“Newly disclosed e-mail inside NASA showed senior engineers worried a day before the Columbia disaster that the shuttle’s left wing might burn off and cause the deaths of the crew, a scenario remarkably similar to the one investigators believe actually occurred…. After intense debate — occurring by phone and e-mail — the engineers, some supervisors…
“The new building is planned to be taller than the trade center towers, which briefly stood as the world’s tallest at 1,350 feet. Libeskind’s tower also would surpass Malaysia’s 1,483-foot Petronas Twin Towers, the tallest buildings in the world.|The choice was made by a committee with representatives of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the Port…
This article will whip your head around a couple of times… take it slowly, and don’t stop until you get to the Looney Tunes references. “To mainstream researchers, Loebner is a self-aggrandizing fool and his contest is hokum: at best irrelevant and at worst a public disservice that encourages bad science….. [T]he closer one looks…
“Israeli scientists have devised a computer that can perform 330 trillion operations per second, more than 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC. The secret: It runs on DNA….|hink of DNA as software, and enzymes as hardware. Put them together in a test tube. The way in which these molecules undergo chemical reactions with…
“Margaret Bourke-White hung out of bombers to take pictures, climbed out on a gargoyle high atop the Chrysler Building to take pictures, was the first Western photographer to go to the Soviet Union, covered the dangerous days of India’s partition….Margaret Bourke-White was in love with the shapes of industrial design — the mechanical muscle and…
“The template system is also good for the audience. Apcar says that when readers come to a NYTimes.com multimedia project, it will look familiar to them — they will know how to navigate it. That’s not so for a news site that treats every multimedia project as an independent entity, not bound to existing practices…
“They aren’t videogames, after all; except for the occasional cut scene, we almost never use video. We use images rendered on the fly–and the images are the surface of the game, the interface, the cotton candy. The meat of the game, the heart of it, is in the underlying code. These are games that run…
“When the company receives a call from someone who’s clearly lost it — which can happen several times an hour — [psychologist]Chessin comes on the line to help the caller rediscover their happy place. Then the engineer returns to discuss the technical problem in detail.” —Psychologist Helps Victims of Data LossSFGate) At first I thought…
The article is worth reading, but I’m quoting from the “Procedures for Shuttle Bailout” box at the bottom: “Although no formal requirements or plans exist for crewmembers to bail out of the orbiter during uncontrolled flight, they may be able to do so under certain circumstances. The hatch jettison pyrotechnics do not require orbiter power…
“It’s time for a reality check. Hypertext is not, and has never been, all that. Electronic literature is a tiny field and mostly, no one cares about it, except for a handful of endlessly bickering insiders. Maybe 200 people in the world are even marginally interested in the academic arguments….From the outside, though, it looks…
“When writing a website the writer needs to be focused on the reader; that is write for readers. Even though human readers are those who are going to be active and do something about your site, one of your primary readers is Googlebot. Writers need to be aware that building information has an effect on…
“Forty German authors are hoping to set a new world record by conceiving, writing and printing a book in 12 hours, the event’s organizers said on Tuesday.” —Germans to Create Book in 12 HoursCNN) I believe the German word for the activity is zuschnellbuchermachen. Thanks for the link, Mike. Similar:Once again, The Onion gets it…
“Baseball – a slow, serene game played with a wooden bat, a cloth ball, and cowhide mitts on a broad, grassy field – surged in popularity just when the industrial revolution was taking hold, leaving masses of urban workers and shopkeepers yearning for the pastoral peace and quiet of the fabled agricultural age. They could…
“Dear Strong Bad,|Right now I am putting off writing a paper for my English class. Can you write my Englilsh paper? I don’t even care if it’s good or not. I just don’t want to do it.” —A Well Thought-Out Englilsh [sic] Paper, by Karl “The Yellow Dart” SmithHome Star Runner) Never underestimate how a…
“People will soon be able to publish their own website via their phones as blogging goes mobile.” —Blogging Goes MobileBBC) Sounds a bit much like drafting a press release to fill a Sunday evening news gap, but journalists have been quick to grasp the social significance of weblogs. Thanks for the link, Rosemary. Similar:If Google+…
The next time you publish a timely magazine article that gets mentioned by a lot of webloggers during the same week that you accept a new job, resist the urge to celebrate by sending out for Papa John’s pepperoni pizza and getting laid up for three days with a bad case of food poisoning. My…
“A NASA engineer warned of the possibility of grave damage to the shuttle Columbia days before the spacecraft broke up on Feb. 1 and complained that it was hard to get relevant information, according to e-mails released by the U.S. space agency on Friday.|The e-mails by safety engineer Robert Daugherty expressed concern that a debris…
Dave Winer on scripting news quotes from my “On the Trail of the Memex” in order to disagree: Here’s one for the history books. “For all intents and purposes, Google owns the Web, by virtue of its superior and highly popular search engine.” I don’t agree. Teoma appears to be as good a search engine…
DADDY: Peter, the weather is so nice… let’s play a game.PETER (age 4): I do NOT want to play any game that’s in the world. I want to play a game that’s NOT in the world.DADDY: Peter, what kind of game is not in the world?PETER: (pointing towards computer) On a CD.Games: Not in the…
“The arts and the sciences are again joining together as one culture, the third culture. Those involved in this effort?on either side of C.P. Snow’s old divide?are at the center of today’s intellectual action. They are the new humanists…..In too much of academia, intellectual debate tends to center on such matters as who was or…