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 ) […]
Fiore Olive Oils (tagged: food todo gifts ) Speed-of-light experiments give baffling result at Cern at BBC News (via /.) — "I knew it!" (tagged: science physics research )
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 […]
SPDY: An experimental protocol for a faster web at The Chromium Projects — Maybe I'm a little late in looking into this but… better late than never? Got about halfway through it; looks interesting and promising and I need to finish reading. (tagged: webdev tools google performance SPDY todo ) Optimising your Application with Grails […]
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 […]
The Sass Way (tagged: Ruby css Sass blog ) Sass for Designers at SonSpring (tagged: webdev css sass ) Nanolaw with Daughter Been meaning to read this for months. Finally for around to it. So worth it. (tagged: writing scifi future history fiction ) In the privacy of our homes at Code: Flickr Developer Blog […]
HOWTO Use UTF-8 Throughout Your Web Stack at rentzsch.tumblr.com, via DF (tagged: webdev web programming UTF-8 ) Chrome and Safari extension to rehabilitate disruptive footnotes. at Ideon Open Ideas — a great idea but sadly doesn’t work on blog.founddrama.net yet; it appears to be looking for footnotes with fn embedded in the href… so perhaps […]