Air travel news this week has been heavily disrupted by the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull. (Best reaction to that so far, and best response by stranded travelers.) As of today, the ash cloud is still causing trouble, though most countries have reopened their airspace. Previous eruptions in the last 2000 years have all been ( Read more... )

The Senate healthcare reform bill passed by the House of Representatives yesterday is not much, but it's certainly not nothing:Here are ten benefits which come online within six months of the President's signature on the health care bill:

1. Adult children may remain as dependents on their parents’ policy until their 27th birthday
2. Children under age 19 ( Read more... )

A while back, I mentioned Superstruct, a not-so-alternate reality game based on predicting the future and stimulating creative thinking about likely future crises. There's also World Without Oil, a game based on a near-future oil crash scenario. Now there's another game in that vein, starting in March, called Evoke, billing itself as both a game ( Read more... )

This evening, I saw the film Ink with Shoshana. I'd pre-ordered the DVD for that film after seeing a story on Reddit about how pirated downloads of the movie had taken off. The thread mentioned that the studio was the same one behind this short film, which I'd really liked but had subsequently slipped my mind ( Read more... )

• The FDA chews out General Mills
• An article on a particularly prescient episode of Start Trek TNG, in the context of the new movie
• This, which has been making it's way around the 4chan-o-sphere and probably cannot be explained coherently: Something about willingness to spend vast amounts of effort on intentionally bad ideas, Python as a language ( Read more... )

A sequence of events ( Read more... )

Interesting chatter bouncing across the blag-o-sphere / twitter-verse / what have you:

There's some discussion of the Facebook redesign, which is generally loathed, leading Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to proclaim that "disruptive" companies don't listen to their customers; presumably customers just drag you down. Actually, I don't think the ( Read more... )

Yesterday, I was trying to decide where to donate my latest batch of change (ultimately donated to OLPC). While I was looking at various organizations, I wished there was a site for nonprofits along the lines of Yelp or Amazon, and posted this thought on Twitter.

This resulted in a brief conversation between me and Michael Hoffman (who evidently ( Read more... )

Google has released their own web browser called Chrome (more info here in comic form). I'm trying it out now. While there are still a few rough spots to smooth over (that's what beta tester feedback is for, after all), the interface is innovative, and the WebKit rendering engine and v8 JavaScript engine make it blazingly fast. I'm unlikely to ( Read more... )

• Short Attention Spans
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• What will be the ultimate conclusion of this trend?
• Google vs. Yahoo