It feels to me like there should be more and better representations for the range of magnitudes known to apply to elements of our universe. One aspect of this which perturbs my thinking somewhat is: At what orders of magnitude should there be representations? Every 10x? Every 2x ( Read more... )

Reading technical articles over at Kuro5hin.org, a fascinating interview with one of the designers of European currency convergence got my attention. It's entitled Complementary currencies for social change.

Really great quote from near the end:Assume that a Martian lands in Denver on the wrong side of the tracks. He ends up in one of the ghettos ( Read more... )

This company, Loadux.com is giving away a free boot-from-cd Linux to anyone who passes the word. Can't last long, I suspect! The CD is Knoppix 3.4, which I've been trying to download in hopes it'll actually boot on my finicky laptop.

Zoinks... ( wotta weird 'un... )

Argh! I've been trying to figure out what instrument makes the "whooping" sound in Paul Simon's song, "Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard" and the theme music for the British series, Queer As Folk. A local music shop suggested maybe it was a vibraphone, so I've been Googling around that word and "arrangement" and "instrument" and "distinctive" ( Read more... )

The CBC investigative news show "Disclosure" tonight did a segment on this trend where a lot of (especially younger) people are getting their news mainly from news parody shows, like "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" in the U.S., and "Rick Mercer's Monday Report" in Canada. Hrm, they didn't even mention "This Hour Has 22 Minutes," although they ( Read more... )

Used to be, watching The West Wing on TV would give me a boost of energy. This season, I felt the show was on the skids largely because I wasn't getting that, any more. Today, watching last night's episode, I did again ( Read more... )

Yum, wow, I've been practicing a really easy tasty inexpensive curry I found online, and tonight found an African lentil dish that's just as cheap and easy and goes pretty well with it -- just in time, too, since my rice cooker still has lots of aromatic yellow rice left from Monday!

( Read more... )

Apple is making OS X even better, building on their shrewd move of using the open source FreeBSD as the system's foundation. If you're a Mac fan too busy and/or nontechnical to read up on the details, here's my very cursory summary of the Ars Technica review of Mac OS X 10.3, a.k.a. Panther:

( Read more... )

Sheesh, have I got to start keeping up with Ars Technica for news on political scandals now?