Technology
razib | July 7, 2009Gmail and a raft of other apps were finally thrown out of beta recently. The assumed reason is that Google is trying to horn in on the enormous business market for applications, and people can get fired for greenlighting betas which break. But if you miss that not-ready-for-primetime new app feel, go "Back to Beta".
drorzel | July 7, 2009Matt Leifer had a good comment to yesterday's post about how the editing function, in my opinion, adds considerable value to a book that you don't get with a blog. I got distracted and didn't reply to it, and since a day in blog-time is like a week in the real world, I'll promote it to a post so it doesn't get buried and forgotten:
Yes, but starting a wiki in order to put together a more coherent version of the ideas from the blog may have been equally effective. Blogging is not the only web publishing tool.
Of course, I realize that you still wouldn't get the benefits of the editorial…
cevans | July 6, 2009
One of Buckminster Fuller's most interesting conceits was his dislike of specialization, which he likened to a kind of intellectual prison, restraining "bright" people from truly understanding the complex, and general, systems of which they were a part. After all, he argued, what causes extinction in the animal kingdom? Overspecialization. Of course, it's logical, and it's s problem we see over and over again in human history, from the Industrial Revolution displacing specialized factory workers to the often daunting gap of comprehension between the social and "hard" sciences. As soon as we…
drorzel | July 6, 2009There's another round of "science blogs will make traditional journalism obsolete!" going on in connection with last week's World Conference of Science Journalists-- see Mad Mike, for example. This wouldn't be interesting except that it happened to collide with my reading Unscientific America, and it struck me that the book is, in many ways, one of the best arguments you could construct for the superiority of the traditional publishing process to doing everything with blogs.
As I said in my review of the book, there's really nothing in Unscientific America that will come as a surprise to…
gregladen | July 2, 2009This is not 'legal' so don't do it. Later in the summer it is expected to become a feature.
gregladen | June 30, 2009Powerup: 3G by a mile, Palm Pre pwnd
Browsing: Palm Pre wins, 3Gs slowest
Real World Test: 3Gs broke, Palm Pre wins.
gregladen | June 28, 2009DOS stands for Disk Operating System.
In the old days it was how you ran your PC. You booted up the computer and you had a prompt much like today's Linux command line in appearance. If you typed "wp" at the command line, a text-based non-GUI version of WordPerfect would run. If you typed "dir" you'd get a list of files in the current subdirectory. If you typed "nc" you'd get norton commaner. Maybe. Can't remember exactly. And if you typed something like "term" .... well, you were on the internet, checking your mail in pine and maybe mining data with gopher.
Then, one day, it became…
grrlscientist | June 24, 2009tags: medicine, surgery, robots, Catherine Mohr, TEDTalks, streaming video
In this video, surgeon and inventor Catherine Mohr tours the history of surgery (and its pre-painkiller, pre-antiseptic past), then demonstrates some of the newest tools for surgery through tiny incisions, performed using nimble robot hands. Fascinating -- and very graphic. This is an inspiring presentation, but she neglected to mention all the other people who contribute to this technology, from engineers and computer designers to scientists. [21:28]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and…
bioephemera | June 23, 2009
Clocky sounds like R2D2 and looks kind of like an ATV's single-axled, pastel cub. In other words, it's really, really cute. Which is why when Clocky wakes you with its piercing warbles, crashes to your floor and rolls under your bed, you won't want to smash its little display with your fist. At least, we hope not! Click through for more details.
Clocky is a clock for people who have trouble getting out of bed. When the snooze bar is pressed, Clocky rolls off the table and finds a hiding spot, a new one every day. Clocky began as a class project. After graduating, Gauri Nanda turned Clocky…
bioephemera | June 23, 2009
I'm here in DC at the Newseum for the State of Innovation Summit, a collaboration between SEED and the Council on Competitiveness. The crowd is pretty awesome - right now Adam Bly, SEED's CEO, is sitting a few rows from me with E.O. Wilson. Earlier, Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, talked about a conversation he'd had recently with Steven Chu about using the Smithsonian's resources to enhance public understanding of climate change. As he spoke, the intense sunshine of a summer day in DC played across the Smithsonian castle turrets directly behind him (the seventh floor…
gregladen | June 22, 2009While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.
Clay Shirky: Clay Shirky's consulting focuses on the rising usefulness of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, wireless networks, social software and open-source development. New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and…
illconsidered | June 22, 2009This press release was forwarded to me:
WASHINGTON-- A new study published today in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that refrigerant chemicals, so
called F-gases, are a more dangerous global warming threat than previously
predicted. The study was authored by scientists from the
Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, United States government
agencies NOAA and EPA, along with a scientist from the chemical company
Dupont.
The paper projects that HFC (hydrofluorocarbon) emissions will rise
rapidly in coming years and decades, threatening to effectively…
clock | June 20, 2009On Twitter, things can be fast and unpredictable. Like yesterday. I was having an interesting discussion with @jason_pontin about the changing role of quoting sourses in Old vs. New journalism, when he suddenly said he had to go and then asked me if I would be interested in joining him. He was going to talk to a group of business-folks at the MIT Enterprise Forum about Web 2.0 and asked me to come in for a few minutes and explain, on Twitter, what Twitter is about. An hour later, it happened. Here is the stream (you can find it yourself by searching Twitter for #MITEO):
@jason_pontin Follow…
clock | June 19, 2009A bunch of interesting Twitterers aggregated in NYC a couple of days ago at the 140 characters conference, discussing various aspects of and uses of Twitter. One of the sessions was about Twitter and Science, led by @thesciencebabe and @jayhawkbabe. I am very jealous I could not be there, but we can all watch the video of their session:
Happy to see the last slide, with @PLoS as one of the recommended Twitter streams to follow for those interested in science.
gregladen | June 18, 2009Sean really needs to start using a script, but I'm showing this to you because it does include a couple of nice tips.
drorzel | June 18, 2009If I were to start using Twitter, what's the best way to go about that? That is, what interface to the service makes it the least annoying to use?
It would be a nice bonus if the package in question could handle multiple accounts, too. I will probably sign up as myself to try things out, but the real point will be to create a Twitter account for the dog, for book promotion purposes. It'd be nice to be able to post things from either account without having to switch programs.
(That's not a deal-breaker, but it would be nice...)
drorzel | June 17, 2009There have been a half-dozen stories in the past few weeks that looked interesting, but didn't even make it into the Links Dump for the day. Why not? Because the stories or studies were only available as PDF files.
I have no idea if this is actually getting worse, but I'm finding this more irritating than ever. It's particularly annoying as there's usually no good reason for presenting the information in question in PDF form-- you could perfectly well present it as an easily linkable and quotable HTML page. Take, for example, this NEA report on the arts-- the one-paragraph note on Inside…
clock | June 14, 2009Follow me on Twitter and you'll see this stream (to see more than one-sided conversation, search me there as well and check if there are comments on FriendFeed):
RT @ljthornton Students: Roughly 2 hours of tweets from "student living in Tehran," 22: http://bit.ly/wVpJl
#CNNFail: Twitterverse slams network's Iran absence. http://tr.im/osmp (via @jayrosen_nyu)
@HowardKurtz Hours and hours of ....talking to the camera revealing no useful information?
@HowardKurtz perhaps CNN and its audience have very different ideas of what is reporting, what is useful information, what is coverage.
@…