Ars Technica reports on congressional staffers who were given orders to go into Wikipedia and tamper with the representatives’ entries.
From Ars Technica:Congressional staffers edit boss’s bio on Wikipedia
This alone makes for a pretty interesting story, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Further investigation by the newspaper and by Wikipedia staff found that more [...]

Alright, today marks the first day on our new hosting, with our spanking fresh domain name, and a boat load of extras that I don’t even know how to work yet.
You will notice that this is eripsa.org, as opposed to say, eripsa.net or eripsa.com, which to be honest I can’t really get my head around. [...]

Blogging for future reference/possible addition to blogroll
http://www.bubblegeneration.com/

breeds more of the same.

From Fox News: Japanese Working On Robot Butler
“We are hoping to make them something comparable to service dogs,” Isao Hara, senior researcher at the institute in Japan’s technology hub of Tsukuba, just northeast of Tokyo, said of the pair of robots painted in silver and blue. “I think it’s quite possible [...]

There is a really good article on Turing in The New Yorker this week, that goes into much greater detail both on his life and work, and the Enigma problem. As a bit of a teaser:
From The New Yorker: CODE-BREAKER
In 1938, Turing was awarded a Ph.D. in mathematics by Princeton, and, despite the urgings of [...]

From Cnet nets: Sony puts Aibo to sleep
According to a company representative, more than 150,000 Aibos have been sold since they went on the market in 1999. But the overall company is in the midst of an historic belt-tightening, and the robotics unit didn’t make the cut.
“Our core businesses are electronics, games and entertainment, but [...]

Ars Technica reports on a lawyer looking for an easy case against Google. he had the bright idea of writing a bunch of random thoughts like the following:

The Smoke Detector:
I’m so worried about it being a voyeur camera
that whenever I return home, I take it down from
the wall, pry it open, and carefully inspect its
constituent [...]

I have recieved numerous requests to publicly comment on the Google scandal in China. As always, Ars Technica gives the best commentary on this issue, and I agree with their analysis. The scandal, of course, is not with Google’s business practices; the outrage is a result of people realizing that Google is a business [...]

I wrote the previous post on accident. I was meaning to post a sarcastic response to a review of a new biography of Turing. I ended up writing a draft of the first half of my prelim proposal, and have since lost my sarcastic edge. Now I just want to lay down.
From Scientific American: A [...]

Keep the ball moving.
The list:
1) Nature and machines
1a) With Descartes, and all philosophers who worried about the determinism of the new science, mechanization was to be associated with natural processes- with the laws governing matter and the mindlessness of the animals. Man, in an effort to distance himself from the machine, was also distanced from [...]