demography and development
- Free exchange | Economics
- Game theory | Sports
- Graphic detail | Charts, maps and infographics
- Gulliver | Business travel
- Johnson | Language
- Lexington's notebook | American politics
- Newsbook | News analysis
- Prospero | Books, arts and culture
- Pomegranate | The Middle East
- Schumpeter | Business and management
Advertisement
Latest blog posts - All times are GMT
Advertisement
