This is really cool. There's a fun GIF-roulette aspect to it. Click to select a random next one.I found every animated GIF on Wikipedia... then made a site where you can browse them, one-by-one.

via jwz

On a recent visit home, my mother and I got into it over the value of government services, and whether it was worthwhile to go into deficit to support social programs. I don't know if I was able to communicate my idea that government has economic value, even though it doesn't directly produce wealth (her phrase, arguably put, but I hope my meaning ( Read more... )

Obviously everything in space is three dimensional, but you get pretty used to 2-d images of the sky. If we saw the big dipper from a different angle they would look totally different (lesson plan pdf for teaching this to kids). Even though I knew this academically, and I even had an image in my head of the spatial arrangment of things, I always ( Read more... )

I've been catching up a little on some Bad Astronomy while I wait for sucktastic Open Office to apply a filter (for some reason it's really slow on Ubuntu 10.04, compared to a Windows VM running on the same system). [Just checked, it's still working.] And I found two posts that just make my heart swell:
( Read more... )

There's this idea that sexism (in the traditional direction of the term: men are superior to women) largely hurts women, but it causes issues for men too. There's a TED talk about the "Man box": acceptable activities for men are limited by what is manly. Here's an example about
how sexism hurt laptop adoption.
Though Hawkins doesn't quite say it ( Read more... )

There's a pretty good article up on Skepchick today about Franz Boas (who revolutionized anthropology).

It's a good article, and makes him sound like a pretty interesting person, but the passage I got focussed on was about Historical Particularism.
Historical particularism is the idea that societies have particular or unique histories that inform ( Read more... )

I never understood what hash salting was until I read this. A really good article which explores all the angles on making a basically secure web-app, with a lot of examples.
So the lessons for developers:

1. Password storage should always be done using a strong hashing algorithm. IT should be one designed for password storage and also use a ( Read more... )

It's amazing to think about the inspiring heights NASA has reached, the complicated problems they have solved, and the edge-of-seat hanging feeling they still give you with descriptions of the real things they are doing. I would love, one day, to go to space and another planet, so long as it didn't mean saying goodbye forever to my friends and ( Read more... )

This is incredible. Robots that work as a team to accomplish a goal in a relatively free-form environment.

via Pharyngula

There's a really good anti-Shell campaign going on right now (apparently set up by Greenpeace, though the whois information doesn't obviously lead to them). It's set up like a backfired social ad creation thing, and is really funny. Check out some of the "ads" in the gallery.

via curiously following the trail of @EmilyGusba's retweet.