January 2010
31 posts
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WatchOliver Sacks: What hallucination reveals about our minds
Oliver Sacks is the man.
Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks brings our attention to Charles Bonnett syndrome — when visually impaired people experience lucid hallucinations. He describes the experiences of his patients in heartwarming detail and walks us through the biology of this under-reported phenomenon.
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100 Games Cupcake Game →
100 cupcakes. Each represents a game. See if you can guess them all.
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Old World vs New World Computing →
The gist of this article, by stevenf, is that the iPad represents one of the first steps into a New World of computing in which many hairy details of how the computer operates are abstracted away. The computer behaves only in predictable ways that prevent the user from doing something dumb, like running a background process that eats all their CPU cycles or installing a virus.
I buy the general...
Tongue Twisters →
The Economist tries to figure out which language is the hardest to learn.
English is pretty simple: verbs hardly conjugate; nouns pluralise easily (just add “s”, mostly) and there are no genders to remember.
English-speakers appreciate this when they try to learn other languages. A Spanish verb has six present-tense forms, and six each in the preterite, imperfect, future, conditional,...
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On the iPad →
The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours...
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The iPad Big Picture →
John Gruber points out the other message behind the iPad announcement.
Apple doesn’t talk much about the technical details of the iPhone. They never talk about CPU speed or the name of the chip being used. They don’t tell you how much RAM is in there. Part of their vision for moving computers from technical culture to popular culture is about getting away from defining these things by their...
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iPad Thoughts →
Some of Dave’s thoughts on the iPad:
Newspapers, magazines, and comic books, have a strong appeal in an iPad format. I was expecting, however, that Apple would include them in its iBook store. Instead, each publication will have it invent its own iPad app, which is going to lead to some interesting fragmentation. Hopefully the market will decide quickly how things should work. Imagine, say,...
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Why testers? →
Joel Spolsky on testers:
That’s one of the reasons we have testers. A great tester gives programmers immediate feedback on what they did right and what they did wrong. Believe it or not, one of the most valuable features of a tester is providing positive reinforcement. There is no better way to improve a programmer’s morale, happiness, and subjective sense of well-being than a La Marzocco Linea...
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The idea of progress: Onwards and upwards →
A meditation on progress from The Economist.
Through complacency and bitter experience, the scope of progress has narrowed. The popular view is that, although technology and GDP advance, morals and society are treading water or, depending on your choice of newspaper, sinking back into decadence and barbarism. On the left of politics these days, “progress” comes with a pair of ironic quotation...
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The Kingdom of Boomeria →
Coolest science teacher ever?
The Kingdom of Boomeria is a magical place of just one hectare hidden in the forest in Bonny Doon, California. Students who graduate from San Lorenzo Valley High School go out into the world and tell tales of their adventures in the Kingdom of Boomeria and find that no one believes them. After all, how many people can claim their science education included fighting...
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Appeals Court Upholds Prison Ban on Dungeons &... →
Apparently D&D is not OK in the big house.
Prisons can restrict the rights of inmates to nerd out, a federal appeals court has found.
In an opinion issued on Monday, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected the claims in a lawsuit challenging a ban on the game Dungeons & Dragons by the Waupun Correctional Institution in Wisconsin.
The...
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12 things we want to see in iPhone OS 4.0 →
Ars Technica list of 12 easy to implement features that are currently missing from the iPhone.
9. Unified inbox support and/or better inbox switching: If you have more than one mail account, you know what a pain it is to switch between accounts. Currently it takes a minimum of four taps to switch from one inbox to another. Allow unification, or make it easy to switch between accounts. Or how about...
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WatchTime lapse photography of retreating glaciers.
(via TED)
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LEGO Aircraft Carrier →
This photo set is of a LEGO scale model of an aircraft carrier. The finished model will be 23 feet long.
The USS Intrepid is an Essex Class aircraft carrier of the United States Navy (USN). She is currently berthed in New York and serves as a museum, but had an operational life in the USN spanning over 20 years. When complete, this model will depict the USS Intrepid as she appeared in February...
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Quantum Computing →
Curious about what a quantum computer is? Ars Technica has a great article describing the basics: what a quantum computer is, how it works, the basics of quantum theory, and why you should care about quantum computers.
Bits, either classical or quantum, are the simplest possible units of information. They are oracle-like objects that, when asked a question (i.e., when measured), can respond in one...
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Google Talks Chrome OS →
Interesting interview with some of the minds behind Google’s Chrome OS. I like their description of their development methodology.
A lot of our approach is, we have over 200 Googlers using this every week, and we tend to just inflict a new build on them and see if they use things more or less, and we just iterate from there. And we’ve got another year of iteration left before consumers...
James Patterson Inc. →
This article—from Sunday’s New York Times Magazine—made me want to read a James Patterson book just to see what all the hype is about.
Like most authors, James Patterson started out with one book, released in 1976, that he struggled to get published. It sold about 10,000 copies, a modest, if respectable, showing for a first novel. Last year, an estimated 14 million copies of his books in 38...
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Evolution of Dogs →
In this excerpt from Richard Dawkins’s most recent book, The Greatest Show on Earth, he describes how the domesticated dog is a product of artificial selection (breeding) and natural selection.
We can imagine wild wolves scavenging on a rubbish tip on the edge of a village. Most of them, fearful of men throwing stones and spears, have a very long flight distance. They sprint for the safety...
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SAS is the Best Company to Work For →
CNN Money writes about Fortune’s number one best place to work, SAS.
Though companies in Silicon Valley get lots of press about perk-friendly workplaces, it’s here in the less go-go South that employees reign supreme. SAS is not only the world’s largest privately held software business — with revenues of $2.3 billion, it’s about the size of publicly traded Intuit...
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Air America Closing Up Shop →
Air America Radio, the liberal talk radio station, is done.
It is with the greatest regret, on behalf of our Board, that we must announce that Air America Media is ceasing its live programming operations as of this afternoon, and that the Company will file soon under Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code to carry out an orderly winding-down of the business.
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Vanity Fair Reviews Kentucky's Creation Museum →
I will never get tired of reading about this museum.
I took Paul Bettany, the actor who plays Charles Darwin in the new film Creation, along with me to photograph the [creationist] museum. He has played crazed and murderous apostates in films the devout ban themselves from seeing—in Legion, also out this month, Bettany stars as the archangel Michael, who defies a vengeful God hell-bent on...
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Bill Gates's blog. →
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US vs EU Economic Model
This article from the National Journal compares the American economic model with the European economic model.
Which has the superior economic model, the United States or Europe? The question keeps coming up and never gets resolved. It is having another go-round at the moment, with the adversaries lining up as usual. Conservatives say that Europe’s social-democratic model is bound for the...
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AMC Greenlights Walking Dead →
This could be good, no?
Frank Darabont, director of The Shawshank Redemption has been given the go-ahead from AMC to adapt the astounding zombie comic The Walking Dead for television.
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