I just realized that, although I use a Windows machine every business day, I never touch the function keys. I mean the ones labeled F1 through F12, above the number row on the QWERTY part of the keyboard.

I don't even know what the F#-keys do, though I am perfectly capable of finding out ( Read more... )

In addition to his work on pure mathematics, John von Neumann contributed fundamental advances to dozens of fields, from quantum mechanics to weather prediction. In particular, he was a pivotal figure in the development of electronic digital computers.

I've been reading George Dyson's terrific book Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital ( Read more... )

Hugh Daniel has passed away. He was a good friend for more than three decades ( Read more... )

Recently I contributed to a discussion on the Restricted Data blog, and decided I should expand upon it here.

Wikipedia tells us, "Swipe is a comics term that refers to the intentional copying of a cover, panel, or page from an earlier comic book or graphic novel without crediting the original artist ( Read more... )

I'll be at Capricon 33 in Wheeling, Illinois this weekend, having attended thirty-two Capricons previously.

Science Reporting Sucks Rocks
Friday, 02-08-2013
11:30 am to 1:00 pm
Botanic Garden A

Correlation is not causation! Every day, the news butchers articles about health, climate change, and technological advancements. Science literacy ( Read more... )

As someone whose workplace is concerned with inverse femtobarns, I am somewhat aware of the importance of standard prefixes for very small or very large numbers.

In the article about puppies killing the Internet, the reference to a "zettabyte" got me thinking about prefixes we use for big binary numbers like kilobytes and megabytes. Turns out ( Read more... )

This is a news story about the rather staid goings-on at a telecom conference-- exabytes of projected traffic, yadda yadda-- but it has a great headline that may become a true classic of doomsaying ( Read more... )

I can't recall in whose Livejournal I read about Richard Carrigan's recent paper. He speculates about the dangers of inimical software possibly buried in SETI signals.

All the discussion on the Web seems to be coming from an article in The Guardian.

You can read more about his ideas in "Do Potential SETI Signals Need to Be Decontaminated?" (it ( Read more... )