June 2007
35 posts
The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation →
“The iPhone is the floating car we imagined we’d be driving in the future.”
– Daily Exhaust: Why There’s an iPhone Craze.
Champagne Moments
Scott Adams (a.k.a. the Dilbert guy) is someone that by just about any standard that most people would measure by is successful. He had lots of money; more than enough to be comfortable. He does work - but it is work that he loves, and his office is 47 seconds’ walk from his bedroom. He also owns 3 successful resuurants. and he has some influence with (in terms of real ability to help, and...
WatchFrom Coudal Partners: not only getting the keyboard clean, but providing a beautiful cinematic experience.
Indiana Jones is coming back! →
Production starts on the new Indianna Jones film. Cool!
“ZDNet click-whoring at its finest; they know, more than most, how they can drive...”
– - comment left at “ZDNet Really, Really, Really Hates Apple & the iPhone « TWO A DAY”
As a consumer of the internet, please realise just how you are being played by these (and other) people.
Baby monitor picks up video from NASA →
Cool.
Priorities
In Japan, your elderly pet can have round-the-clock monitoring by doctors. Sounds like something from Hollywood, right?
Well, in L.A., you can be right there in the E.R. of a hospital vomiting blood, and a) have all the doctors and nurses refuse to help (there’s a procedure to follow for admissions, you know), and b) have the ambulances refuse to come and get you because, after all,...
“I am worried that I am getting too old and slow. I’m starting to...”
– Umm, sounds like a good idea to me.
Story: Disguise that took the intrepid zoologist into the crocodiles’ lair | the Daily Mail
blog.pmarca.com: Top 10 science fiction novelists... →
I think that the thing I miss most about being younger is having time to read.
Three important words: "I was wrong." →
Admitting a mistake, just as publicly as you made it, is a really, really good thing to do. Here’s how and why it is done.
Readable text vs. Readable text - the different...
OK, so there’s a minor flap about the difference between the way Apple software (including when it runs on Windows, now with the new Safari web browser release) renders fonts on-screen, and how Windows does it. You can read a quite nice short discussion of it here: Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering - Joel on Software
Everyone seems to think that the MS way is more...
“smart people can also make really stupid decisions”
– Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted): Why Don’t All Smart People Make Smart Choices?
Living the Scientific Life (Scientist,... →
Wowsa! This is cool. Or hot. Or something.
A Galaxy and a supernova →
Pretty.
“Men could soon be as pointless as a bathing costume in the Antarctic”
– I’m just wondering if this quote refers to pointlessness in the sense of “a woman without a man is like a fish without a a bicycle”, or more to do with shrinkage in the cold.
Either way, I’m a bit chilled.
Story: globeandmail.com: Where the boys aren’t
How to hire the best people you've ever worked... →
“ASCII means never having to say you’re sorry”
– Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : E-mail is not a platform for design
Canadian has green blood →
More than 1/4 surveyed don't think the Earth goes... →
It is always tempting to think with these things that, well, they’e only Americans, right? At least, I sometimes comfort myself with that thought… but honestly, there’s no real evidence I know of to make us think that the people of the US of A should be worse off than anyone else in this knowledge area.
This scares me.
“It was quite a ride”
– - guy who was accidentally hitched to the front of a semi in his wheelchair. South Bend Tribune
Octopi (and other cephalopods) are cool. →
This article is about their invisibility tricks - but they are just generally cool creatures.
The toilet seat dilemma as game theory →
I’m not quite certain what a ‘trembling-hand’ equlibrium is, but I’m pretty sure you’d better clean it up.
A different analog clock
I have always been intriuged by the analog clock face. Even though I understand the direct visual usefulness of the idea over the abstraction of a digital display, I nonetheless personally prefer the digital option.
The links below, it seems to me, are a step in the right direction in the visual display of time. Or they are at least intriguing. (I was pointed to it on User Friendly; I have also...
Spammer arrested
I completely applaud locking up spammers - seriously, beyond being annoying, they actually block up a huge piece of something that is becoming an ‘essential service’.
I can only hope that it will actually have some actual effect.
Story: Alleged ‘Seattle Spammer’ arrested | Tech News on ZDNet
"Well qualified nuts" →
So, they’ve gotten a bunch of my favourite authors together (Greg Bear, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, other Sci-Fi writers with technical PhD’s) to think up novel ways that terrorists could attack, and novel ways to defend. I like it!
“this is the first and only expedition to the North Pole opening [to the center...”
– Um, maybe there’s a reason for that? Trip proposed to centre of Earth via Arctic hole
It never ceases to amaze me what some people believe. Then again, maybe some people think the same thing about me!
May 2007
18 posts
Isolation of infectious diseases
SO, there’s this guy who has a really nasty, incurable strain of tuberculosis, and he decides to fly around the world anyway. He keeps flying even after being directly ordered not to.
Read all about it here: The Questionable Authority : Thou Shalt Not Be Bloody Stupid
I have my own experience with this sort of thing. Not TB, thank God, but I received an incredibly nasty flu from a...