It is traditional to open with a joke - so here you go. The Mother Of All 9/11 Posts. Watch out especially for the white Flavor Flav imitator and the 4chan contributions in the "deliberately offensive" category.

This post, on the other hand, is going to be more in the vein of Jon Schwarz's "Today Is The Anniversary Of An Enormous Opportunity." ( Read more... )

I think of myself as a full-contact English user. This means that sometimes English gets the better of me and I say something that makes no damn sense, requires that you be me to understand it, or involves using a word in a distinctly nonstandard way. The latter is the one I'm wrestling with at the moment: I'm glumly coming to accept that "hive ( Read more... )

The following link should be handled with caution. On Sunday, the Washington Post printed a story by Gene Weingarten called Fatal Distraction. It is exactly the sort of thing that makes me relax some of my cynicism about traditional media establishments' abilities to do journalism that matters. It engages in some of their flaws, but it is ( Read more... )

Today, I am amused by the things that are in your body. There's a surprising number of parts of your body that both are named after a specific person and sound like menacing cybernetic additions or something that you'd base superpowers on.

• Nodes of Ranvier
• Betz Cells
• Castle Intrinsic Factor
• Gerota Capsule
• Papez Circuit

Dr. Alex Halavais recently released a book, Search Engine Society, and is teaching a course on the same topic this year. He's also broadcasting half-hour talks that accompany his course: this is one of them.


The rest of the series so far.Most of the content is strictly audio, so that makes for a good radio-like stream of information. I want to ( Read more... )

I really never have appropriate things to say on these occasions - not when someone I dislike dies, not when someone who I thought was cool dies, not when a friend's dear family dies. About all I have to say is that death sucks, and we ought to get our collective shit together such that people are not obliged to shuffle off the local coil until ( Read more... )

If you've talked to me a bit, you'll probably have picked up that I was raised without TV and don't watch it.  I don't like it.  My usual explanation is that it's a low-quality information source and that the properties ( advertising, mainly) that make it a low-quality information source are a severe turn-off that keep me from regarding it as a good ( Read more... )

Oh hell yes.  Maybe this is old news to some of you, but I just saw it and it made me jump the hell up: a solar panel more efficient than coal is going into production.  I've been dwelling on the Grim Meathook Future lately, so something like this perks me right up.  It's one more step.  There are a lot of steps left, but every step gets us closer ( Read more... )

Eight months ago: What the hell is a 248-dimensional structure good for?

Now: A Unified Field Theory that actually makes testable predictions? Don't mind if I do!

Despite Kary Mullis being a jackass in some ways, more scientists on surfboards is good; more Nobel prizewinners on surfboards would be even better.

Science!

SCIENCE!

I ♥

This continues where the previous long-ass post leaves off. Again, composting, needs critique, shop, pixels, etc.

15. High morality depends on accurate prophecy. You cannot judge the morality of an action unless you have some idea of what the consequences of the action will be. According to this point of view, an action cannot be good if it has ( Read more... )