Topics pertaining to science and technology, current or future.
I’ve been pained for several years by the ads in one of my RSS feeds. Mozilla Thunderbird (my program of choice for handling e-mail and RSS feeds) waits until it has all of the images for a message before rendering any of the message, including its text. That’s fine, I don’t mind text or non-animated …
As strange as it sounds, the research does have a useful purpose. Other than giving the researchers an excuse to legally (?) keep otherwise-illegal drugs, that is. 😉
I recently spotted this quote on our friend interrobang’s blog: The results of a multiple regression analysis of 49 metropolitan areas show that the greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate. The effect is independent of divorce, southernness, poverty, and gun availability. — Steven Stack and Jim Gundlach, “The …
Continue reading ‘“The Effect of Country Music on Suicide”’ »
Yet another science-fiction technology is now becoming science fact. I wonder how long it will be before this technology, or something based on it, is put to medical use — and how long after that it will be before it’s turned to malicious use as well.
I always wondered about ball lightning, even when I first heard of it in grade school. It just didn’t seem to make sense. This is certainly one explanation, and it makes more sense than some form of lightning that ignores the known laws of physics. I’m not sure I buy it though. I’d have to …
Continue reading ‘“Ball lightning is all in the mind, say Austrian physicists”’ »
Interesting facts and statistics. And if you squint at it just right, you can almost see the future that science fiction has foretold for the last sixty years or so, right around the corner. (Via Lifehacker) EDIT, 2013-05-01: The first sentence above used to link to <http://www.onlineschools.org/blog/wild-world-robots/>, but I was asked today by someone from …
Just for balance, after yesterday’s thorough Microsoft-bashing post, here’s an Apple-bashing one that I thoroughly agree with too. I still plan to get a fourth-generation iPod Touch when they come out later this year, to replace my aging first-generation one, because it’s still the best non-cell-phone organizer available at present — but I’ll get it …
Why? Probably because Microsoft is rapidly fading into an irrelevant computing has-been, and Windows 7 is good enough that most people no longer feel the urge to abandon the Windows ship.
World War II warplanes were often painted with sharp-toothed heads on the fronts, to improve the morale of the pilot’s side and, hopefully, decrease it on the enemy’s. But apparently that’s not enough; now scientists have come up with a justification for stenciling the whole thing to look like a shark. 😉 (All kidding aside, …
Continue reading ‘“German boffins develop sharkskin paint for ships, planes”’ »
I like snarky-but-true comments. This one is particularly good. The article it leads to is also packed with good advice. I don’t particularly worry about my online privacy. I have my browser set to delete cookies (including Flash super-cookies) whenever I close it, I keep Javascript blocked for most sites, and I absolutely refuse to …
Continue reading ‘“Online Privacy: Check Yourself (Before You Wreck Yourself)”’ »