hjalli.com – Hjálmar Gíslason

Wired article on how DARPA and the US Navy are looking at animals as models for building the next generation of war machines and spying gadgets.
- Wired News: Mobile Robots Take Baby Steps

Series of drawings, done by an artist under the influence of LSD as a part of a test conducted by the US government in the late 1950′s. Most curious.
- Acid trip 1

New research explains how schools of fish use the turbulance from each other to minimize the energy needed for them to move around.
- ScienceDaily News Release: Scientists Pinpoint How Fish Save Energy By Swimming In Schools

As the world watches the Mars rover Spirit at work on Mars, it’s interesting to get a glimpse of the artificial intelligence systems that control its behavior. These two articles from the NASA website scratch the surface of the subject.
- NASA – People Are Robots, Too. Almost
- The rover�s “brains”</a>

Wired is noticing search engines’ urge to evolve into something better. This article mentions several interesting products to effectively narrow searches including: Vivisimo, Grokker and TouchGraph.
- Beyond Google: Narrow the Search

Forbes cuts through the nanotechnology hype and lists the best real nanotech products already on the market.
- The Top Ten Nanotech Products Of 2003 (via Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends)

The January 2004 issue of Popular Science has a cover article named “Linking Mind To Machine: Soon The Human Brain Will Control Robots – Just By Thinking“. I haven’t read it yet (issue has not arrived to Iceland), but it’s one of my favorite Wetware subjects so it should be interesting.
- Popular Science | Jan 2004 | Contents

We’ve had email spam, we’ve had blog comment spam, we’ve had lousy tricks to improve search engine rankings. Douwe Osinga has an interesting but not so pretty sight of what might be a next step in making our online lives harder: Software bots that combine a variety of methods to make a living.
- The Software bots will takeover the Internet

IBM is developing a pretty clever search engine named WebFountain. The engine indexes the web in a similar way as typical search engines do, but additionally uses automatic annotation modules that “makes sense” of the meaning of the indexed documents. Sadly for us nerds, they don’t plan to make this a public search engine, but rather a tool for data analysts and research companies, paying substantial amounts for access to the engine. But this is certainly one of the hints that search engines are becoming a smarter breed (see also Google’s Director of technology’s comment here in Wired’s 2004 predictions).
- A Fountain of Knowledge

A thought provoking article from Technology Review about teaching kids to understand and deal with the media that is involved in their lives on all levels.
- Media Literacy Goes to School (subscription required)