I wish these ads were dated, or at least put in order of their release. I recognize a good portion of the hardware — and the prices — but some of the ads look very sixties-esque, a decade I wasn’t around for. (Via Lifehacker)
Archive of entries posted on July 2010
“Water Freezing and Boiling Myths”
Interesting chemistry facts and fantasies about that most-useful of chemicals, H2O. (Via LifeHacker)
“Quantum Time Machine Lets You Travel to the Past Without Fear of Grandfather Paradox”
It’s rather fascinating, and pretty non-intuitive. The intuitively obvious scenario is that, if someone could time-travel to their own past, there would be nothing to stop him from killing his own grandfather before his father was born. But there actually would be something stopping him: the fact that he exists to go back at all [...]
“Detect A Good Liar By Knowing Their Most Effective Tactics”
Although I might object to the term “good liar,” the idea is sound.
“Who was the Pied Piper?”
I thought that the Pied Piper was just a story, until I read this. Ptomaine-poisoned rye bread or child slavery, according to the comments… either way, it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing I’d want to tell my kids at bedtime. As a cautionary tale in daylight hours, definitely.
Spin
I never realized, until I started reading the Bad Science blog, just how much “spin” there is in science papers. Spin is great when shooting pool, but it’s simply dishonest when someone uses it in a scientific paper. And when that paper is about the efficacy of a medicine or the safety of a product, [...]
“Canadian man replaces his false eye with bionic camera eye, is putting eye video feed online for all to see”
This is the sort of thing I expect will become commonplace, as replacement body parts become a lot less expensive. (I’d love to claim credit for the prediction, but I’ve seen it before, in science fiction novels from at least two authors. One was William Gibson, the other I can’t recall the name of.)
“I could license you to use this software, but then I’d have to kill you”
Most of the licenses listed here are perfectly normal, but there are a few really odd ones…
I Write Like…
It seems that I write like Mark Twain, at least when I put in the text of one of my longer recent blog posts. Oddly enough, no one else in the fifty comments on the Boing Boing post on this (at the time of this writing) was told that one, and lots of them tried [...]
Ubuntu’s “Bug #1″
This bug was filed back in 2005, but I just discovered it. It’s a nasty one, but between Apple and various Linux distributions, I think they’re making headway on it. The description starts out: Microsoft has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace. This is a bug, which Ubuntu is designed to [...]