March 2008
48 posts
Discardia →
Discardia is a new holiday. Why do we need a new holiday?Well, not exactly need, not as such, but this is a very good holiday. It doesn’t involve obligations or expense or overblown expectations of specialness. It does not require you to interact with people whom you do not wish to interact with. In fact, it doesn’t require you to do anything. Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad....
“An 81-year-old Australian man has shot himself dead with an elaborate suicide...”
– Holy moses.
A classic example of Linda Stone's concept of...
susannawolff, via paul tough. For the original concept of continuous partial attention, go here: … when the computer dies, well, not to be too dramatic, I die a little too. I was watching “John Adams” (that’s right, the HBO miniseries event) and I was, literally, experiencing information withdrawal. My hand would reflexively reach towards the dead computer to ask, how old is Laura...
“In a wry piece entitled, “A Short Pre-History of Comsats, Or: How I Lost a...”
– I didn’t realize that Arthur C. Clarke wrote a paper in 1945 that predicted the geostationary satellite.
Clive and Greg playing Army of Two
emilynussbaum: How do you feign death? You push the green button that says, “Feign death.” How do I exit? I don’t know, but you’d better figure it out soon. What was that? Are you dead? I think I hit a mine or something. That seems unfair. This is the EASY LEVEL?
The Why Files | The voice and the sax →
Totally awesome experiment with a hacked-out saxophone mouthpiece, proving that the mechanics of the throat are more important than the fingerholes in controlling the instrument in the top range.
“the way that it’s usually presented. In fact, I’d say games are closer to plays....”
– GameSetWatch - Opinion: ‘Shut Up and Save the World - The Silent Protagonist’
“In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly...”
– A scientist has done some brain scans to help figure out why we’re so addicted to surfing info online.
Bad Science Journalism and the Myth of the... →
I’ve probably been guilty of this:There is a particular narrative about science that science journalists love to write about, and Americans love to hear. I call it the ‘oppressed underdog’ narrative, and it would be great except for the fact that it’s usually wrong. The narrative goes like this: 1. The famous, brilliant scientist So-and-so hypothesized that X was true. 2....
“Relying on loop quantum gravity, an alternative to string theory, Pennsylvania...”
– bookofjoe: What happened before time began? ‘Cosmic forgetfulness’
“In the early days, start-ups focus on how great it’s going to be when they...”
– How to Change the World: On the Other Hand: The Flip Side of Entrepreneurship by Glenn Kelman
The Future of Web Startups →
A startup used to be expensive, requiring investors. Now all it requires is an idea and the courage to put it online. Paul Graham’s incredibly interesting essay argues that we’re heading into a period where there are gazillions more startups than ever before, and that this will fundamentally alter some cultural assumptions about what the arc of the career of a young white-collar...
“Many trace the origin of war games to a 1913 work by H. G. Wells titled Little...”
– You can’t make stuff like this up. From a superb profile of the late Gary Gygax by David Kushner in Wired.
“Pat Taylor, who started playing soccer at 4, said it took him about a month to...”
– Yet more reasons we need to dismantle the sports-industrial complex.
“If you have three or four drumers clapping perfectly in time, it sucks, you get...”
– Tape Op Message Board :: View topic - teach me how to do hand claps
Google's Pagerank organizes information the same... →
The original paper is here.
Hmmm. So the spambots are back again. So I call the guys at Pair, they check my server logs, and apparently there’s really only a small handful of IP addresses that have been slamming my comment script … so all I need to do is block them via my htacess file. My mother would understand absolutely nothing said in the previous sentence.
“‘I would much rather put a phenomenal, great teacher in a field with 30...”
– http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/nyregion/07charter.html?hp
“In Eve Online, The Goons … fly cheap little frigates into battle, get...”
– http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/16-02/mf_goons?currentPage=1
Google Custom Search Engine - Site search and more →
I’ll give this a couple of days and see if it actually winds up indexing my tumblog.
Scientists create nothing
Literally — nothing.
I’m always amazed when corporations and other touchy folk don’t understand The Streisand Effect.
It’s really weird having people review your magazine articles, which is essentially what these distillations of my pieces on Brijit are.
