Topics on my particular interests.
Given the recent demise of so many juicy and useful pseudo-threats, politicians and other fearmongers are probably watching this with anticipation. After all, it’s never too early to start planning your strategy of terrifying people into giving you more money and power.
With paranoid parents banning everything from comics to children’s books to toy guns, it’s kind of shocking to look back and see what their own parents must have played with in their youth.
What is this, the Roombas-in-Space hour? Now the Swiss are getting into the act too!
This article by Ben Hamamoto makes the case that how we see and judge authority is changing, and that the Internet could be responsible: […] with science and health, we do value a certain cold detachment. Public health organizations in the U.S. have traditionally been very careful to appear serious, probably because appearing too casual …
Oops, another perfectly good disaster scenario down the drain. Unless something like the metavirus from the novel Snow Crash appears, capable of infecting both humans and computers, I think we’re fairly safe on that front. At this rate, right-leaning politicians and other fear-mongers must be seeing a new disaster on the horizon: running out of …
Continue reading ‘“The cyber-weapons paradox: ‘They’re not that dangerous’”’ »
Apparently the historical size of horses is inversely proportional to the temperature — in other words, when temperatures were hotter, the ancestors of modern horses were smaller, and vice versa. It makes sense, since smaller bodies are easier to cool. Unfortunately it’s also well-known that reptiles have just the opposite response, getting larger as temperatures …
Continue reading ‘“Global warming COULD SHRINK THE HUMAN RACE”’ »
We’re gearing up to release our first program for the general public in quite some time, so we’re going to need a real website again, rather than the one-page placeholder that I put up several years ago. The last time I had to design a website was before the turn of the century. I started …
Continue reading ‘Git makes website maintenance easy too!’ »
Nice. I might even be tempted to buy something like that.
It’s so hard to find a good, credible, looming disaster to panic about, and then those pesky scientists keep destroying the few that we manage to find. Runaway global warming keeps getting kicked in the teeth by inconvenient facts. Nuclear power disasters persistently refuse to be anywhere near as disastrous as people hope. Scientific advancement …
Continue reading ‘“RIP: Peak Oil – we won’t be running out any time soon”’ »
I did this (thanks for the early heads-up, Ploni), though I had a few problems getting to the history page. Once I managed it, I was appalled to see how much stuff they’d managed to associate with me… nothing damning, just massive amounts of it. If someone wanted to cause me problems, or wanted to …
Continue reading ‘“How to remove your Google Web History”’ »