• blogTO notes a threat to some of Liberty Village's historic buildings through development.
• Centauri Dreams looks at planetary formation around close binary SDSS 1557, which includes a white dwarf.
• False Steps' Paul Drye announces a new book project, They Played the Game, which looks at how different baseball players overlooked in our history might ( Read more... )

The Canadian Broadcasting Centre's Ivan Harris Gallery is hidden away from the CBC Museum, behind the escalator leading to the Centre's food court. My attention was caught by the vintage technology on display, by the RCA TK-76 A camera that enabled mobile news gathering in the late 1970s, or the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 that could transmit as ( Read more... )

• At Apostrophen, 'Nathan Smith writes about the status of his various writing projects.
• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling links to an article examining pieces of software that have shaped modern music.
• blogTO notes the expansion of the Drake Hotel to a new Junction site. Clearly the Drake is becoming a brand.
• Citizen Science Salon looks at how ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes that TTC tunnels will get WiFi in 2018.
• Border Thinking's Laura Augustín shares some of Edvard Munch's brothel paintings.
• Centauri Dreams looks at the latest science on fast radio bursts.
• Dangerous Minds shares some of the sexy covers of Yugoslavian computer magazine Računari.
• Dead Things looks at the latest research into dinosaur eggs.

Inverse features Joe Carmichael's interview with artificial intelligence pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber, who claims that we've been making artificially intelligent programs since 1991. His argument actually does make a weird kind of sense, but I'm far from being an expert in the field. What do experts say?

You claim that some A.I.s are already ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes that a Vancouver nerd bar is opening up shop in Toronto.
• Dangerous Minds provides its readers with a take on an upcoming Tom of Finland biopic.
• The Dragon's Tales notes that Enceladus seems altogether too hot and notes that dwarf planet Makemake seems to have a surprisingly uniform surface.
• Far Outliers looks at Afghanistan and Poland at ( Read more... )

Bloomberg View's Adam Minter argues that China's erratic and often repressive official policies leave it poorly positioned to copy, or import, Silicon Valley.

At first glance, China does seem like a logical destination for talented tech workers. For years, its government has offered them lucrative incentives to come to Chinese universities and ( Read more... )

The Atlantic's Ronald Brownstein looks at the huge gap, in social and economic terms both, between California's Silicon Valley and incoming President Donald Trump.

The political gulf between Donald Trump and the high-tech community he has summoned to a meeting in New York City on Wednesday might be comparable to the technological distance between ( Read more... )

• Apostrophen's 'Natha Smith talks about his tradition of the stuffed Christmas stocking.
• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling talks about the decline of the Pebble wearables.
• blogTO lists some of the hot new bookstores in Toronto.
  
• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about some of her family's traditions.
• The Dragon's Tales looks at the ancient ( Read more... )

Yesterday's issue of The New York Times featured an article by Farhad Manjoo prophesying the end of the "gadget", non-smartphone devices capable of doing anything from tracking fitness to filming underwater scenes. Smartphone technology has displaced it.

What happened to gadgets? It’s a fascinating story about tech progress, international ( Read more... )