what you need, when you need it.
Mailing Lists are Zombies
ConversationBoard (the code behind ILX) would be perfect for this, I’m thinking. It surprises me how much tech discussion is locked away in little ghettoes like IRC, mailing lists and wikis.
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.
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.
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.
“Harry Evans. He is smaller now, his legs slower and his hair whiter. But when he came into the Guardian’s morning conference on Thursday he held an audience of journalists – many of them not born when he left his last great editorial job in 1982 – in the palm of his hand.” — ‘We have to keep doing it’ | Harold Evans interviewed by Alan Rusbridger
tomewing:
Just started watching Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on DVD - picked it up on sale in Amazon a while back. Not normally a fan of spy stories but this is fantastic, gripping and an absolute feast of old school Brit character actors.
… there’s a part quite late on where Alec Guinness is given some bad news. And although there’s no dialogue, he speaks volumes by taking off his glasses and patting his jumper. It’s sublime.
Dont be fooled, it’s just a gateway jam so that you’ll buy posh Brie to make sandwiches. I’m onto their scam.
Painting images in CMYK. By hand. With moire and everything.
I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette
