Sapere Aude
Month: September 2010
What happens if someone dies out there, months away from Earth? Promession entails freezing a body, vibrating it into tiny pieces, and then freeze-drying the pieces, which can then be used as compost to grow a memorial shrub or tree. The pair recently collaborated with NASA and design students in Denmark and Sweden to adapt Promession for use on a Mars mission.
you will be reduced to shards, for safe return to earth.
A Kevlar-like armor might have helped Alexander the Great conquer nearly the entirety of the known world in little more than 20 years.
the oldest bacteria are 500 ka old, the oldest trees 80 ka.
who do you think those wig-wearing lacy-shirt sporting revolutionaries were? They were fucking blue-staters, dickhead. Boston? Philadelphia? New York? Hello? Think there might be a reason all the fucking monuments are up here in our backyard?
this is awesome, but also depressing / scary, especially for work email accounts.
that looks like an awesome hike. with bivouac.
THE ONE TRUE VERSION
Most importantly, the new culture of ubiquitous forking can have profound impacts on lots of other categories of software. There have been recent rumblings that participation in Wikipedia editing has plateaued, or even begun to decline. Aside from the (frankly, absurd) idea that “everything’s already been documented!” one of the best ways for Wikipedia to reinvigorate itself, and to break away from the stultifying and arcane editing discussions that are its worst feature, could be to embrace the idea that there’s not One True Version of every Wikipedia article.A new-generation Wikipedia based on Git-style technologies could allow there to be not just one Ocelot article per language, but an infinite number of them, each of which could be easily mixed and merged into your own preferred version. Wikipedia already technically has similar abilities on the back end, of course, but the software’s cultural bias is still towards producing a definitive consensus version instead of seeing multiple variations as beneficial.
There are plenty of other cultural predecessors for the idea of forking, all demonstrating that moving away from the need for a forced consensus can be great for innovation, while also reducing social tensions. Our work on ThinkUp at Expert Labs has seen a tremendous increase in programmers participating, without any of the usual flame wars or antagonism that frequently pop up on open source mailing lists. Some part of that is attributable to the cultural infrastructure GitHub provides for participation.
Moving forward, there are a lot more lessons we can learn if we build our social tools with the assumption that no one version of any document, app, or narrative needs to be the definitive one. We might even make our software, and our communities, more inclusive if we embrace the forking ourselves.
or more accurately, easy forking and easy merging is. the author goes off the rails towards the end saying that forking wikipedia would be good.
The goal, walk from the Empire State Building, on West 33rd Street, to Rockefeller Center, on West 48th, without ever setting foot on 5th or 6th Avenue—to knife through tall buildings in a single bound, or at least in stepwise forays. A writer for this magazine accomplished the feat in 1956, and a photographic attempt appeared on our Web site last year. A recent lazy Friday seemed like a good time to try the experiment again.
Equipment: sneakers, jeans, a polo shirt, and a purposeful, slightly preoccupied air (Yes, I have important business here). Starting time: 16:00, when doormen are dreaming of the weekend. Expectations of success: low. The last 50 years has stripped midtown of spacious department stores such as Ohrbach’s and Stern’s, and fortified it with guards, visitors’ logs, and electronic-card-access gates.
how to get to central park from 33rd street without using avenues.
for when you outgrow burning man.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 