Nick poses the age-old question: do cell phones really interfere with airline navigation equipment? I remember asking the same question a few years ago, and being told by a friend that cell phone bans aren’t really issued by the FAA, but rather the FCC. Cell phones moving at 500 mph with line of site to [...]
Number of times Cameron’s car has been towed for street cleaning this year: 5
Amount of money spent in the process (US$): 585
Pieces of trash Cameron counted yesterday on the street that was supposedly cleaned: 20
Number of times Cameron cursed the city of Cambridge for each piece of trash: 3
As a part of my New York withdrawal treatment, I have been regularly consuming media about the city to quell the pangs of nostalgia that is starting to set in. Among my favorites so far is Rem Koolhaas’ 1978 architectural chronicle Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. The book attempts to weave a [...]
The US State Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have just granted the TransOrbital Corporation rights to start commercial development on our lunar counterpart. The launch is scheduled for June of 2003 from Kazakhstan.
Something I’ve never understood about space: why does the US seem to have exclusive rights to everything that goes on [...]
Engastration is catching on.
You’ve heard of turducken, and you may have even tried it. It’s something that’s been coming up in conversation quite a bit lately, but I have yet to meet anyone who has actually cooked one.
If you have successfully prepared recursive bird stuffings, and looking for a new challenge, try Whole Stuffed Camel [...]
James Stinson of the enigmatic and influential Detroit electro act Drexciya passed away Tuesday. An email from Mike Clark shot around electronic music lists yesterday shocking unexpected fans (including me).
This past two years were quite prolific for the duo, releasing three singles and a full-length album, all hailing highest respects in reviews (even those outside [...]
Standard coding environments are fairly regular in their approach to the process of debugging, relying heavily on a programmer’s visual representation of the computational process. Research at Loughborough University suggests that using other parts of the perceptual apparatus can help coders identify and repair code in considerably less time.
Paul Vickers and James Alty have been [...]
Engineers in South Africa have reduced condom application time by an order of magnitude, from 30-40 seconds down to only 3. The inventor declined comment on the source of his inspiration, as his wife apparently would never forgive him if he told the media. I did a bit of sleuthwork, and came up with nothing; [...]
Some of the research in biotechnology these days is starting to sound a little too much like Neil Stephenson to be taken seriously. Nature reports today that researchers at Berkeley have discovered methods for controlling gene expression with light. At current, heat and chemical methods are the only techniques used to operate gene expression.
Meanwhile, here [...]