About four years ago I bought an electric mower that was quiet enough that I could listen to audiobooks while doing my suburban adulting duties. The battery held enough charge that I could get about 1/2 of my lawn done at a time so that summer I bought another battery. A couple years later I…
A new study from researchers at Northeastern University, in collaboration with scientists from MIT and the University of Glasgow, investigated what happened when a group of domesticated birds were taught to call one another on tablets and smartphones. The results suggest that video calls could help parrots approximate birds’ communication in the wild, improving their…
this frog and their band pic.twitter.com/bVo6xuakuv — non aesthetic things (@PicturesFoIder) March 26, 2023
This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their…
For some reason today I was thinking of the 3D shape scientists recently discovered in our cells — I had to look it up just now to refresh my memory. Not being an expert in geometry, I would describe the “scutoid” as an irregular prism-like shape with a hexagon on one end and a pentagon…
Mars rover captures first sound of dust devil on red planet.
Video game history is colliding: Sierra founders are bringing a seminal text adventure game to VR (The Verge) Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther 1976; Crowther and Woods 1977) (photo credit) Photo of Ken and Roberta Williams; Wikipedia photo of Adventure on a CRT Sierra On-Line (Sierra Entertainment, Inc.); King’s Quest, Space Quest, Phantasmagoria; original publisher of…
Science deniers who expect medical research to be as tidy and predictable as a chapter in a middle school textbook sometimes see conspiracy theory when they look at the twists and turns in the scientific community’s response to the COVID-19. The scientists themselves would say they are doing science in real time, adapting to the…
In real life, people express a given emotion with tremendous variability. In anger, for example, people in urban cultures scowl (or make some of the facial movements for a scowl) only about 35 percent of the time, according to meta-analyses of studies measuring facial movement during emotion. Scowls are also not specific to anger because…
This winter I changed my weekday alarm tone to chirping birds. Now that real birds are singing early outside my window I’m waking up to them instead of my alarm — even on weekends. That’s not a bad thing.
In April, 2002, I was blogging about Instructions for “Asking a Girl on a Date” (autistics.org) The Inform Beginner’s Guide (I edited this book on programming text adventure games in Inform 6) Broken Links: Just How Rapidly do Science Education Hyperlinks Go Extinct? (yes, the link was broken but I linked to the backup on…
He was abandoned by his flock, his nest blown from the mango tree. His eyes were tightly shut and he was shuddering, too young to survive alone. He was the size of my little finger, with feathers the colour of Rich Tea biscuits, inky eyes and a small bill like a pencil lead. I placed…
