“By the time this child graduates from high school, her brain will have absorbed 350,000 television commercials, 100,000 alcohol ads and a daily barrage of sex and violence. If that doesn’t turn you off then nothing will.” —TV Turnoff Week — April 22-28Adbusters) Umm… why does it start on Tuesday? That’s probably an old ad.…
When a blogger dies, what happens to the blog? “I keep it on my ‘friends’ list just so I can see his name every so often, but I can never bring myself to click on his name. The first year or so after he passed on I visited it with decreasing regularity, until eventually I…
“In 1999, Fanning, a 19-year-old Boston-area hacker from a broken home, stumbled on the idea for making digital MP3 files easy to find on the Net. Teaming up with fellow geeks he knew only through online chat rooms, he crafted a simple technology that allowed millions to swap music collections free of charge. The operation…
What if “pi” were a recent discovery? How would journals publicize it, and how would the educational system absorb it? “Once the discovery had been reported in a contemporary journal, mathematicians could be expected to begin using and citing Archimedes? constant… While the term Archimedes? constant would become increasingly familiar even to school children, scientists…
“In my opinion, the application forms for humanities Ph.D. programmes should carry the warning: ‘Enter at your own risk.’ The fine print should read: ‘The risks include poverty, shame, humiliation, and clinical depression.’ You will of course find no such warning on the graduate-school application forms. And incredibly enough, even at this stage in the…
“My how times have changed! These days you hear nerd talk spewing out of everyone’s mouth! … Is it computer technology that’s made nerds of us all? Or perhaps it’s because we really do work for those former “losers” now.” Peter Bagge —The Nerd-ification of AmericaReason) I feel the same way about Star Trek, which…