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Whether or not an unexamined life is worth living, examining what goes on inside your head is a lot of fun. I've become interested in psychology late in life (after treating it with contempt when I was a cocksure young rationalist) and identifying my biases and tracing them back down to their ( Read more... )

The original Star Trek premiered 42 years ago today. Feeling old, I went for a walk and tried to identify another pair of three-syllable homonyms and got nowhere. Viritrilbia, we need ya down here for a bit-and bring McPhee if you've got him.

Also on the word front, I got a note last night from a ( Read more... )

In stories circulating widely around the Web, Apple's new all-animation, all the time user interface is just the hottest thing. How hot? Well, it introduces a brand new UI element: smoke. In the item I link to above, launching a window to burn a CD or DVD also launches a plume of smoke curling ( Read more... )

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• Larry Nelson sent me a pointer to a site where you can download free PDF generators for a great many different kinds of graph paper, including some very odd stuff (for Americans, at least) like penmanship guide paper for Chinese ideograms. Music staffs, ledger sheets, ( Read more... )

When I was sixteen, my friend Art Krumrey built a remarkable gadget that went on to be his senior high science fair project: A flame speaker. I spent a fair amount of time with him in his basement, fooling around with it, and it was a pretty amazing thing. He built it based on a description in ( Read more... )

• Go take a look at Pete Albrecht's blog, where he's posted some of the most dumbfounding amateur astrophotographs I've ever seen. Pete tries to put it in perspective by comparison to how he took astrophotos at Northwestern University 25 years ago, but he doesn't mention ( Read more... )

I just popped over to Salon to read an article by SF writer David Brin entitled "Why Johnny Can't Code." It's interesting enough to skim, but it can be summarized very easily: Brin thinks the lack of line-oriented BASIC interpreters (like we used to have in IBM PC BASICA and cheap ( Read more... )