Design, to atomic precision, a useful material with the highest possible strength-to-weight ratio, something stronger than steel and lighter than balsa wood.
Month: June 2009
Poets Write the News
except for the sports page. funny how the most irrelevant part of the paper is too sacred for this experiment.
It’s hard to imagine the Times doing anything like the June 10 experiment, though. For this edition of the paper, nearly all the rules taught in journalism school were thrown out the window. Writers used the first person and showed up in nearly every photograph alongside their interview subjects, including the likes of Defense Minister Ehud Barak and President Shimon Peres.
The Learjet repo man
Popovich’s first rule of firearms is pretty simple: The man who tells you he’s going to shoot you will not shoot you. So without so much as looking back, he got on the plane and flew it right to Chicago. “My job is to grab that plane. And if you haven’t paid for it, then it’s mine. And I don’t like to lose.”
Absurd Time Covers
From William Randolph Hearst’s ginned up hysterical stories about marijuana to the “10-cent plague” comic book scare of the 1950s to The New York Times warning of “cocaine-crazed Negroes” raping white women across the Southern countryside, the media has always whipped up anxiety and increased readership via thinly sourced exposes of the next great threat to the American way of life. No publication has done a better job of scaring the crap out of post-baby boomer America than Time, the top-selling newsweekly that’s dropping subscribers like the mythical meth mouth drops teeth.
Watershed Down
The 2009 Venice Biennale opened this week with an unexpected and quite beautiful piece of performance art. Artist Mike Bouchet had built a one-to-one scale replica of a typical American suburban home that he planned to install on floating pontoons in the Venice Arsenale basin. He called the project Watershed. 1 of the pontoons capsized, and the entire house sank to the bottom of the canal—an unintentional yet utterly perfect coda to the house’s own built-in commentary. Now, a fake generic American suburban home will add its ruins to the underwater archaeology of Venice.
Extra-galactic planet
there is a way to spot planets in other galaxies. The trick is to exploit a phenomenon called microlensing in which the gravity of one star focuses the light from a more distant one towards Earth.
LaTeX fail
ah, art directors. no one would put \cos x on their fingernails.
No exponential expansion?
The Fermi Paradox often leads to the conclusion that other advanced civilizations do not exist. This is unduly pessimistic. What the Fermi Paradox implies is that intelligent civilizations capable of exponential expansion do not exist.
Left 4 Dead
zombies!! chain saws!! frying pans!!
Internet Mapping Project
various people’s conception of “home” on the internet, and their relation to the wider internet.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 