Officials: Fake weapons parts ‘ticking time bomb’ At the Associated Press. Fascinating story. (tagged: military politics counterfeit research ) Wired.com Goes Creative Commons: 50 Great Images That Are Now Yours Thanks, Wired. (tagged: creative commons wired ) To Find Alien Cities, Look for City Lights on Distant Planets at Popular Science (tagged: Science Astronomy ) […]
Bryan Curtis on the cult of Jurassic Park Bryan Curtis, writing at Grantland. (Timely, what with my current re-read of the novel.) (tagged: jurassicpark specialeffects essay film culture ) Wall Street Isn’t Winning It’s Cheating Matt Taibbi (who else?) writing for Rolling Stone (where else?): And we hate the rich? Come on. Success is the […]
So you want to write JavaScript for a living? by Hans Brough, re-posted at NCZOnline (tagged: javascript webdev recruiting hiring ) What feature would improve the web? Great round-up by Paul Irish. (tagged: Paul_Irish webdev web_standards ) Why Occupy Wall Street Is Bigger Than Left vs. Right Ladies and gentlemen, once again: Matt Taibbi: What […]
Occupying Wall Street Tim Bray on #OWS: Street protesters’ demands work best when they’re simple enough to fit in a short declarative sentence, for example “Mubarak must go”. In this case the appropriate courses of corrective action aren’t like that, involving things like a financial-transaction tax, separation-of-concerns regulation, and eliminating institutions which are “too big […]
Challenges of Writing Alternate History Set in Other Cultures Interesting piece on alternate history and other misc. steampunkery, over at Tor.com: And unlike a novel set in a secondary (imaginary) world, there is no useful way of working this information into the book: alternate history explicitly relies on readers’ pre-existing knowledge. There’s simply no place […]
Making Laws About Making Babies at NYTimes.com (tagged: research politics fertility ) One-Third of Sun-Like Stars Have Earth-Like Planets In Habitable Zone And (as usual?) the comment thread from pedantic astrophysics nerds is awesome. (tagged: Astronomy Science research ) Innovation Starvation Neal Stephenson (writing at World Policy Institute) on the demise of innovation. Mandatory reading. […]
CSS3 tools by Lea Verou (tagged: css3 tools webdev ) A survival guide for Unix beginners (tagged: unix CLI ) 25 Insights on Becoming a Better Writer At The 99 Percent. The common theme: find what works for you, stop making excuses, and put the goddamn pen to the goddamn paper. (tagged: writing creativity ) […]
Git Reference (tagged: reference git ) Scala School Nice work, folks. I especially like the bit about teaching Scala as a new language and not as "Java, improved". (tagged: tutorial programming Scala development learning ) Don’t Get Fireballed at brown blog (via D. Howell) — filed under "I'm already doing this but it's worth the outbound […]
Code camp offers tech advice to local professionals The mention of me is basically just a copy/paste of the bio that I submitted to the conference… but hey: for some reason I got called out. (Maybe I made an impression?) (tagged: Vermont tech ) What teachers really want to tell parents Ron Clark: This one […]
Diamond planets, climate change and the scientific method Matthew Bailes: …I suspect we’d find a lot of commentators, many with no scientific qualifications, pouring scorn on our findings. People on the fringe of science would be quoted as opponents of our work, arguing that it was nothing more than a theory yet to be conclusively […]