Category Archives: technology

the music goes round and round

At a party in 1981 I predicted that within twenty years there would be digital music players with no moving parts. I was a bit worried there until MP3 players came along. (Good thing nobody remembers I predicted that such … Continue reading

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paper forever

In the New Yorker, a review of The Myth of the Paperless Office. (Link from Monty Solomon on a private list.) Paper enables a certain kind of thinking. Picture, for instance, the top of your desk. . . . The piles look … Continue reading

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Flo control

Visual cat-pass filter (relayed by Spastic Mutant)

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Schelling points

New Scientist: Neural network ‘in-jokes’ could pass secrets This reminds me of a discussion, years ago on Extropians, of “Schelling points”: for under-constrained problems there may be a cultural preference for particular solutions. For example, if I ask you to … Continue reading

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the craft of letters

Typecaster seeks apprentice. (From GirlHacker, who picked Rebecca’s pocket.) I have a friend who used to cast his own bullets; dunno whether he still does. Sometimes he used wheel-balancing weights discarded (why??) by car mechanics, and sometimes he used an … Continue reading

Posted in humanities, technology | 1 Comment

legibility is in the eye of the reader!

Here is a paragraph from HTML: The Definitive Guide, by Musciano & Kennedy, second edition published by O’Reilly in 1997: Yield to the browser. Let it format your document in whatever way it deems best. Recognize that the browser’s job … Continue reading

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catch ’em early

The Spirit of Kyoto? I’ve heard it suggested that manmade pollution helped end the Little Ice Age. Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle wrote a novel on a similar premise, Fallen Angels.

Posted in luddites, politics, technology | 1 Comment