This is an OCR scan of Alan M. Turings fascinating article in which he first introduced what is now commonlöy refered to as "Turing Test". While his assumptions of what would have been true be the year 2000 were obviously false (there is no know computer programm which passes the test), the rest still makes an interesting read with many good arguments. (Here is another digitized version of the text.)
I am spending quite a lot of my time travelling through the global net. Amogst a lot of rubish I there are a lot of very good/interesting/informative/funny sites and my bookmarks are growing by the day. Here are some of my best finds.
For all Web Developers/Designers working on Linux this small Script (in combination with Wine) will be very valuable: It automatically downloads and installs Internet Explorer Versions >= 5.0, so that it is possible to test IE’s rendering from within Linux without need of a dual-booting Windows installation.
Wie macht man aus einer Kugel zwei gleich große (mit gleichem Maß) Kugeln, nur indem man die erste zerstückelt, rotiert und verschiebt? Prof. Winklers Beweis und Erläuterungen zum Paradoxon von Banach-Tarski kommen nur mit Schulmathematik aus und sind trotzdem mathematisch lückenlos und einwandfrei. So müsste Mathematik in der Schule unterrichtet werden, dann kann niemand mehr behaupten das Mathematik fad ist! Der Text wurde in den Didaktikheften der ÖMG publiziert und richtet sich daher an AHS-Lehrer. Trotzdem sollte er für alle Mathematikinteressierten ab der 7. Klasse AHS verständlich sein.
Der Text ist in mehreren Formaten auf der Homepage von Prof. Winkler verfügbar, unter anderem als PDF und HTML.
The Bibliothèque nationale de France has digitalized quite a lot of its books and has made them available online. As a mathematician, the first book I came across was Cauchy’s Cours d’Analyse and subsequently I found Cantor’s Beiträge zur Begründung der transfiniten Mengenlehre. While the interface takes some time to adapt to (especially if you do not speak French very well. What does "chemin de fer" mean on an internet site?!), it is quite powerfull and even allows downloading subsets of a book as a pdf (or tiff) file.
Flickr did spawn a lot of community contributions. While I save all the extensions, hacks and tools for another post, today I want to present you pictr*e magazine, a free, creative-commons "offline pdf mag with photos and stories from flickr". The first issue features some outstanding photography, an interview with Jeff Clow (from the 1-2-3 group) and the Lomo fake effect-technique tip.
"My homepage. After being on the Internet for a good decade (and good it was), I decided to get me one too. It does sound really circa 1996,"
but it is not. Douwe Osinga has but together a very interesting assortment of is projects and (mainly Google) hacks. Most of his work is either about statistics and data mining or artifical life.
He does some interesting things with the Google search engine, like letting it talk (this goes a tiny step in the direction of an idea Johannes one suggested to me). You will find plenty of things to explore at http://douweosinga.com
A friend of mine suggested this link (or rather showed me a printout of this site, and I had to google for it). "The Devil and Simon Flagg" is a mathematical short story by Arthur Porges. It is now a bit outdated but the conclusion is nowadays true nonetheless.
Not only Google (and Microsoft) can deliver satelite photos. NASA can too. Its World Wind application does even predates Google Earth by quite same time. While for many regions the NASA data has a worse resolution than Google’s, World Wind has acces to the newest data from MODIS and does also offer overlays from SVS. The first means, that you can see current intersting phenomea like hurricans, sand storms and volcanoes, the latter offers many overlays of the globe showing everything from sea temperature to signs of human inhabitation. It has also the undeniable benefit of eing Open Source and having a community.
A realated link is NASA’s Visible Earth site which offers quite a lot of stunning statelite imagery. (Good for making posters!)
Today I do not have one link of the day, no I have two!
These two sites will supply you with an virtually unlimited amount of Sudokus in all difficulties: Daily Sudoku and Web Sudoku. And when you really have too much spare time, try this one.
Ban Comic Sans. Not really the newest site on the web, but still with a very just and honourable mission 
.
