“Spanish Flu of 1918: how bad was it?”
Some useful statistics on “one of the most lethal flu outbreaks in recorded history.” Reading that should calm all but the most germophobic people.
Archive of entries posted on April 2009
“GNOME vs. KDE: The Final Smackdown”
A very amusing look at the two major Linux desktop environments. It’s so well-written that I could actually hear it in my head, as if it were live commentary on a real boxing match. (I don’t have a favorite in this fight. I’ve used GNOME for the past few years, but that’s solely because it’s …
The Power of Ideas
The human mind is fascinating, for many reasons. Here’s just one example. Until a few weeks ago, I thought that my purpose in life was eliminating problems. It went hand-in-hand with the idea of kaizen (as mentioned earlier on this blog). It’s not something I consciously thought about; it simply developed over the years, because …
“Are you ready for a wrist-mounted computer?”
I don’t know whether this kind of thing will ever catch on. It’s neat and useful, and I’d buy it in a heartbeat — but so are dome houses, and most people look at them and say “that’s weird, Martha.” They might be a stepping-stone between today’s separate devices and neural-interface computers, but there would …
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“Systemic Progress: Towards a Unified Theory of Life Hacks”
I thought I was one of the few people who did this kind of thing. I didn’t realize that all geeks do it, or that there was a word for it (“kaizen”).
Ubuntu 9.04 Even Better
I was all braced for a Herculean effort to get Ubuntu 9.04 working on my system, earlier this week, but as mentioned, I was disappointed: the upgrade worked almost flawlessly. But I did have one remaining problem with it (other than the encrypted home directory problem), and I was concerned by all the “cruft” that …
“Revealed! Where babies come from!”
Hilarious (and, despite the title, completely safe for work). In this startling time-lapse video, we see life’s wonder unfold as a brave couple bare the entire process of making a baby, from fertilization to gestation to birth. Science!
“Boffins: Atlantic temperature ruled by dust, not CO2”
“Warm ocean, hurricane increases down to clean skies,” according to the subtitle. Hm, I wonder what NASA’s climate experts would say about that?
Vanity Surfing
I just did a Google-search on my own name for the first time. Wow. I have a fairly common last name, but a pretty rare first name — I’ve only met one other person with the same first name in my life — so I didn’t expect very many results. And in the grand scheme …
Ubuntu 9.04: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
On Sunday evening, after a hard day’s work on Project X, I decided to poke around the Ubuntu web site a bit. The new version wasn’t scheduled for release for another half-week, and I knew from experience that I wouldn’t be able to download it for several days after that, due to web site congestion. …
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