I recently had a discussion with a friend about webcams, and we both mentioned that we rarely had any use for them… at least, for the usual uses. We’ve had a problem in the last few months with one of our cats defecating on the floor in a particular spot. As mentioned, we have three [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Science and Technology category.
“Think Twice About What ‘Everybody Knows’”
I found some of this stuff to be shocking. It’s worth a read.
“How To Grow A New Joint Inside Your Body”
I think I’m jealous of future generations. They’ll grow up with all this neat technological stuff that we’re just hearing about now, like the ability to regrow a damaged joint in your own body. The stuff of science fiction to us will be taken for granted by them. On the other hand, they’ll have to [...]
“Street-Fighting Math: down and dirty guide to approximation and problem-solving”
A useful skill. I didn’t realize that anyone had written a book about it. It’s available as a free PDF file too, there’s a download link in the “related links” section. I’ve picked it up, and I plan to read it when I have a chance. (Via BoingBoing)
“Google, boffins crack Rubik’s Cube mystery”
The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything may be 42, but it seems that the ultimate answer to how many moves (at most) it would take for an omniscient being to solve the Rubik’s Cube is much lower. (No omniscient beings were harmed in the calculation of that answer.)
“Human hive-mind game whups computer boffinry ass”
My high-school best friend and I both ended up in Virginia in the very early nineties, a few years after we graduated, he in the Air Force and I going to tech school. We decided to make a trip back to Connecticut to meet up with the old gang. Among the people we met were [...]
“Ultraviolet Movie Locker Aims to Solve the Movie Industry’s Digital Mess”
Sorry, but I just don’t trust the movie industry to do something like this. It sounds good, and it would be welcome, but think about it… the movie industry made a killing on the VHS-to-DVD format change, just as the music industry did on the cassette-to-CD change, and the 8-track-and-LP-to-cassette change before it. Maybe the [...]
“UK ICT classes killing kids’ interest in tech”
Here’s the first paragraph: The Royal Society is to investigate why British schools are failing to interest children in information technology – and why numbers taking classes are falling so fast. Well, duh! There are two main reasons for this. The second one is that the dot-com era turned into a dot-bomb — you can [...]
“AOL sales drop by a quarter, reports billion dollar loss”
Before the Internet became widespread, AOL made money by charging ridiculously high rates to access the content on their network. Afterwards, their content was worth less every day as web sites sprang up everywhere, so they reinvented themselves as an Internet Service Provider (a pretty slick move, in my opinion, not that they had a [...]
“Cashless World”
Sometimes I think Scott Adams (yes, the Dilbert guy) is just throwing outrageous stuff out there on his blog, to provoke reactions. I can’t tell if this article, on getting rid of cash and making all financial transactions digital, is one of those though, or if he truly believes that it’s possible. It would offer [...]