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It's snowing in Baltimore

Snowy splashes through the decades

Snowpocalypse time lapse.

Hitchcock and his grandchildren. (Via iateabee, though I lost the link going via zootool)

Caledonian Mercury

It’s Scotland’s first newspaper since, ooh, the West End Mail. There’s a quarterly print edition to come.

My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement

Mailing Lists are Zombies

rentzsch:

John Resig:

As far as I’m concerned, Google Groups is dead.

As far as I’m concerned, mailing lists are dead zombies.

A pain to subscribe to. A pain to manage (you almost immediately need to set up reader-side filtering for any list of any significant traffic). A pain to follow (by date or by thread are both painful). Inefficient. A pain to unsubscribe from.

I used to run a few Mailman lists myself, but gave up since it wasn’t worth the hassle.

Forums as we know them aren’t the answer. I think we need a new kind of forum (unfortunately phpBB has ravaged the world). Stackoverflow is a promising re-think on the topic. Perhaps Google Wave or something like it is the future.

I was hoping blogging would be it. Perhaps it’s too soon to tell, but it doesn’t feel like it. I think it’s still too hard to blog and have real, trackable conversations that way.

Personally, I’d like to see something that would allow quick, off-the-cuff twitter conversations to seamlessly grow into real, persistent, searchable topic-oriented chats.

I don’t read Scoble, but Jeff Atwood just tweeted this related post. I feel dirty linking to Scoble, but I think it’s a good post.

IBM takes a (feline) step toward thinking machines

science:

IBM simulates a cat’s cerebral cortex using a supercomputer. The numbers are staggering: using almost 150,000 processors and 144 terabytes of memory, the program simulated the roughly 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses (connections between neurons) of a cat’s brain. Even with this massive processing power, the simulation ran a hundred times slower than a real cat’s brain. (The researchers fed the artificial brain images of corporate logos. If I were a brain in a vat, I’d want my fantasy world to be a little livelier.)

A deeper question is whether this kind of simulation is telling us anything new. It seems — and this is, of course, extremely speculative, as is everything regarding actual artificial intelligence — entirely possible that we could duplicate a human brain in silicon, yet come no closer to understanding the brain’s operation. AI might be useful, but will it ever satisfy our very human curiosity about how and why stuff, in this case, the mind, works? Who knows. When dealing with the nature of consciousness, very little is certain.

“[Topley-Bird] would often go in without even having heard the track once, yet most of the stuff you now hear is the very first thing that came out of her mouth. It was brilliant. It was like ‘hair standing up on the back of your neck’ time.” — The making of Maxinquaye

marco:

The 27” iMac’s base configuration is $1699. It has a 2560x1440 resolution […] The 30” Cinema Display is $1799. It has a 2560x1600 resolution.

The 30” is also too shallow. Sounds weird because this thing is a monster, but it’s still not really deep enough — which makes the iMac far too shallow.

Laptop and PC screens are all going widescreen-TV sizes because that’s where the money in making panels is, but 3:4 or portrait is the best shape for a computer screen: look at the iPhone, or even the shape of this webpage.

Your solution to the news crisis will not work

I wrote a snarking form letter replying to yet more ideas for saving journalism, posted it as a Metafilter comment and now it seems to be growing legs.