Posts Tagged ‘context’

From the humor site NewsBiscuit, a brilliant set of security guidelines for naming your first pet, so that when your bank uses “what was the name of your first pet,” in order to verify your identity, you will be safe. Banks are now advising parents to think carefully before naming their child’s first pet. For

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High-security first pet naming guidelines

Gawker has launched a new column written by an anonymous Fox News employee who posts under “The Fox Mole.” S/he claims to have been with Fox for “years,” and claims that s/he can’t find work elsewhere because other news organizations view Fox alumni with suspicion. The Mole’s first column describes a particularly nasty piece of

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Fox News whistleblower begins anonymous tell-all series

Microsoft has (kind of) acquired Netscape, buying many of its key patents and assets from erstwhile owner AOL. Early Netscape employee JWZ calls it “brand necrophilia” and adds, “I assume that this means that ValueClick will now be suing Microsoft over the cookie patent instead of AOL, if that’s still going on. There are no

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Microsoft buys Netscape (sort of)

The brilliant popular engineering Sustainable Materials – with Both Eyes Open: Future Buildings, Vehicles, Products and Equipment – Made Efficiently and Made with Less New Material has just been released in the USA. I reviewed this book last November, when it came out in the UK. Here’s a brief excerpt from then: We review a

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Brilliant pop. engineering book Sustainable Materials comes to the USA

Gary Goddard tells the story of the near-construction of a life-sized Starship Enterprise replica in downtown Las Vegas. Goddard successfully bid to build the attraction as part of the 1992 competition to revitalized Vegas’s sagging downtown and bring back tourist traffic that had been sucked away by the strip, but the project was scuttled at

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Secret history of the near-construction of a lifesized Starship Enterprise in downtown Las Vegas

Randall Munroe’s produced another in his series of his spectacular, gigantic charts of unimaginably large and complex things compared and rendered tractable by the human imagination. “Lakes and Oceans” has everything you need to cultivate an appreciation for the vasty depths and the ocean blue. Plus, a snarfworthy punchline at the deepest depths.

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XKCD’s "Lakes and Oceans" chart of the other 70% of the planet

Parents in America are taking out loans at interest rates of up to 20% in order to pay for their children’s private K-12 education. The average loan from one provider, Your Tuition Solution, is $14,000, while the Lake Trust Credit Union lets you carry up to $40,000 in loans for your child’s primary and secondary

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American parents take out student loans for their kids’ kindergarten education

Last night saw the announcement of the 2012 nominees for science fiction’s prestigious Hugo Award. It’s a particularly fine ballot, reflecting a record number of nominating ballots (wisdom of the crowds and all that). Included on the ballot are our own moderator Avram (as part of the team that publishes The New York Review of

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2012 Hugo Award nominees announced

Kyle sez, “My friend Jordan Stratford has launched his first Kickstarter (currently funded, yay!) but the idea is simply too lovely not to share. From Kickstarter:” This is a pro-math, pro-science, pro-history and pro-literature adventure novel for and about girls, who use their education to solve problems. This is the made up story about two

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Sciency, girl-positive steampunk kids’ adventure novel on Kickstarter

Here’s the original, extremely bonkers pitch-reel produced for The Muppet Show, which appears on the DVD set The Muppet Show: Season One. Not shown in this clip is the finale, which the Wikia Muppet wiki describes thus: “After Leo’s powerful speech, Kermit appears from off-screen against a CBS logo and shrugs, ‘What the hell was

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Original pitch-reel for the Muppet Show is delightfully bonkers

Why “Good Jobs” Are Good for Retailers, aHarvard Business Review study by MIT’s Zeynep Ton, argues that the success of retailers like Uniqlo and Trader Joe’s can be attributed, in part, to maintaining high levels of well-paid staff. This runs contrary to contemporary retail wisdom, which has relentlessly focused on cutting staff levels to the

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Having lots of well-paid staff around is good for retail profits

PCVS is a venerable high school in Peterborough, Ontario (northeast of Toronto). It’s older than Canada, and boasts a roster of eminent alumni. It is fully enrolled, gay-friendly, and a success story from top to bottom. It’s also slated for closure. In a bid to redistribute its students to half-full schools on the edge of

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Successful, full, gay-friendly, arts-friendly public high-school in Peterborough, Ontario slated for closure

