What time is it? and Where am I? – two seemingly simple questions but just look what happens when you start to explore the depths of the questions. Mario Corchero is doing a talk on It’s time for datetime at PyCon coming up in May. “We will also speak about different standards of time, time […]
What makes Western Culture to nest for the wealth of modern society and the path for getting out of the mire of human misery? Joel Mokyr has some ideas: The persistence of technological creativity and the Great Enrichment: Reflections on the ‘Rise of Europe’ [Editor’s note: This column first appeared as a chapter in the Vox […]
It’s cited as one of 366 Weird Movies. “Would a watermelon in the midst of a chase sequence not be, in its own organic way, emblematic of our entire misunderstood enterprise? At once totally logical and perfectly irrational?”–W.D. Richter, explaining why there is a watermelon inside the Banzai Institute … Any movie that successfully incorporates […]
TXRed posts From “Animal House” to “Zulu”?. “So, if I, a female-type person, want to sum up the best and worst of undiluted guy-ness, Animal House and Zulu would be it?” … But as an outsider, I think Dr. McD was right. From everything I’ve seen and heard, and hidden my eyes from, you had […]
Luboš Motl takes off on Nautilus’ disillusioned ex-physicist. “Bob Henderson wrote an autobiography for Nautil.Us” and that provided the ammunition for a rant on Life’s Journey that any college freshman with ambition should read carefully. This is a sketch of the “path towards the deep laws of the Universe” that I already had in mind […]
Keep in mind that it is the craftsman and not the tools that solve problems and create solutions and that tools are the product of craftsman, too. Tools not only enable and facilitate, they also communicate. They are one craftsman sharing ideas with another. How you can do something influences how you think about doing […]
Back in the day, a short wave radio with a decent antenna was needed if you wanted to listen to foreign broadcast stations. Now all you need is a computer connected to the I’net. Radio Garden provides a globe you can scroll with green dots for radio stations. Click on a green dot or scroll […]
Ever wonder why English has such a rich written tradition? Why Tolstoy was Russian? The expression of ideas depends upon culture and software is no different. This is what Adam Michael Wood is arguing in choosing between Python and Django vs. Ruby and Rails. tl;dr – Python … I have a particular app I’m trying […]
On YouTube is the story of an early project in computing, the Birth of BASIC. The timeframe is 1960 +/- a few years. The story isn’t just the development of BASIC but also that of interactive computing on a time sharing operating system. The 38 minute video also shows the struggles in funding and in […]
Anthony Watts reports: NOAA/NWS to stop ‘yelling’ at the public in their forecasts. New forecast software is allowing the agency to break out of the days when weather reports were sent by “the wire” over teleprinters, which were basically typewriters hooked up to telephone lines. Teleprinters only allowed the use of upper-case letters, and while […]