NASA mission managers fell into the habit of accepting as normal some flaws in the shuttle system and tended to ignore or not recognize that these problems could foreshadow catastrophe. This was an “echo” of some root causes of the Challenger accident, the board said. —Shuttle [Columbia] Report Blames NASA Culture (MSNBC) This suggestion comes from…
Yet even though Mr. Crowley had moved mountains on the scientific and business fronts to get the treatment into testing, he couldn’t seem to speed the drug to his own rapidly weakening children. When he sold his company, he gave up control of the medicine they needed. The shortage of the drug, conflict-of-interest questions and…
Witty, ironizing Rorty, Fought he metaphysics grey. Joshing gently with the haughty, He commended Dewey’s way; Dewey who – he too the sort he (Rorty) wrought a giant from – Redescribed the true, for taught he Pragmatism with aplomb. —Roaming in Thought [after reading Rorty] (Normblog) A selection from a larger poem (by an undisclosed author)…
The Dutch PC-Active magazine has done an extensive CD-R quality test. For the test the magazine has taken a look at the readability of discs, thirty different CD-R brands, that were recorded twenty months ago. The results were quite shocking as a lot of the discs simply couldn’t be read anymore. —CD-Recordable discs unreadable in…
Next to page views and hit counts, the blog indexes are a good way to see if your story has people talking — with either good or bad feedback. Plus, marketing folks at media companies are starting to watch them, and PR people are using them to track companies and product releases, according to David…
I am cutting the whole thing into paragraphs, using my very sharp scissors. I will read a paragraph at the time. I will read it disjointed and jumbled, and see what I can do about the argument before me, without linking it to the devastating argument over or under on the page. Doing this I…
A New Zealander who sent millions of junk emails out every day has shut his business after his personal details were posted on the web. —Spammer ducks for cover as details published on web (New Zealand Herald) Spammer Shane Atkinson was outed by the Juha Saarinem of the NZ Herald. But like Pez candies lined…
Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. — Jakob Nielsen —Usability 101: The What, Why and How of User-Centered Design (Alert Box) Huh? Quality attribute? Maybe that’s an important and useful technical term in information design, but I wouldn’t put it in a 101 course. How about (the admittedly…
Technonerds go to movies strictly for entertainment, and of course, the most entertaining part comes after the movie when they can dissect, criticize, and argue the merits of every detail. However, when supposedly serious scenes totally disregard the laws of physics in blatantly obvious ways it’s enough to make us retch. The motion picture industry…
Humboldt traveled to the cave where hundreds of the Atures were buried, weighed down his mules with some of their skeletons, then headed to a nearby village. There, the local people showed the foreigner a talking parrot that no one understood: It was the last living thing to speak the language of the Atures, the…
A Picture is Worth… Two photos… one is the mugshot of a monster who e-mailed detailed and graphic threats against his high school. The other is a snapshot of every mama’s dream child whose short story was discovered on a school computer and tragically misunderstood. “Save Brian” is a slick and impressive website designed to…
The increasing rate of litigation means that there is a far higher chance that doctors will be asked in court to explain the exact meaning of NFN (Normal for Norfolk), FLK (Funny looking kid) or GROLIES (Guardian Reader Of Low Intelligence in Ethnic Skirt). —Doctor Slang is a Dying Art (BBC) Here’s an amusing couplet, taken…
“The Berenstain Bears taught me about not being greedy. I used to have the ‘galloping greedy gimmies,’ but not anymore.” … Delighted by the positive influence of [The Berenstain Bears] Get The Gimmies, Johnson’s parents purchased their daughter 14 more books from the series. —Precocious 6-Year-Old Claims Berenstain Bears Book Changed Her Life (The Onion) Ouch……
Inspired by an article in The New York Times Magazine, the Gender Genie uses an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author. Read more about the algorithm at nature.com. —The Gender Genie (Bookblog) Textually speaking, are you male or female?…
As the hobbyhorse of a few crackpots, Holocaust Denial seems harmless. But retum to CODOR on the web and you may reach a different conclusion. The benign image of Brad Smith (who includes a Christmas letter each year in his newsletter) asks only that we come to the topic with open minds, and with just…
You might be surprised to learn that the outskirts of the solar system are loaded with Plutinos, Centaurs, cubewanos and EKOs. Astronomers didn’t even know this a decade ago. In fact until 1992 they hadn’t even invented three of the terms. | Now it seems they don’t have enough of these crazy names. — Robert…
Cyberslackers, egosurfing, data smog? All three terms have entered the English language, according to the compilers of the Oxford Dictionary of English, who have added 3,000 more words to the 350,000 words and phrases in modern usage. —Charles Arthur —Internet terms make entry in dictionary (The Independent) Contemporary English still contains a host of idioms that…
Blair Hornstine, whose court battle to be her high school’s sole valedictorian ended up throwing her life in turmoil, settled her differences with the Moorestown School District yesterday to the tune of $60,000 – all but $15,000 to pay her lawyers. — Toni Callas and Joseph A. Gambardello —Valedictorian settles suit against district (Philadelphia Inquirer) I’ve…
The bomber was a father of two. A man who has children who walks down the aisle of the bus, looking at the children whose small short cheerful lives he is about to destroy, contenting himself with the knowledge that they are mere Jews – such a man has abdicated his humanity. The fact that…
How might science engender democracy? I’d like to suggest two mechanisms: first, by changing the way people think; second, by altering the interaction among those who make up the community. The more scientifically literate people become, the more they will expect, even demand to participate in the political process, and the more effective they will…