Some Stuff: June 3, 2009

Tetris celebrates it’s 25th Birthday today

1980: The NBA Board of Governors voted to make the 3-point goal a permanent part of pro basketball. They drew the 3-point line at 23 feet 9 inches.

Windows 7 has a release date: October 22, 2009

Marvel has a booth at the Licensing Convention Expo happening in Las Vegas this week and is showing off their logos for their four upcoming movies: Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America, and The Avengers.

Back in April I told you, Fox is very anxious to get Wall Street 2 into production right away, to capitalize on our current economic situation, so that the story stays relevant. Here’s what I know, Oliver Stone will return to direct, Michael Douglas will be back as Gordon Gekko, and Shia LaBeouf will join as the newcomer and Javier Bardemwill be the villain.

Scientist trying to locate colonies of emperor penguins in Antarctica have found an unusual way to do it ... looking for their poo from space. Researchers have had problems working out exactly where the penguins live because individually they are not big enough to show up on satellite images. But the British Antarctic Survey found that while the flightless birds are too small to be seen, the mess they leave on the ice isn't. Scientists have now discovered 10 new colonies of penguins all because of the poo streaks on the ice.

You've got your robots which can make copies of themselves, of course. That's pretty scary - a runaway exponentially-multiplying machine horde, potentially able to overrun the human race in an eyeblink. But how much more scary would it be if you had a machine which could not only make copies of itself once complete, but could also participate in its own construction while it was still being built?

Yes, it's true. DARPA a Military group have now expanded somewhat on their intention to initiate a programme called Self-Explanation Learning Framework (SELF), which they explain thus:

DARPA seeks to construct systems that can participate in their own construction...