As a long-time Emacs afficionado, I find this article rather amusing. Emacs Key Bindings Make You Retarded makes the case that years of being used to abominations such as hitting Ctrl+A to go to the beginning of a line can actually prevent you from using newer interfaces that are probably much better, ergonomically and productively. [...]
It’s always nice to see that insanity among the geek set isn’t a purely American phenomenon. Case in point: one Briton’s construction of a PVC flamethrower from bits available at any hardware store. This isn’t perhaps as crazy as Interpretive Arson’s Dance Dance Immolation, but probably equally likely to instantly remove your eyebrows should a [...]
Scientists have been touting the health benefits of green tea for a number of years. Now someone has figured out how to use the tannin in green tea to polish hard drive heads. Not only are the researchers getting better results than the traditional diamond-and-harsh-chemical process, the solution is biodegradable.
via Boing Boing
Creative Commons kicked off their new Sampling License today. An artist can release work under the Sampling License to give other artists permission to use portions of the work, without re-distributing the entire original work verbatim. This presents a legal way for collage artists and remixers to borrow bits and bobs of existing work without [...]
Now there’s something that’s been missing from NASA‘s spacecraft: uranium fission power plants. The planned Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (Jimo) is a nuclear-powered monster, around 18 to 30 meters long.
Jimo also would bristle with fins to dissipate the intense heat from its reactor.
Yeah, I’ll bet it would. You could also set up a Jovian espresso [...]
John Walker, founder of Autodesk, creator of The Hacker’s Diet, and all-around smart-type guy, has a fun new tool available for your encrypting pleasure. JavaScrypt is an entirely Javascript-based implementation of the AES that runs from the comfort of your very own Web browser. Though not as speedy as crypto code hand-tooled to run natively [...]
Dan Sugalski has an excellent article that explains what a type is in computer programming. This is the best and most complete explanation I’ve read about types and why they spark so many arguments among programmers.
I need to clear some time in my schedule to read the rest of the series Dan has written; his [...]
Here’s an Advent calendar with some real rewards behind its little cardboard panels. Instead of little chocolate treats, Mark Fowler’s Perl Advent Calendar offers tips and tricks about a different Perl module for each day of Advent, plus an extra module on Christmas day. Definitely worth a look, whether you’re YAPH, both Christian and geeky, [...]
I’d heard about the efforts of experts to develop markings that would keep people out of radioactive waste disposal sites for the 10,000 years that they will remain dangerous, but until now, I hadn’t read any of the experts’ findings. Excerpts from ‘Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation [...]
Loading
