The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon

Due to the water damage from the heating pipes, I’ve had to move all my stuff from the guest bedroom to the master bedroom (I previously had surrendered the master bedroom due to Michelle’s quantity of clothing), and our place has been a disaster ever since. We’ve made small steps by cleaning out the [...]

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In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex won the National Book Award for nonfiction, and wins the Rob Gonzalez Book Award™ for being just plain awesome.
To set the scene, the book dives into the history of whaling. In particular it chronicles the rise and fall of Nantucket island, the [...]

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Displaying the stiff-upper-lip spirit that built an empire, he uttered the words that are every air passenger’s worst nightmare: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get it under control. I trust you are not in too much [...]

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Or, at least that’s what I might say if my blood were radioactive enough to set off security detectors. Around 60,000 Americans are currently under various types of medical treatments in which they receive small amounts of radiation, enough to set off radiation detectors such as those that might be used to screen for [...]

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I’ve posted a couple times before about crazy weapons the military has used or is developing (remember the World War 2 bats?).
If you feel something crawling on your neck, it might be a wasp or a bee. Or it might be something much more dangerous.
Israel is developing a robot the size of a hornet to [...]

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Lee Feigenbaum has written an excellent survey covering the current state-of-the-art application development paradigms for the semantic web, and provided a vision as to how he believes RDF application development could/should evolve.
My off-the-cuff, gut reaction is that RDF, as the data-format basis of a distributed application development framework, needs a well-defined object model to be [...]

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Check out The Ad Generator.
The ad generator is a generative artwork that explores how advertising uses and manipulates language. Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly. By remixing corporate [...]

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A pretty interested article in Time about the brain and what it means to be conscious. Here are some quotes that I enjoyed.
Why does consciousness exist at all, at least in the Easy Problem sense in which some kinds of information are accessible and others hidden? One reason is information overload. Just as a [...]

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My new favorite green advice: “For a cross-country flight, each extra pound you carry on puts almost a pound of CO2 in the air.”
Energy Tip #25 from TerraPass.

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Tupper’s Self-Referential Formula.

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