September 2011
22 posts
August 2011
15 posts
“Nerds: You know more about technology than anybody else, and anybody who knows less than you is a total ****. I love you for that. But normal people deserve wonderful technology too. And half the **** you call computing—running custom ROMs, reinstalling OSes, ****ing with network settings—is like a chef sharpening his knives over and over and calling that cooking. Real computing is the actual stuff you do—cutting videos, editing photos, writing. Or at least it should be. Not the **** people do to make all of that work.”
—
Yes. This was the exact epiphany I had a decade ago when it became clear that I was using Karen’s computer more than my own because I kept fiddling with settings and drivers and infrastructure. Had to fiddle with that stuff just to make it work at all, and never got past that point to anything even remotely useful.
It was like being stopped at the entrance to a restaurant and having to fill out a 50-page questionnaire about your preferences in fork style and placement, glass style, water level, lighting level and color, cloth or paper napkins, small or large plates, plate rim color…
The best day of my technical life was when I realized the defaults on her machine were good enough to do what I needed, so I didn’t need to choose them all over and over again.
“As of 2Q/2011, the WB-8 device has demonstrated excellent plasma confinement properties. EMC2 is conducting high power pulsed experiments on WB-8 to test the Wiffle-Ball plasma scaling law on plasma energy and confinement.”
—
from the Project Summary provided by the Energy/Matter Conversion Corporation to Recovery.gov.
In other words, they’re making great progress on creating a breakthrough fusion device that could change all our lives.
I can’t stress enough how important this is; a Navy project that would ordinarily have been completely confidential is seeing a little sunlight because of the reporting requirements associated with stimulus funds. The results are being posted to the Polywell page on Wikipedia, which folds in other scraps of information the company leaks out occasionally.
How Dangerous is That Little Green Spot of Mold on Your Bread? →
1.usa.gov
Learn about mold and food safety from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
I was just thinking about this the other day. TLDR for hard cheeses: cut away a chunk about 1 inch (3cm) around the mold and re-wrap the rest. TheMoreYouKnow™
“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”
— Lawrence M. Krauss (via wilwheaton)
PaleBlue.blog: Some important points of clarification →
paleblueblog.org
So here’s the thing. This isn’t a “NASA report.” It’s not work funded by NASA, nor is it work supported by NASA in other ways. It was just a fun paper written by a few friends, one of whom happens to have a NASA affiliation.
This happens all the time, unfortunately. NASA has amazing levels of credibility and prestige among the general public, and anyone even remotely connected with them shares an outsized amount of that prestige.
The sad part is where we all lose; I’ve seen people with refreshing opinions and crazy new ideas go completely silent as soon as they realize the weight that NASA affiliation gives their ideas.
“
You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts.
You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth.
But that’s all.
” —Dear Sugar, The Rumpus (via brklyn)
Worth reading the original article all the way through.
This rings true for me. My life is a hundred times more awesome than I would have expected a decade ago, despite failing at pretty much everything I thought I’d need back then.
USA.gov: Locating Food Deserts →
blog.usa.gov
About 13.5 million people in the Unites States live in food deserts, areas that are generally identified as low-income communities without ready access to healthy and affordable food.
The Food Desert Locator, developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, pinpoints areas of the country that…
It’s a great visualization, even if I did originally read it as “Locating Food Desserts”. Some of the areas around San Diego aren’t so interesting (like the airport runways), but others are surprising. Is that a desert in Little Italy?
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Out-of-this-world ideas funded →
cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com
NASA is awarding $100,000 one-year grants to 30 teams for out-of-this-world ideas ranging from new kinds of spacesuits to quantum communication and space solar power.
The awards were announced today under the auspices of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program, or NIAC. The space agency said the concepts were chosen on the basis of their potential for enhancing future space missions.
“Printable Spacecraft”. “Aneutronic Fusion Spacecraft Architecture”. “Ambient Plasma Wave Propulsion”. How cool are those project titles?
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4:37
July 2011
12 posts
“Evil can kill a person but it cannot kill a people.
We will punish the guilty. The punishment will be more generosity, more tolerance, more democracy.” —Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg & Oslo mayor Fabian Stang (via kateoplis)
We will punish the guilty. The punishment will be more generosity, more tolerance, more democracy.” —Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg & Oslo mayor Fabian Stang (via kateoplis)
Hack Days and Code-a-thons | HowTo.gov →
howto.gov
They listed Science Hack Day on the page until I corrected them that NASA supported Science Hack Day as opposed to organized it. Now it’s not listed at all :/
Jed? Do you have a comment on this?
What it's like to live with cats...
They watch you work.
They prevent you from working.
They take a bath on top of you.
They get into places they shouldn’t be, and judge your taste in books while there.
They sleep on you.
They wake up on you.
They sit in your favorite chair.
They think you are a chair.
They look cute all the time.
