06 Jun 2009

Home (film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, 2009)

home02

Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006) was the first big documentary film that received international attention. It covered the current scientific knowledge global warming caused by the artificial greenhouse effect.

Now the film “Home” by the French director Yann Arthus-Bertrand is published. It tries not only to focus on the climate issue but to show the whole picture: exhaustion of natural resources, energy consumption, biologic diversity, pollution and the rising gap between industrialised nations and the rest of the world.

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13 May 2009

Self-replication

selfreplication01

Self-replication is the ability of a machine to reproduce all parts it consists of. In a more strict sense it stands for the capability to create a fully functional copy of itself, explicitly including the final assembly.

The interest of this concept on the one hand lies in the possibility of conducting long-term space missions, on the other hand there are strong economic implications: A machine capable of reproducing itself is consequently also able to manufacture a broad range of products.

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29 Apr 2009

Antikythera Mechanism

Biggest fragment of the mechanism

The Antikythera Mechanism is an old artefact, dated back to about 100 BC. It was originally rediscovered 1902 on board an ancient Greek ship wreck. Its purpose probably was the calculation of planets’ positions. It is far more complex than any object found before from that period.

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15 Apr 2009

Technological Singularity

Accelerating Change I

In my English course I had to prepare a presentation on a topic regarding new technologies. Having recently read the novel “Accelerando” by Charles Stross (available online for free) I had a suitable subject ready: a technological singularity. You maybe have heard of other types of singularities in mathematics or cosmology, but this one is quite different.

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