Starship Sofa has just podcasted Neil Gaiman’s novelette “The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains,” which won this year’s Locus Poll Award for Best Novelette. Here’s the text of the story, and above is a video of Neil reading from it. You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself

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Podcast: Neil Gaiman’s "The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains"

On IO9, Esther Inglis-Arkell does a great job of describing the molecular gastronomy practice of “spherification,” whereby food is liquefied and then coaxed into forming gelatinous spheres. It has its origin in a 1950s drug-delivery project from Unilever, but was revived by chef Ferran Adrià around 2003. What spherification does is put back in what

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How food spherification works

Apropos yesterday’s post about 1970s science fiction convention costumes, Strephon Taylor sez, “I just saw your post on the 1970′s science fiction costumes. I made a documentary on the early northern California Star Trek conventions called “Back to Space-Con”, it has a ton of costume footage, I think you will dig it. We have some

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Documentary about 1970s northern California Star Trek conventions

Bruce Sterling’s “An Essay on the New Aesthetic,” is a dense, difficult, exciting critical look at the New Aesthetic, a kind of art movement centered in my neighbourhood in east London (“If you wanted a creative movement whose logo is a Predator supported by glossy, multicolored toy balloons, London would be its natural launchpad.”). Sterling

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Bruce Sterling’s critique and love note to "the New Aesthetic"

In this short video, Kirsti show us how she uses a shotgun and some standing water to make a beautiful rainbow that carries the delicate scent of gunpowder and magic. KIRSTI’S SHOTGUN RAINBOW (via Neatorama)

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HOWTO make a shotgun rainbow

Lynne Olver’s Food Timeline tracks food trends through the ages. The Twentieth Century timeline is a decade-by-decade treasurehouse of food fads and fashions, working from primary sources like cookbooks, contemporary magazines, local newspapers, and restaurant menus. The timeline also provides guidance for each decade’s “signature” foods for the benefit of people planning historical parties. Home

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American 20th century food fads, decade-by-decade

FoodJunk, whose blog details the flavors and sensations to be had from junk food, bought a 22-year-old unopened package of Batman cereal on eBay and tried it. The results weren’t good. Bad news for anyone with a superhero-themed apocalypse stockpile, and something to remember for the next time you’re telling a story about someone poking

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Taste-test: 22-year-old Batman cereal

Denise Balkissoon writes, “This is the last week of the trial of Byron Sonne, computer security consultant charged with explosives after the G20. This week, his defence called Fryderyk Supinski, who was a member of a hackerspace with Sonne. The two had planned on building model rockets together.

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Closing week of Toronto’s G20 hacker trial: hackers love explosions

Marilyn sez, “Nelson Dellis began training his memory after his grandmother died of Alzheimer’s, and last week the 28-year-old won the U.S. Memory Championship for the second year in a row.” The technique? Translating data into visual images and placing them into a “memory palace” – a place in your mind that you can walk

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Of memory champions and memory palaces

A group of researchers at Drexel University have demonstrated a method of recovering credit card details and other sensitive information from used Xbox 360s, even after they have been “reset to factory defaults.” The method is straightforward and uses readily available tools. Ashley Podhradsky, one of the Drexel researchers, says, “Microsoft does a great job

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It’s easy to get credit card numbers off used Xbox 360s

BB pal Gareth Branwyn sez, “Just wanted to alert you, in case you were unaware, that my old cyberpal John Shirley’s seminal series A Song Called Youth just came out in a new omnibus edition with a new introduction by Richard Kadrey and a biographical note by Chairman Bruce Sterling.” In a near-future dystopia, a

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John Shirley’s seminal "Song Called Youth" back in print

Here’s Kevin Smith discussing his success as an independent, and rebutting critics who say that his go-it-alone strategy for his Red State (which is, by the way, excellent) was only possible because he’d made a name for himself: Anyone that tells you “oh he could do it because he’s Kevin Smith”—tell ‘em horseshit, man. That’s

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Kevin Smith on why you, too can be an indie success

In this 1945 Mechanix Illustrated article, Harold S. Kahm sets out the facts for any would-be ride-designers looking to hit the jackpot with a new high-speed thrill. Starting with the origin story of the bumper car (a WWI munitions plant worker built a miniature truck for hauling parts, the plant workers went crazy riding it,

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HOWTO get rich from carny rides, 1945