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Cham Letter Nga
Cham is the language of the Cham people of Southeast Asia, and formerly the language of the kingdom of Champa in central Vietnam. The Cham script is a descendant of the Brahmi script of India, itself a descendant of the Aramaic script. - Wikipedia
This one reminds me of particle traces in a cloud chamber.
June 2011
13 posts
Good Morning Moon | Marian Call →
mariancall.bandcamp.com
Preview single from Marian’s upcoming album ‘Something Fierce!’ Written for waking up astronauts as well as sleepy terrestrials.
If you like space, Marian Call, or uplifting songs, you must listen to this. Really.
See-No-Evil Monkey
The three wise monkeys embody the proverbial principle to “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”. The three monkeys are Mizaru, covering his eyes, who sees no evil; Kikazaru, covering his ears, who hears no evil; and Iwazaru, covering his mouth, who speaks no evil. - Wikipedia
He’s not making this up, really! See, you can type them all in a row: 🙈🙉🙊 If you only see boxes, try installing the Symbola font. See also the Emoticons page at Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources.
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code point: Undo Symbol →
codepoint.tumblr.com
Behavioral Issues in the Use of Interactive Systems, a 1976 research report by Lance A. Miller and John C. Thomas of IBM, noted that “It would be quite useful to permit users to ‘take back’ at least the immediately preceding command (by issuing some special ‘undo’ command).” The programmers…
Great idea, terrible symbol. “It’s just a jump to left…”
WHERE WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO VISIT ON YOUR PLANET?
I’ve heard Venice is quite nice.
Or wait. Is this an attempt to get the answer to my security question? Sneaky robot…
Tumblr Comments/Replies
My big complaint about having Tumblr replies turned on is that my friends will leave insightful comments or questions and there is no way to reply (unless I reblog, which is always way more emphasis than an answer warrants). It happens every week, just know I’m not ignoring you…
I’ve been on both ends of this, and I agree it’s frustrating. Tumblr doesn’t do true conversations well, because they either require re-reblogging a post (verboten) or replying to a reply (also verboten).
Also: Message received, Taylor. I won’t take it personally. :)
May 2011
11 posts
“During the introduction [at BioBarCamp] many people expressed an interest in “Open Science”, “Open Data”, or some other open stuff, yet it was already pretty clear that many people meant many different things by this. I think for me the most striking outcome of [a session to define it] was that not only is this a radically new concept for many people but that many people don’t have any background understanding of open source software either which can make the discussion totally impenetrable to them. This, in my view strengthens the need for having some clear brands, or standards, that are easy to point to and easy to sign up to (or not).”
—Science Commons » Blog Archive » What’s open science? (via arielwaldman)
Roman Numeral Ten Thousand
Sometimes 500, usually D, was written as I followed by Ɔ, while 1,000, usually M, was written as CIƆ. Sometimes CIƆ was reduced to a lemniscate symbol (ↀ) for denoting 1,000. Similarly, 5,000 (IƆƆ) was reduced to ↁ; and 10,000 (CCIƆƆ) was reduced to ↂ.- Wikipedia
I had no idea.
Whaaaaat?
Tibetan Mark Gug Rtags Gyas
With ༺, a bracket. - Unicode.org
Wait, really? I wonder what gets bracketed by these. It looks like the kind of thing that you’d read with fanfare, like:
༺This character is too awesome for words!༻
Dun-da-dunnnnn!
“The total company expenditures since being founded in 2002 through the 2010 fiscal year were less than $800 million, which includes all the development costs for the Falcon 1, Falcon 9 and Dragon. Included in this $800 million are the costs of building launch sites at Vandenberg, Cape Canaveral and Kwajalein, as well as the corporate manufacturing facility that can support up to 12 Falcon 9 and Dragon missions per year. This total also includes the cost of five flights of Falcon 1, two flights of Falcon 9, and one up and back flight of Dragon.”
—Elon Musk, setting the record straight on SpaceX
Yi Syllable Ie
Modern Yi (ꆈꌠꁱꂷ) is a standardized syllabary derived from the classic script in 1974 by the local Chinese government. It was made the official script of the Liangshan (Cool Mountain) dialect of the Yi language in 1980. Other dialects of Yi do not yet have a standardized script. There are 756 basic glyphs based on the Liangshan dialect, plus 63 for syllables only used for words borrowed from Chinese.- Wikipedia
The whole Modern Yi character set is like something you’d find etched in Martian caverns. Impressive stuff; it’ll probably be my go-to set for inspiring logos and icons.
When I lived in Venezuela, someone told me the story of a farmer who was bitten by a snake while working in the field. Enraged, he ran after the snake instead of tending to his wound, hacking away at the tall grass with his machete until he found it and killed it. By that time, however, the snake’s venom had spread throughout the farmer’s body, killing him in turn.
…
We got our snake. I hope it’s not too late for us to purge his venom from our system. I don’t think it’s too late.
