gregladen | March 8, 2009I have a bunch of designers at my job, and they all carry around an apple. No not the fruit, you know the vastly overpriced and over-hyped electronics brand. These guys think they are so cool with there notebooks running extremely expensive designer software. I think this is somewhat of a problem with Linux. While Linux is actually a lot cooler then apple, it's not perceived by enough people as being cool.
Linux the cool factor, Part I and Part I.
gregladen | March 7, 2009My first storage medium was paper tape. Narrow strips of tape with holes punched out of it to store programs and data, could be printed out of a tape-puncher attached to a paper-based TTY terminal, or read into the terminal. Then, I used punch cards. Eventually I upgraded to a casette player for small data sets, and a tiny magnetic rectangle for my TI 59.
And I can relive all of these experiences with a walk down memory lane. ...
Computer Data Storage Through the Ages -- From Punch Cards to Blu-Ray
By the way, when the 5.25 inch floppy disk was replaced with with the 3.5 inch plastic…
gregladen | March 7, 2009
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gregladen | March 7, 2009... giving talk at University of Minnesota.
taken from way far away with my very crappy cell phone camera.
gregladen | March 7, 2009I recently posted about the work by Pagel and colleagues regarding ancient lexicons. That work, recently revived in the press for whatever reasons such things happen, is the same project reported a while back in Nature. And, as I recall, I read that paper and promised to blog about it but did not get to it. Yet.
So here we go.
The tail does not wag the dog
The primary finding of the Pagel et al. study is this: When comparing lexicons from different languages, meanings that shared a common word in an ancestral language change over time more slowly if the word in question is used more…
gregladen | March 7, 2009Dawkins at Oklahoma
And this update on the Okie Legislature's assholitude
This is funny. Julia's adding it to her homework assignment on Pluto
gregladen | March 7, 2009 The Humanism of the Star Trek Universe. Scott Lohman and Robert Price on Atheists Talk #0060, Sunday March 8, 2009
Gene Roddenberry convinced the executives at Paramount that a show about exploring space would appeal to a mass audience. They funded a weekly series for three beautiful years, and it turns out he was partially right. The show was not a ratings giant until it went into syndication and cartoons some five years after it had been canceled. From there it fostered a "Big Bang" of cultural infusion. Movies, fan fiction, spinoff series and "cons" exploded the concepts of Star Trek…
gregladen | March 7, 2009Even "Windows" computers (laptops in particular) will be using this OpenSource minisystem.
Splashtop is preinstalled on the hard drive or in the onboard Flash memory of new PCs and motherboards by their manufacturers. Splashtop is a software-only solution that requires no additional hardware. A small component of Splashtop is embedded in the BIOS of the PC--that's the part that runs as soon as you press the power button.
Within Splashtop, you have the choice of running one of its applications, such as the Splashtop Web Browser, or booting your operating system. Splashtop is compatible…
gregladen | March 7, 2009.. now, this is not a Congo Memoir. And it may be a distraction more than a reality. We'll have to see....
BUKIMA, Congo -- Jean-Marie Serundori's eyes light up when he sees his old hulk of a friend Kabirizi.
War, displacement and bloodthirsty rebels had gotten between them.
But for the first time in years, this section of a venerated Congolese national park is rebel-free. Government wildlife rangers, like Mr. Serundori, are firmly in control -- for the moment. And Kabirizi, a 500-pound silverback gorilla with a head as big as an engine block, seems to be flourishing in his kingdom of…
gregladen | March 6, 2009Climate change is already having a detectable impact on birds across Europe. This is the message from a group of scientists who have created the world's first indicator of the impacts of climate change on wildlife at a continental scale. "We hear a lot about climate change, but our paper shows that its effects are being felt right now", said lead author Dr Richard Gregory from the RSPB (BirdLife in the UK).
Of the 122 common species included in the analysis, 75% are predicted to experience declines across their ranges if they continue to respond to climatic warming in the way the models…
gregladen | March 6, 2009At the 2008 EG Conference, artist Miru Kim talks about her work. Kim explores industrial ruins underneath New York and then photographs herself in them, nude -- to bring these massive, dangerous, hidden spaces into sharp focus.
gregladen | March 6, 2009I hope you can see this. Your site is borked. A previously registered user name and comment does not work. Getting a new user name and comment does not work. Your "security code" words are usually illegible. Your "Email us" link is incorrectly configured. You can't do it the way you've done it for many system to read it. Borked.
So, I have a comment on this post of yours regarding this statement by Michele Bachmann:
If you want to look at economic history over the last 100 years. I call it punctuated equilibrium. If you look at FDR, LBJ, and Barack Obama, this is really the final…
gregladen | March 6, 2009Perfectionism is the least of the behaviors that are encouraged in art but need to be set aside if the artist wants to be fully accepted in "polite society." Artists need the obsessiveness to see a project through with little feedback (or despite feedback). They need enough pride to believe that their ideas are worth executing. They need to be mercurial enough to suit their thinking to a new and very different project from their last. They need to ask uncomfortable questions and set aside polite fictions. They need to be willing to upset people. They need to be willing to manipulate their…
gregladen | March 6, 2009I had been having thoughts regarding the larger context of Richard Dawkins' visit to the University of Minnesota (in which he gave this talk), and the socio-political context of this visit, but had not decided if I would write about them. Then I read, at Pharyngula (the other Minnesota scienceblogs.com blog - you probably have not heard of it, but it's pretty good) this post: Richard Dawkins: banned in Oklahoma? Indeed, a legislator of that wayward state is trying to ban the man from the U. As if.
What I was thinking about requires some historical background regarding Dawkins' visit.…
gregladen | March 6, 2009...
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gregladen | March 6, 2009I'm starting to worry that the last few Friday Weird Science write-ups by Scicurious (who seems, these days, to be the primary blogger at Neurotopia) have been of papers that I happen to have read. Just so you know: Thousands of papers are published per week across the diverse sciences, and although Scicurious tends to deal with life science and I tend to read life science, the chances of this particular harmonic convergence across bloggers regarding papers published over the last decade is statistically almost zero. More likely, Scicurious and I just have similar taste ... or lack thereof…
gregladen | March 6, 2009Putting Open Source to the Mom Test
I stumbled across Amber's blog by accident today - she's writing a series of posts that document her experience installing and using Linux distros and a variety of open source applications.
I hope open source developers are following along as stay-at-home-mom Amber shares her adventures in Linux and open source. She eloquently points out usability issues that make it hard for your average mom to race out and embrace open source. Developers: Take note. For that matter, publishers should take note - I hope Amber gets a book deal out of her blog series.…