Pi Day Extraordinaire
Posted by News Fetcher on March 14 '15 at 08:30 AM
By samzenpus from
Slashdot's pecan-apple-or-cherry? department:
First time accepted submitter
DrTJ writes
Today is Pi day. This year is a bit more extraordinary as it is 3/14/15 (in American date format). To celebrate, USA Today has posted a number of videos of kids reciting Pi, one of them to 8,784 digits. The Washington Post highlights the story of a couple who decided to make it their special day. "Donahue, 33, a Legal Aid attorney, fell for Karmel’s geeky side as soon as they met. On a beach vacation with her friends in 2012, a psychic told her, 'You are about to meet your soulmate.' Three days later, she walked into Kostume Karaoke night at Solly’s Tavern along the U Street corridor and saw a man onstage croaking out the Backstreet Boys’s 'I Want It That Way.' By the end of the night, he would be serenading her with Cake’s 'The Distance' — the song the DJ will play when they cut the pie."Read Replies (0)
By samzenpus from
Slashdot's bo-hands department:
An anonymous reader writes with news that Delphi Automotive is undertaking the longest test of a driverless car yet, from the Golden Gate Bridge to midtown Manhattan.
"Lots of people decide, at one point or another, to drive across the US. College kids. Beat poets. Truckers. In American folklore, it doesn't get much more romantic than cruising down the highway, learning about life (or, you know, hauling shipping pallets). Now that trip is being taken on by a new kind of driver, one that won't appreciate natural beauty or the (temporary) joy that comes from a gas station chili dog: a robot. On March 22, an autonomous car will set out from the Golden Gate Bridge toward New York for a 3,500-mile drive that, if all goes according to plan, will push robo-cars much closer to reality. Audi's taken its self-driving car from Silicon Valley to Las Vegas, Google's racked up more than 700,000 autonomous miles, and Volvo's preparing to put regular people in its robot-controlled vehicles. But this will be one of the most ambitious tests yet for a technology that promises to change just about everything, and it's being done not by Google or Audi or Nissan, but by a company many people have never heard of: Delphi."Read Replies (0)
By timothy from
Slashdot's trust-the-police department:
First reported by Capital, and
picked up by Reason, it seems that "Computers operating on the New York Police Department’s computer network at its 1 Police Plaza headquarters have been
used to alter Wikipedia pages containing details of alleged police brutality."
Computer users identified by Capital as working on the NYPD headquarters' network have edited and attempted to delete Wikipedia entries for several well-known victims of police altercations, including entries for Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo. Capital identified 85 NYPD addresses that have edited Wikipedia, although it is unclear how many users were involved, as computers on the NYPD network can operate on the department’s range of IP addresses.Besides edits to entries about specific instances of misconduct, edits from the same NYPD IP blocks were discovered in Wikipedia entries about the city's stop-and-frisk program and about NYPD misconduct more generally.
Read Replies (0)
By Soulskill from
Slashdot's canceling-my-retirement-vacation department:
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from io9:
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy filled us all with hope that we could terraform Mars in the 21st century, with its plausible description of terraforming processes. But now, in the face of what we've learned about Mars in the past 20 years, he no longer thinks it'll be that easy. Talking to SETI's Blog Picture Science podcast, Robinson explains that his ideas about terraforming Mars, back in the 1990s, were based on three assumptions that have been called into question or disproved:
1) Mars doesn't have any life on it at all. And now, it's looking more likely that there could be bacteria living beneath the surface. 2) There would be enough of the chemical compounds we need to survive. 3) There's nothing poisonous to us on the surface. In fact, the surface is covered with perchlorates, which are highly toxic to humans, and the original Viking mission did not detect these. "It's no longer a simple matter," Robinson says. "It's possible that we could occupy, inhabit and terraform Mars. But it's probably going to take a lot longer than I described in my books."Read Replies (0)