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
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.”
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.”
Tuesday, 18 March 2008
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.”
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.”
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.”