January 2012
26 posts
Watch10 meter dive dry-run (by GreenDot Project)
This is what I spent this past Saturday doing. It’s for science. And the Olympics.
“There were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are...”
– Udacity and the future of online universities. After having 160,000 students in his free online course on AI, Stanford prof Sebastian Thrun resigned his tenured professorship to start a free online university. He’s hoping for 500,000 people in his first class.
“To any informed contemporary child, a robot is simply a computer being carried...”
– William Gibson, “Googling the Cyborg”
“If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not...”
– The only mention of “space” in Shakespeare, Shakespeare Sonnet 44. Courtesy of John Powers.
“Providing a new approach for understanding the experience of things as things,...”
– Amazon description of Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing
“What’s Huckleberry Finn about? Hucklberry Finn is a novel which is about a...”
– Bruce Sterling, Closing the 2011 A+E Conference
“So, so many of us know Photoshop. We know its flaws, its terribleness, and the...”
– Paul Ford, 0h30m w/Photoshop (Ftrain.com)
“This is not the first time engineers have been given the challenge of packing...”
– Lights, Camera, Barbie? - NYTimes.com
“an impeller-pump” with “glitterized fluid”?!? First person to find a picture of this wins one Internet.
December 2011
11 posts
“For example, he has called for “a massive new program to build a permanent lunar...”
– David BrooksThe Gingrich Tragedy - NYTimes.com
Unlike Brooks this makes me more excited for a Gingrich presidency. If we’re going to have boondoggles, let all our boondoggles be sufficiently sci-fi.
“The next Steve Jobs will totally be a chick, because girls are No. 2—and...”
– Louis CK, The Next Steve Jobs Will Be A Chick | Fast Company
November 2011
21 posts
WatchBiomechanic Leg Visualization (from data in Biomechanics and Motor Control of Human Movement by David A. Winter)
“High school and college students may be ‘digital natives,’ but they’re wretched...”
– Clive Thompson on why kids can’t search and the importance of educating against the filter bubble (via curiositycounts)
Also, it doesn’t help that Google constantly changes their search algorithm for the worse, taking away user control, breaking power-user switches, etc. How do you teach...
“Hey everyone, I just thought of a metaphor for “web apps”!...”
– Bret Victor, serialized on twitter: 1, 2, 3, 4