A recent NSF study found that few Americans know their science, but most believe science fiction is true:
A survey of 1,574 adults found that 60 percent agreed or strongly agreed that some people possess psychic powers or extrasensory perception, a premise that is generally discarded as unproven by most scientists.
But never fear, the results are [...]
Faced with a complete deficiency of customer support numbers online, I decided to use my local electicity provider’s website to sign up for new service. Heralded as a convenient alternative to talking to a real person, I received this auto-reply within seconds:
The Electric Company has received your request for an application and/or discontinuance of Electric [...]
A group of Italian researchers are using simple compression to detect language, and individual voice, based on the premise that language distribution affects the compression ratio. Clever.
Robert Cringely’s personal narrative about losing his child is heartbreaking, having realized his son Chase was dead on his lap while he wrote email. The cause of death was determined to be SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), a disorder that is little understood, or even studied for that matter, due to a lack of medical [...]
Oh, Darryl Strawberry, where did it all go wrong? On his umpteeth conviction, a Florida judge finally sentenced him to 18 months in jail. The former all-star was caught “breaking the rules of the drug treatment center by smoking, having sex with a resident and trading baseballs for cigarettes.”
Only Robert Downey Jr. could compete with [...]
In the doctor’s waiting room last week I was catching up on the back catalog of Atlantic Monthly, and I came across this cover story: 1492, by Charles Mann. The article is an account of the debate over what the Americas were like before it they were the “New World,” one of the more striking [...]
Last night at our weekly electronic music gig (the appliance of science) in Cambridge, we featured guests Keith Fullerton Whitman (aka Hrvatski) and Greg Davis in duo form, just back from an extended US tour. They played a set of positively nerve-racking noise, full of baby giggles and monstorous groans (someone likened them to Legend). [...]
Recently released, the official rules for the Extreme Ironing World Championships:
There are three components for scoring:
Extreme and creative ironing style
Extreme well pressed and clean clothes
Extreme short time
At the World Championships every ironist must use the official World Championships iron for an accurate comparison of extreme ironing performances. The iron will be provided by the [...]
Who needs a book of rhyme pages when you’ve got a high-speed rhyme database? I’m having a vision… freestylers with wearables.
Ben Greenman writing for the New Yorker asks: will bands like The Strokes and The White Stripes have a widespread and lasting effect on rock music?
A week ago, the answer cut me off in a crosswalk: some balding 40-something was enjoying the new found
spring weather, speeding around with the windows of his early-90’s Ford minivan [...]