November 2011
1 post
“The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or...”
– Oh come on, you can tell us really.
Searching for ET, But No Evidence Yet | The White House
September 2011
2 posts
How to Internet →
Useful guide to getting more out of the web.
Hubble Movies →
Decades turned into seconds.
August 2011
2 posts
Prints from 1910 showing life in the year 2000 →
The flying policeman looks like an early Batman.
They write the right stuff →
Developing the incredibly reliable software used in the Space Shuttle.
July 2011
8 posts
Facebook and the Epiphanator: an end to endings? →
Social media has no understanding of anything aside from the connections between individuals and the ceaseless flow of time: No beginnings, and no endings. These disparate threads of human existence alternately fascinate and horrify that part of the media world that grew up on topic sentences and strong conclusions. This world of old media is like a giant steampunk machine that organizes time...
If your website's full of assholes, it's your... →
I wish news sites would just close their comment sections so I didn’t feel compelled to look at them.
The scheme behind the ‘weird old tip’ ads →
Unsurprisingly dodgy but exasperatingly successful.
Joe's first computer encounter →
It’s easy to forget how weird this all is.
Online Dating: Sex, Love, and Loneliness →
Long New Yorker article on the history and state of Internet dating.
The End of the Space Age →
I hope the Economist is wrong.
June 2011
11 posts
“You might not know this, but one of my responsibilities as commander-in-chief is...”
– Barack Obama at Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Centre.
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The Radioactive Orchestra →
Make music with radioactive isotopes. Example track here.
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The Brain on Trial →
David Eagleman on neuroscience and the law:
When a criminal stands in front of the judge’s bench today, the legal system wants to know whether he is blameworthy. Was it his fault, or his biology’s fault?
I submit that this is the wrong question to be asking. The choices we make are inseparably yoked to our neural circuitry, and therefore we have no meaningful way to tease the two apart. The...
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Lytro
A company called Lytro has developed a camera technology which allows the focus of a photo to be selected after it is taken, in post-processing. I hope it works anywhere near as well as the demo photos suggest (and that it’s in any way affordable).
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Hello
Hello there. I have decided to move my blog to Tumblr.
Because I wanted to start from scratch, and because Tumblr doesn’t let you import posts anyway, all the old stuff is now found here. It’s not like you’re missing out on much with it gone though.