- Birds show off their dance moves – Funny video, fascinating science, bad music…
- Intelligent Design Sort – It would seem that intelligent design has “uses” outside explaining the diversity of nature. It works for Computer Science too. Who’d have thought it?
- Scrap ID cards now, say Cabinet rebels – Maybe there is some benefit in the dire state of the economy…
Tag: Science
- American Stonehenge: Monumental Instructions for the Post-Apocalypse – Who doesn’t love a good mystery?
- The Holy Faceble: Genesis:1-2 – The more I learn about Facebook, the less I want to join. Same with this god stuff.
- Rejected. – “It’s just frustrating when the problems crop up, because compared to nearly everything else about the whole setup, the problems seem so arbitrary, avoidable, and developer-hostile. For instance, this problem wouldn’t be nearly as frustrating if approval, even for minor updates to established apps, took less than 7-14 days.” Not that I’m bitter than a minor update to Yummy recently got rejected or anything…
- Coming to an ID Card Near You: Your DNA – “Can there be any doubt that the UK government will, at some point, try to add DNA to the other biometrics on the card?” Scary stuff.
- How to spot a hidden religious agenda – Apparently this article was pulled from the New Scientist website shortly after it was published which is a bid odd as there’s nothing scientifically objectionable.
- Tea really does taste better from your favourite cup – “Your daily brew tastes better from your favourite mug.”
- Ryanair’s New Emergency Instructions Could Be Real One Day – Funny. Though we probably shouldn’t give them ideas.
- Liberal Democrats – Freedom Bill 2009 – I didn’t hear about this first time around, but it sounds like a good idea. As one of the commenters noted, even if it doesn’t go anywhere it might make the Government justify why these laws are needed when there are perfectly good, less draconian one already in place.
- Among the Inept, Researchers Discover, Ignorance Is Bliss – “People who do things badly … are usually supremely confident of their abilities — more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.” I can’t actually remember how I stumbled across this link any more, but it makes fascinating reading. Does kind of make you a little paranoid, though.
- 10 Geeky Tricks for Getting Out of Bed in the Morning – I should probably read this more closely when I’m properly awake. I’m getting worse and worse at getting up in the morning…
- Does University Challenge really test intelligence? – No. Knowing a bunch of obscure facts isn’t intelligence. If that’s the measure, then Wikipedia is way smarter than Einstein or Newton or Gauss or Darwin.
- Review: Canon EOS 5D Mark II – If anyone wants to buy 5000 copies of Yummy so that I can afford one of these I’d very much appreciate it.
- Creationists are still denying Darwin. Stephen Moss asks why – “What worries me about many of her fellow creationists is that they begin with the Bible and then start looking for scientific evidence to back up what their faith tells them is true.” That and the fact that they keep coming up with the same arguments.
- Scientists Agree: It’s in His Kiss – “Over 90 percent of human society engages in what, if you get right down to it, seems like a very strange thing to do: putting faces together and trading spit.” Seems like a very appropriate thing to discuss on Valentine’s Day…
- Anti-Bootlegging Measures and the iPhone App Store – There’s a lot of talk about cracked iPhone apps at the moment and the measures that developers are taking. The interesting and surprising thing here is how effective a polite message is, at least in the case of a Mac app.
- 1234567890 Day – Finally, an event worth celebrating…
- Ravenous Clock Runs Backward, Scares Children – Neat.
- Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live – “The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin.”
- Zappos CEO Talks Culture Fit and the Importance of Creating a ‘Wow’ Experience – Interesting article about how Zappos have thrived.
- Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge – “A historian of science at Stanford, Proctor points out that when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: Ignorance increases.”
- The Palm Pre’s possible Achilles heel: battery life – All the glitz you see in the Pre demo and videos may come at a price.
- Tags: Database schemas – Interesting article on how sites like delicious might handle tagging. Yummy until v2.0 uses the “Scuttle” method. Subsequent versions modify this a little for performance reasons.
- Market Yourself An iParadigm – “The part I love the most is that the people making the ‘just market your app!’ comment have no real idea how much effective marketing costs. Oh sure, you can go far on viral and word-of-mouth marketing, but it all pales in comparison to even a small banner graphic in the App Store.” Making your application visible is hard.
- Matthew Alexander on Torture – Nice examples of why torture doesn’t work. Worth reading the linked articles.
- Robbery suspect left his address – “Chicago police have arrested a man who allegedly robbed a bank using a threatening note written on the back of his own pay cheque.” Brilliant.
- Reliving Cuba’s revolution – Interesting to see this on “film.” They wouldn’t let us take cameras up there when I visited in 2004. (Plenty of other pictures of Cuba on ZX81.org.uk though!)
- What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting – “Once one understands that a text message travels wirelessly as a stowaway within a control channel, one sees the carriers’ pricing plans in an entirely new light.” I worked on text messaging software back in the late nineties and, at least for GSM, is absolutely true.
- Internet sites could be given ‘cinema-style age ratings’, Culture Secretary says – “Giving film-style ratings to individual websites is one of the options being considered, [Andy Burnham, British Culture Secretary confirms].” The government still seems not to understand how the internet works. If implemented, this will basically result in a system that’s easy to circumvent and is paid for with higher ISP connection fees. We all lose.
- Happy Birthday Earthrise – “Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Isn’t that something…” Still very much awe-inspiring even forty years later.
- Fearless: Apple’s Macworld Expo exit is part of its DNA – “In Apple’s estimation, the best time to kill off a successful product or brand is ‘as soon as possible.’ Dropping a winner means creating a new winner to replace it, and that’s exactly what Apple has decided it must do to be successful: create great new products again and again.”
- If programming languages were religions… – Apparently I’m into Voodoo and Taoism…
- A humanist discussion of… ‘creationism’ – A nice rebuttal of some of the more common “arguments” against evolution.
- Classics in Lego – Famous photographs in Lego. Fantastic!
- A shaming victory on 42 days – The governments absurd law, allowing the Police to detail people for up to 42 days without charge, is not popular. Just hoping the Lords send it back with some rude comments attached.