Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the usual manner of a scientist to systematise what it reveals. He arrives at two generalisations: (1) No sea-creature is less than two [...]

“Hooray for popularization!”

A while back I mentioned that I was really enjoying following the various TED Talks as they are being put online. (In fact, at this point, I’ve got an archive of over 230 of the talks as MP4 videos–around 12Gb–that I’m working my way through, either on the iPod during enforced waiting periods, [...]

Holy “ask and ye shall receive”, Batman!
From the CBC
The National Union of Public and General Employees, which represents more than 340,000 workers across the country, on Friday wrote to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to investigate the practice of “traffic shaping” and its impact on internet users.
“These internet service providers are, with little or [...]

Did you see the news about Bell deciding that it can filter and shape traffic even carried over “wholesale” pipes to ISPs?
Users of the Canadian family-run ISP Teksavvy (which we profiled last year) have started noticing that Bell Canada is throttling traffic before it reaches wholesale partners. According to Teksavvy CEO Rocky Gaudrault, Bell has [...]

It is very hard for me to imagine that Guinness cupcakes could be anything but super yummy. Make me some–I’ll be your friend.

While we’re talking about food, I’ve got to say that enough is enough. I consider myself at least something of an epicure, so I believe that there are such things as quality olive [...]

From time to time I run across something that just shocks me, not because of the thing itself, but because the thing is so completely something I should have known about and yet have somehow missed. How does a philosophy argument about things that interest me greatly go on for years without my hearing about [...]

I’ve got a three-year-old arriving in half an hour, and I’ve got a remote controlled car that I’ve just assembled, so I don’t have a lot of time for blogging today. Let’s see how many of my 20 or so “quickies” I can get through, in passing, before she gets home…

Recent experiments with Hemmingway’s recipe [...]

I love garlic. A lot. Like, an unsociable amount. Hell, I stole one of Brust’s laws of cooking: “If it doesn’t have garlic, it better be dessert!”
So I love it every time scientists find another way garlic does amazing things to protect your health. I’d eat it anyway, of course. Here’s this week’s example:
from Garlic [...]

Well, I’ve had a very busy weekend here in Melbourne–which I may get around to writing up at some point later tonight–and now I’ve made it back to my hotel/apartment, and it seems like a good time for me to do a little bit of value-added linkblogging. So, no theme, just lots of things that [...]

There’s certainly something to be said for wild and crazy, “the universe is my canvas”, science fiction ideas–things with broad scope that seem tenuously plausible but highly disconnected from our day-to-day lives. Ever since 19821 though, we’ve also known that there are results that are just as surprising, jarring, and interesting as some of those [...]

Science has brought us a permanent, but easily-removable, tattooing ink. Does this change the metatext of tattooing? I mean, the pain is still there, but if the permanence isn’t part of the subtext anymore, what does that mean for the story? Is it to obvious to predict the rise of a serial-tattooing culture, or a [...]

You know what steganography is, right? “Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the sender and intended recipient even realizes there is a hidden message.”
Quite often these days this means encoding information into the insignificant bits of large binary files–changing the colour the [...]

A certain high school English teacher of my acquaintance (now retired) famously posited a definite inverse correlation between the intelligence of his female students, and the size of their breasts.
Well, science is suggesting that this might have been a false conclusion.
It was already known that men find curvy women more attractive and that they live [...]

Remember back in August when I was so delighted with the paper and demonstration video on seam carving technology?
Well, now I can play with that technology. And so can you.
Or, at least, you can if you use the Gimp, since the Liquid Rescale Plugin now puts that algorithm into it. (And why wouldn’t you be [...]

I could write a dozen blog posts about living in the surveillance society, and not make the point as clearly as Michael Zoellner did by writing SurveillanceSaver. There’s nothing that will drive home the point that we’re in the midst of omni-surveillance like someone adapting some of the information flowing from that constant surveillance into [...]