Bob3141592 - Slashdot User

TSA Worker Jailed In Body Scan Rage Incident 352

Posted by samzenpus on Friday May 07, 2010 @03:32PM from the checking-out-your-package dept.

A TSA worker in Miami was arrested for aggravated battery after he attacked a co-worker for making fun of the size of his genitals. Rolando Negrin walked through one of the new body scanners during a recent training session and a supervisor started making fun of his manhood. From the article: "According to the police report, Negrin confronted one of his co-workers in an employee parking lot, where he hit him with a police baton on the arm and back."

Brain Surgery Linked To Sensation of Spirituality 380

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 11, 2010 @05:30PM from the applied-psychology dept.

the3stars writes "'Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas. This raises a number of interesting issues about spirituality, among them whether or not people can be born with a strong propensity towards spirituality and also whether it can be acquired through head trauma." One critic's quoted response: "It's important to recognize that the whole study is based on changes in one self-report measure, which is a coarse measure that includes some strange items."

The Best Robots of 2009 51

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday December 23, 2009 @09:59PM from the best-of-show dept.

kkleiner writes "Singularity Hub has just unveiled its second annual roundup of the best robots of the year. In 2009 robots continued their advance towards world domination with several impressive breakouts in areas such as walking, automation, and agility, while still lacking in adaptability and reasoning ability. It will be several years until robots can gain the artificial intelligence that will truly make them remarkable, but in the meantime they are still pretty awesome."

Comment Re:Why is "Watson" such a popular choice of name? (Score 1) 154

by Bob3141592 on Wednesday May 27, 2009 @01:18PM (#28111933) Attached to: How IBM Plans To Win Jeopardy!

I'd presumed that Watson refered to the assistant of Bell who first understood electric speech. Probably a wink to the quirky and confounding associations Jeapordy delights in.

Comment Re:I would be pedantic, but... (Score 1) 146

by Bob3141592 on Wednesday May 27, 2009 @01:08PM (#28111819) Attached to: Pulsar Signals Could Provide Galactic GPS

I seriously doubt that this could be made to work, since General Relativity denies the very notion of simultinaity required to coordinate signals. And this results from two monkey wrenches - the various velocities and accelerations of the pulsars, and the varying and unknown distribution of gravitational fields between the objects. Space across galactic distances is not Euclidean, and the degree of curvature is not constant from one place to another on large scales.

Naturally, I didn't RTFA, but I'd be surprised if this scheme is valid even in principle. See sig.

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