March 2008
Sunday, 30 March 2008
Do Two Recent Novels About China Obscure the Looming Robot Threat? Yes
New York Magazine: "And this business with the Chinese is a dangerous distraction -- a second front, if you will, in a time when America doesn't have the resources to fight two imaginary future wars at once."
Friday, 28 March 2008
Cupcake Related Program Activities
Pittsburgh area cupcake fans, take note: our friends at CoCo's Cupcake Cafe have a new web site. "Seeing as the last web site was kind of half-baked."
Tuesday, 25 March 2008
Malthus was right!
Paul Krugman: "The same forces that made the industrial revolution possible -- above all, the spirit of inquiry and rationality -- also led to the birth of analytical economics. There probably couldn't have been a Malthus until the world was on the verge of becoming non-Malthusian."
Sunday, 23 March 2008
What Created This Monster?
New York Times: "Bear Stearns held credit default swap contracts carrying an outstanding value of $2.5 trillion, analysts say."
Saturday, 22 March 2008
Shockwave traffic jam recreated for first time
New Scientist: "Pinpointing the causes of shockwave jams is an exercise in psychology more than anything else. 'If they had set up an experiment with robots driving in a perfect circle, flow breakdown would not have occurred. Human error is needed to cause the fluctuations in behaviour,' says Rees."
Wednesday, 19 March 2008
Kyoto By Way Of Kansas City
Tea Leaves: "The point here is that the very uncertainly in how my requests are going to be processed creates a huge disincentive for me, the customer, to even bother asking. I start from the assumption that it's going to be too painful to get a bottle of liquor from the store that sells liquor."
Rock Band with a real drum kit!
Rock Band - Forums: "I wanted to play the drums and my friend has a kit set up in the room down the hall. So I had him let me in, and I set up my xbox and Rock Band in front of it and tried to play along in practice mode."
Tuesday, 18 March 2008
Martian Headsets
Joel Spolsky: "There is no solution. Each solution is terribly wrong. Eric Bangeman at ars technica writes, 'The IE team has to walk a fine line between tight support for W3C standards and making sure sites coded for earlier versions of IE still display correctly.' This is incorrect. It's not a fine line. It's a line of negative width. There is no place to walk."
They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know.
They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know.: "'I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine,' he says. It turns out that Mike is clearly not a naïf. He’s Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management. And Jon, who is dismayed to learn that the drivers he needs don’t exist? That’s Jon A. Shirley, a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating officer. And Steven, who reports that missing drivers are anything but exceptional, is in a good position to know: he’s Steven Sinofsky, the company’s senior vice president responsible for Windows."
Wednesday, 12 March 2008
Howard Gobioff, 1971-2008
Sunday, 9 March 2008
Chess and Politics
Neil Mix: "So why is this post titled Chess and Politics? Because you can draw a direct analogy to the current Democratic presidential primary between Clinton and Obama. The pundits were looking to see if Obama would strike a knockout blow last Tuesday with the Texas and Ohio primaries. He did, but the pundits don't realize it yet. It'll take a few weeks to sink in."
Friday, 7 March 2008
Antisocial
Bob Cringely: "What killed CB radio was that moment when its annoyance factor exceeded its utility"
Tuesday, 4 March 2008
Gary Gygax, 'Father of D&D,' Dies at 69
Wired.com: "Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin"
Monday, 3 March 2008
IE team changes its mind on IE8 default behaviour
QuirksBlog: "Microsoft has decided to put the interests of web standards above the interests of the Intranets of its corporate clients. I advise you to read the previous paragraph again."