I’m selling my car
I’m going carbon-neutral, gas-free, and parking space oblivious. I’m selling my car.
So Proudly We Hail…
November 26, 2007 – 8:47 pm
Romulus and Remus Cave Discovered
November 26, 2007 – 5:59 pm
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Romulus and Remus Cave Discovered
Rome has revealed what its leading archaeologist says is "one of the greatest discoveries ever made", a lost shrine dedicated to the ancient city’s mythical founders.
Andrea Carandini told a press conference yesterday that a large vaulted hall beneath the Palatine hill was almost certainly the fabled Lupercale - a sanctuary believed by ancient Romans to be the cave where the twin boys Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf. The professor acknowledged the evidence was as yet not totally conclusive, but said only "one doubt in thousand" remained.
The End of the Printed Word Draweth Nigh
November 18, 2007 – 1:27 pm
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The End of the Printed Word Draweth Nigh
"There’s 550 years of technological development in the book, and it’s all designed to work with the four to five inches from the front of the eye to the part of the brain that does the processing [of the symbols on the page]," says Hill, a boisterous man who wears a kilt to a seafood restaurant in Seattle where he stages an impromptu lecture on his theory. "This is a high-resolution scanning machine," he says, pointing to the front of his head. "It scans five targets a second, and moves between targets in only 20 milliseconds. And it does this repeatedly for hours and hours and hours." He outlines the centuries-long process of optimizing the book to accommodate this physiological marvel: the form factor, leading, fonts, justification … "We have to take the same care for the screen as we’ve taken for print."
Hill insists—not surprisingly, considering his employer—that the ideal reading technology is not necessarily a dedicated e-reading device, but the screens we currently use, optimized for that function. (He’s read six volumes of Gibbon’s "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" on a Dell Pocket PC.) "The Internet Explorer is not a browser—it’s a reader," he says. "People spend about 20 percent of the time browsing for information and 80 percent reading or consuming it. The transition has already happened. And we haven’t noticed."
Newsweek looks at Amazon’s bid to change reading. It’s the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen and it comes with obligatory DRM. No more loans, no more copies.
I’m all about moving to a fully digital age (friends thought I was crazy for ditching CDs around 2001 in favor of these new MP3 things) but this is not the way to do it.
[via DF]
The (Pseudo) Science of Sleep
November 18, 2007 – 7:55 am
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The (Pseudo) Science of Sleep
For years, doctors have been discouraged by Americans’ disregard for and mismanagement of their sleep. (“I might as well have been running a chain of beauty parlors for the last four decades” is how one described his advocacy.) But bragging about how little you sleep, a hallmark of the ’80s power broker, is starting in certain circles to come off as masochistic buffoonery. The sleep docs we once ignored appear on morning shows to offer tips. Health professionals and marketers are hopeful that a new seriousness about sleep will continue moving out of a luxury-minded vanguard and into the mainstream. Sleep may finally be claiming its place beside diet and exercise as both a critical health issue and a niche for profitable consumer products. [...]
Our conception of sleep as an unbroken block is so innate that it
can seem inconceivable that people only two centuries ago should have
experienced it so differently. Yet in an experiment at the National
Institutes of Health a decade ago, men kept on a schedule of 10 hours
of light and 14 hours of darkness — mimicking the duration of day and
night during winter — fell into the same, segmented pattern. They began
sleeping in two distinct, roughly four-hour stretches, with one to
three hours of somnolence — just calmly lying there — in between. Some sleep disorders,
namely waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall
asleep again, “may simply be this traditional pattern, this normal
pattern, reasserting itself,” Ekirch told me. “It’s the seamless sleep
that we aspire to that’s the anomaly, the creation of the modern
world.”
With two parents and other family members who have or had sleep disorders, I’ve always been interested in its mechanics. The Times Magazine takes a look at the science and myth of a good night’s rest.
The Deterrence Factor
November 18, 2007 – 7:49 am
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The Deterrence Factor
For the first time in a generation, the question of whether the death penalty deters murders has captured the attention of scholars in law and economics, setting off an intense new debate about one of the central justifications for capital punishment.
According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.
Interesting thoughts on that perennially divisive issue in American politics.
A World About Ideas (Dean Kamen)
November 14, 2007 – 2:00 pm
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A World About Ideas (Dean Kamen)
We’re moving from a world of stuff, from the idea that there’s a finite amount of gold out there, a finite amount of almost anything out there. Throughout all of history, people fought over stuff: land, fuel, stuff. But in your generation, the most value that will be created isn’t stuff anymore. It really is ideas. The Internet is an abstraction, and the value of Google exceeds the value of all the car makers.
In a world that’s about ideas, it’s not a zero-sum game. You don’t have to win by someone else losing, where you have the gold or oil or water, and somebody else doesn’t.
- Dean Kamen [via AT:Green]
Inventor of the Segway and a plethora of other cool stuff
Economics 101 [Translated]
November 10, 2007 – 4:49 pm
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Economics 101 [Translated]
[via GetRichSlowly]
Creativity Strangled by Law
November 8, 2007 – 9:14 am
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Creativity Strangled by Law
When democratic laws force a population to consistently break those laws, whence the rule of law? Dr. Larry Lessig explores the world of media and copyright in a 19 minute presentation not to be missed.
[via Presentation Zen]
But how do we know she’s a witch?
November 4, 2007 – 12:03 pm
Majesty and Italian Beef
November 4, 2007 – 6:53 am
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Majesty and Italian Beef
To drive into Chicago
on a sunny Friday afternoon is to experience the city the way God — or
at least the holy trinity of Daniel Burnham, Louis H. Sullivan and Mies
van der Rohe — intended it. Iconic skyscrapers rise from the
strip-mall-strewn prairie to pierce the blue in a jumble of geometries,
their glinting glass, steel, stone and concrete announcing the power
and prestige of the capital of the Midwest. [...]What was this city, then, if such as myself, on a low budget, could
essentially see, do and eat whatever I wanted without straining my
wallet? Were the skyscrapers merely a prairie mirage, a veil for the
cheap, accessible delights hidden at their feet?
The New York Times discovers the Chicago of the graduate student.
Brave New Mouse
November 2, 2007 – 7:02 am
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Brave New Mouse
The mouse can run up to six kilometres (3.7 miles) at a speed of 20 metres per minute for five hours or more without stopping. Scientists said that this was equivalent of a man cycling at speed up an Alpine mountain without a break. Although it eats up to 60 per cent more food than an ordinary mouse, the modified mouse does not put on weight. It also lives longer and enjoys an active sex life well into old age – being capable of breeding at three times the normal maximum age.
