May 2010
45 posts
WatchSpace shuttle time lapse | RobertBenson.com
“Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is...”
– Sergey Brin and Larry Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (via Curated hypocrisy)
“Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re...”
– Associates of Edwin L. Drake refusing his suggestion to drill for oil in 1859
An Apple //e, an iPad, and Jed →
It’s an obvious solution in retrospect, but there is something very unreal and amazing about tapping a button on a multi-touch screen and watching an Apple //e fill up with data — to quote Andy Baio, “that’s like WALL-E connecting to EVE.”
“It will be years—not in my time—before a woman will become Prime Minister.”
– Margaret Thatcher
The Evolution of Apple Design →
With the 25th anniversary of the first Macintosh computer coming up on January 24th, 2009, we’re taking a look back in time at the evolution of Apple products.
Exoplanet Has Showers of Pebbles →
The newly-discovered exoplanet COROT-7b has an unusual form of precipitation: rocks. Because it orbits so close to its sun, the temperature on its sun-facing side is around 4220 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot enough for rocks to vaporize — not unlike water evaporating on Earth. And, like Earth, when the vapor cools in the upper atmosphere, it forms clouds and begins to rain. But instead of...
Thinking literally →
Bargh at Yale, along with Lawrence Williams, now at the University of Colorado, did studies in which subjects were casually asked to hold a cup of either iced or hot coffee, not knowing it was part of the study, then a few minutes later asked to rate the personality of a person who was described to them. The hot coffee group, it turned out, consistently described a warmer person—rating them as...
How Far Has PC Gaming Come? →
There’d been games before Doom, games with complex stories such as Zork or CCC, but Doom was the game that hooked most of us and, most importantly for our purposes, it was the one which changed the way most people thought about games.
It took us from the age when games were monochrome, squinty affairs played by people with milkbottles for spectacles, to a time when it was actually cool to...
“The plain fact is users will not read anything you put on the screen.”
– Coding Horror: Treating User Myopia
Apple IIe Twitter Terminal →
The Apple II has an 8-bit 6502 CPU running at 1 MHz, so it can literally execute thousands of instructions per second. In other words, it’s about a million times slower that the computer you are using right now. So I wasn’t about to write a networking stack or Twitter client on the Apple II itself. Just like the TweetWall the communication with Twitter would happen on a PC and the Apple is...
Watchjingc:
Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?”
I think this may well be the best TED talk I’ve seen, certainly in recent memory.
HTML5 Video Destruction →
Sweet HTML5 effects. A little slow in Firefox and Chrome, but silky smooth in Safari.
Speech Accent Archive →
A clickable world map with recordings of (English) speech. Neat!
awk is awesome →
I needed to count the number of unique occurrences in a text file (without knowing what the set of items is beforehand), and awk has a one-liner solution:
awk '{count[$1]++}END{for(j in count) print j,"("count[j]")"}' FS=: file.txt
Robert Reich: Apple Isn't the Problem. Wall... →
So why is the FTC nosing around Apple and not around Wall Street? Because the Federal Trade Commission Act allows the agency to stop “unfair methods of competition” almost anywhere in the economy except in the financial sector. Banks are explicitly excluded.
Another reason for financial reform.
Watch“The Last 3 Minutes” (by Shane Hurlbut, ASC)
WatchShort Film: The Cheapest Man in the Room
