February 5, 2010
“ The people don’t want “tablet computers” with Ubuntu and OpenID (worst name ever for a product attempting broad acceptance). They could honestly give a shit whether it’s a closed or open system. And, let’s be really honest, they probably care as much about DRM as they do about baseball players juicing; by which I mean not very much at all. They want things to work most of the time, and be easy to fix when they don’t. And if the process by which it happens is “magic” they are totally cool with that.
Mule Design Studio’s Blog: The Failure of Empathy •
“ For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan. If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.
Our world may be a giant hologram - space - 15 January 2009 - New Scientist •
February 3, 2010

alex and luke dot com (via alexandlukedotcom)

Two friends are driving around the continent, and using social media to direct their car.  Might be an interesting project to keep an eye on.

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TEDxVancouver - Neill Blomkamp - 11/21/09 (via TEDxTalks)

The director of District 9 talks about the search for alien life.

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February 2, 2010
Facebook Developers | HipHop for PHP: Move Fast

This is a bit exciting.

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“ AAAAAaaaaaagh!” “Please calm down. Breathe deeply. Anxiety is a normal part of the temporal displacement field. It will pass quickly. OK. OK? OK. Now: Hello. I am you, from the year 2010, two decades in the future.
An Entirely Other Day: The Days of Miracles and Wonder •
February 1, 2010
Canada follows America’s lead on reducing emissions | Alberta | News | Edmonton Sun

This headline (not the story or the ensuing action) makes me so sad. 10 years ago, this would have been reversed.

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HacKey

HacKey searches through your Last.fm favourites and ranks them by musical key, which is nifty.  It’s a three-way tie for me between C Major, C# minor, and G Major, each getting 13%.

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January 11, 2010
Office Worker Hobo Code

Hobo code rewritten for the average office worker. Put together by an old coworker of mine, who is better than us all.

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November 20, 2009
Apple's Mistake

I think this is one of the best criticisms of the App Store process yet:

How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn’t like?
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