November 2011
1 post
July 2011
2 posts
June 2011
1 post
1 tag
Reality check →
Lots of hooks for thought (in a prog philosophy jam way) here in Charles Stross’s demolition of the prospects for the singularity/mind uploading/Matrix-style simulations.
Need to dig up the Pigs In Cyberspace piece too: what would it look like if we were to give in and adapt to an online existence that wasn’t a physical simulation of some kind?
Sure, “what does it feel like...
February 2011
1 post
January 2011
1 post
October 2010
1 post
Tumbled Logic: Of ads and blocking →
nevali
There’s also option 5: a war between ad publishers and ad blockers. Right now, publishers make it easy to block ads — they’re served from domains like ads.lotsabucks.cashcashcash.com, they’re in separate divs or elements easily hidden with CSS, etc.
If ad blockers reach the sort of levels where they’re a problem, that’s going to change.
August 2010
1 post
June 2010
1 post
“Americans want government off our backs … that is, until a folding crib...”
– Greg Palast » Slick Operator: The BP I’ve known too well
May 2010
2 posts
April 2010
1 post
March 2010
2 posts
February 2010
2 posts
It's snowing in Baltimore →
Snowy splashes through the decades
WatchSnowpocalypse time lapse.
January 2010
2 posts
2 tags
Caledonian Mercury →
It’s Scotland’s first newspaper since, ooh, the West End Mail. There’s a quarterly print edition to come.
December 2009
1 post
My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement →
November 2009
2 posts
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...
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...
October 2009
4 posts
“[Topley-Bird] would often go in without even having heard the track once, yet...”
– 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...
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.
“Harry Evans. He is smaller now, his legs slower and his hair whiter. But when...”
– ‘We have to keep doing it’ | Harold Evans interviewed by Alan Rusbridger
August 2009
1 post
July 2009
2 posts
The Human Printer →
Painting images in CMYK. By hand. With moire and everything.
June 2009
2 posts
Giving up my iPod for a Walkman →
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
“While Mr. Brown and his party may deserve to be punished, their political...”
– Paul Krugman: Gordon the Unlucky
May 2009
2 posts
“Here, in other words, is a long-range backstory—a device that, in the Hollywood...”
– Anthony Lane on Star Trek
April 2009
1 post
“The only group that holds a consistently high opinion of newspapers is newspaper...”
– It’s time to kill the idea that newspapers are essential for democracy.
March 2009
4 posts
“‘This computer thing,’ my editor said to me one time in 1983,...”
– How to Become a “Death of Newspapers” Blogger
Old Growth Media And The Future Of News →
This is far better than the Shirky piece everyone is clanging on about.
“I wonder if the BBC shouldn’t run some kind of opt-out scheme where celebrities...”
– spEak You’re bRanes » Does Anyone Know Who We’re Grieving For?
Philosophy has become packed with potential terminological minefields, each of which could explode so massively that philosophers step very gingerely around the humblest sentences.
The result is footnotes like this one from Oppy’s Ontological Arguments: “This talk of ‘sets of sentences’ is shorthand for more convoluted talk about sets of standardly interpreted sentences...
February 2009
3 posts
Experimental New York Times interface →
“It is essential of the happy life that a man would have almost no mail and never...”
– Daily Routines
F*** My Life: Your everyday life stories. →
January 2009
9 posts
All the ephemera that's fit to print →
These guys have taken the best blogposts etc from their friends, gussied it up and run off 1000 tabloid copies on the NOTW press. Like 100000 others, I had this idea too. Maybe come Mar 4 I’ll have enough time to do them.
“With poetic understatement, the immensely huge infinite numbers are simply...”
– Infinity and beyond
“GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where...”
– Our world may be a giant hologram
“The default RequestProcessorFactoryFactory is the...”
– Apache XML-RPC 3.1.1 API Dear God god
“We will know we have arrived at a new form when we learn what to call it.”
– By any other name / from a working library
Retail, they say, is detail. (iLife pixel peeping) →
December 2008
8 posts
“Now here’s the trick: drag the shutter. What that means is, set your flash...”
– Fiat Lux! #protip