“Waiting for Thunderbolt–one port to rule them all”

I sympathize with this fellow’s wish. I’d love to have a single really fast connector for everything, including video. I don’t know that it will ever catch on though, outside of Apple computers. I lived through the time of serial ports, parallel ports, AT connectors, PS/2 connectors, and the like. USB caught on, not because …

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“Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex”

Back around the time I was born (yeah, way back there), science fiction great Larry Niven penned this amusing article about Superman. He got some of the bits wrong, or maybe it hadn’t been established at that point that Superman’s abilities started manifesting slowly around puberty. I’m sure that the superpowers he posits for the …

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“In online game, Tea Partiers make ‘zombie’ targets”

I nearly wet myself laughing at the description. If your politics lean toward Tea Party conservative, you don’t want to read this. (I’m not sure why, but the game sounds familiar… maybe I’ve seen similar pictures on The Daily Show or something? I don’t seem to have blogged about it before.)

“Why Is It So Hard to Find a Suicide Bomber These Days?”

A very long article, but the basic gist of it can be summed up by this paragraph from the middle: […] To put this in context: Out of more than 150,000 murders in the United States since 9/11 — currently more than 14,000 each year — Islamist terrorists accounted for fewer than three dozen deaths …

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“Value, Emotions, and Survival”

I ran across an article the other day that baldly stated that the survival instinct is not the strongest and most universal instinct. Creating value is. Surprising on the face of it, but the more I thought of it, the more I had to admit that there’s something to it. Conventional wisdom (which may actually …

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“Space junk at ‘tipping point’, now getting worse on its own”

I’ve mentioned before the problem of man-made junk in low-earth orbit, and the three plans (American laser, Japanese fishing-net, and Italian robo-satellite) so far suggested to combat it. Apparently the problem is even worse than I’d realized, and has reached a critical stage. If I read the American laser proposal correctly (which isn’t guaranteed), it …

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