That looks like my kind of book shop! If/when I’m next in Alnwick, I’ll have to stop in for a visit.

Earlier item about the poster here.

Last October, after hurting his knee playing hockey, Patrick Priebe was holed up in his apartment near Cologne, Germany, with nothing to do. He was sitting at his computer, staring at his keyboard, when the “Y” key caught his eye. Priebe didn’t see a letter. To him, it looked like a crossbow. Immediately he knew what his next project would be.

[. . .]

To fire, he pulls back the wire, hooks it around a brass block, and places an arrow in the groove. When he flicks the thumb trigger, the brass block drops, the wire pops forward, and the arrow flies.

The Trebucard is a business card sized mini trebuchet. It is designed to fire jumbo paper clips and uses 16 pennies as a counter-weight. Unlike a traditional trebuchet the Trebucard uses the surface it is resting on as a pivot rather than being mounted on a frame.

Tilt shift of the Carnaval party in Rio de Janeiro 2011
Made by Jarbas Agnelli and Keith Loutit
Both Jarbas Agnelli & Keith Loutit were finalists at YouTube play, a Biennial of Creative Video at the Guggenheim.

In academia, the challenge of encouraging interdisciplinary research is at least recognised as a problem. The advancing frontier of scientific knowledge forces most researchers to specialise in ever narrower fields and, as a result, collaboration between these silos is essential. I recently visited the Oxford Martin School, a seven-year-old initiative designed to foster cross-disciplinary projects at the University of Oxford. I talked to the school’s director, Ian Goldin, about the challenges of breaking down academic silos.

He thinks these silos are mostly artificial. Academic journals are largely specialised rather than interdisciplinary and official funding bodies shy away from interdisciplinary projects. The result is that academics with interdisciplinary interests have few ways to fund the research and few credible outlets for publishing the results. The Martin School has funding, but most of the researchers are either junior, with some freedom to experiment, or professors so senior they no longer need to worry about their publication record. The mid-career academics are missing. It is nice to hear the tenure system sometimes produces the hoped-for courage and independence, but not so nice that there is no career track for interdisciplinary researchers.

[. . .]

If problems are one focal point for collaboration, tools can be another. An example: systems needed to deal with the gigantic data sets generated in finance, astronomy and oceanography. Such tools naturally bring together computer scientists and the statisticians, economists and scientists who might use the data. Goldin points to “crowdsourcing” as a second example of a cross-disciplinary tool, complexity science as a third and (optimistically, I feel) practical ethics as a fourth.

Perhaps the real lesson is that promoting cross-disciplinary research need not require a mysterious blend of social-networking tools and funky collaborative architectural spaces. All that is sometimes required is a shared problem, or a shared set of tools, and, above all, the money to pay for the job to be done.

This ruin will be smashed by Tequatl every time. I wonder, if players need to build it first, in some obtuse quest, sorry, event referencing Kevin Costner’s unforgettable, or rather unrepressable, classic Field of Dreams. Building a ruin makes no sense you say? I beg to differ. 135 years ago, the Bavarian king announced he was looking forward to visiting my home town the next year and take a tour of the medieval ruins. Problem was, there were no medieval ruins, but nobody wanted to tell that to the King and spoil the perfect visit he was looking forward to. Thus, in a fit of “because we can” and to further spite the neighboring cities, a medieval ruin was build in the middle of an English garden. The King had a happy visit and today’s fantasy nerds a spot to geek out once a year. This is the place where I learned that people in chainmail do not jump and dropping off a one meter ledge in armor with a broadsword in your hand is a scary dangerous thing. Thank god, neither cell-phone cameras nor Youtube were invented back then, else I would be an international near self-impalement meme today. On the bright side, nobody would then complain about not being able to jump in MMOs.

Francesca Gino’s new study, which links creativity to dishonesty, opens with a quote from 18th-century French philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot: “Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other.”

Gino is not suggesting, as some artists at the time complained, that creative people are evil. But she is saying that, according to her research, creative people are more apt to cheat, lie and justify their evil. Gino, associate professor of business administration at Harvard University, spoke to the Post about her study, co-authored by Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist at Duke University. (Their findings were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology last month.)

Boing Boing has come across a cozy little place that any future super-villain would be happy to call home on Sotheby’s International Realty website. Situated in the scenic Adirondack Mountains of New York, this silo and air park were operational for a short time in 1961. Hundreds of these Atlas F missile silos were built across the U.S. in the 1960′s in anticipation of attacks on the country.

As if the promise of moving into your very own missile silo isn’t tempting enough, Sotheby’s has recently dropped the price from $4.6 million USD to a mere $750,000. Not a bad deal if you’re looking to save money on your lair so you can splurge on that death ray you’ve always wanted.

In addition to the house perched atop the missile, you may also be interested in the adjoining air craft hanger, seven buildings spread out over neighbouring acres of land and an additional log cabin with runway access. To get the whole package, it’ll cost you $1.76 million USD.

The article also linked to this related video:

It’s your mutinous immune system that gives you that sozzled feeling after a boozy session, scientists claim in a paper published today in the British Journal of Pharmacology.

Conk out certain immuno receptors in your brain and you’ll be able to walk in a straight line, perform complex manual tasks and probably even stay awake on the night bus home after a heavy dose of alcoholic refreshment.

These receptors are a particular part of your immune system and scientists have been trying to figure out their connection to alcohol for years. When active TLR4s react with alcohol they release an inflammatory chemical called cytokine that seems to contribute to making us sleepy and poorly-coordinated.

It was a research team at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois, that made the breakthrough. Their pill works for mice, at least.

British Telecom is, as a telecoms company, worth minus £30bn. Yes, that’s a negative number there. And yet it is literally sitting on top of billions in assets.

[. . .]

Ten pairs of copper cabling weighs around 132kg per mile. Which by the miracle of multiplication can be seen to be about 10 million tonnes of copper. Which, at current LME prices of just over £5,000 a tonne, is £50bn.

BT’s current market capitalisation is just north of £20bn. So, as an operating telecoms company they’re worth £30bn less than the mountain of copper they’re sitting upon: that is, they’re worth less than the physical assets or they have, as a telecoms company not a mountain of scrap copper, a negative value.