Multiplication is easier when it's complex - too early to read it all now, but it looks interesting.
wissen
Three Minute Philosophy - Immanuel Kant - I don't often link to this, but well, anyone who can summarize Kant in 3 minutes, waste 30 seconds on the name, and still add a laugh at the end, deserves recognition.
MY WORLD IS A LITTLE DARKER… - I don't often write obituaries here, but well, with Martin Gardner, a hero of my childhood has passed away. His mathematical games and puzzles were for me what new Batman or Spiderman comics were for other kids. Discovering an unknown issue of Spektrum in the city library with puzzles by him, or finding one of his books, was always a highlight.
5 Animals That Can Do Amazing Things ... With Their Penises | Cracked.com - what evolution comes up with to ensure the survival of a species ...
The dark side of Dubai - a somewhat different story about Dubai. If you strip away all the ostentatious buildings, you're left with a dictatorship based on wage slavery and deception. And now the place belongs to Abu Dhabi.
collision detection: Molecular secrets of the "iron-plated snail" - iron-plated snails that live in hydrothermal vents 3 kilometers below the ocean surface. Steampunk snails?
Christopher Blizzard · HTML5 video and H.264 – what history tells us and why we’re standing with the web - more about the licensing issues with H264
Armin Maiwald turns 70 - and I'd like to congratulate him, the co-inventor of the show with the mouse!
An experiment in real-time: The human becomes a data set - Background - Feuilleton - FAZ.NET - I rarely link to FAZ, but if they let Frank Rieger write about the problems of data collection mania, then you have to honor it with a link, especially if the article is really very good.
Alloy Analyzer - if you want to see how far automatic proofs and automatic reasoning on software models have come today, check out this project. Written in Java, installers available for major systems. Comes with a declarative language for model specification and automatic conflict finders - so a faulty model throws out counterexamples that violate at least one of the boundary conditions. And the tutorial doesn't deliver any abstract, practice-remote examples, but for example a model of a date system with various operations on it.
TidBITS Entertainment: "If Monks Had Macs" Available for Free - one of the strangest projects from the old Mac era. Interesting just because you can see how some people used Hypercard back then (runs today on Runtime Revolution and thus cross-platform).
John Graham-Cumming: Data Visualization Disease - "Averages are fun because any fool can calculate them, but pity the fool who averages without thinking.".
Distributed Wikipedias instead of a central monster with deletion fanatics - interesting proposal. A decentralized Wikipedia based on a distributed version system like Git. Exactly the direction in which my thoughts for my blog have been going lately. I tried something similar in my Second Life-oriented blog and found it very pleasant - I created blog posts on one of my computers and then simply pushed them as raw Markdown files via Mercurial (which I prefer over Git in terms of handling) to the server, where everything was then processed by a blog engine and static HTML was generated. Clean traceability of changes, clean conflict handling, proper backup of old versions - and the transfer via Mercurial (git is comparable) is also quite fast, as only differences are sent. At the moment, I'm still pondering how to efficiently apply something like this to a blog monster with several thousand entries. And how something like this can be used in the company, for example, instead of wikis, as these do not necessarily represent the optimal situation there.
Mandelbulb: The Unravelling of the Real 3D Mandelbrot Fractal - Mathematics can simply be beautiful.
Why do we have an IMG element? - Mark Pilgrim buddelt in HTML-Geschichte.
Scientists discover gene that 'cancer-proofs' rodent's cells - presumably p16 not only makes you safe from cancer, but also causes hair loss and ugly long front teeth ...
Photic sneeze reflex - I knew it existed!
Weird New Ghostshark Found; Male Has Sex Organ on Head - sounds like a headline from the Bild newspaper, but is actually just a very strange fish from an equally strange group of fish species.
Online Latin Dictionary - no questions asked. I just needed it right now.
The Most Useful Rope Knots for the Average Person to Know - exactly what it says on the tin. Practical rope knots and tips on how to tie them and what they're for.
Car engines to serve as "home power plants" - ok, still fossil fuel, but at least an efficient use of it. As a concept certainly interesting, albeit not entirely without problems.
Coffee reverses Alzheimer's - well, that will surely please the rider of the shockwave ...
'Misty caverns' on Enceladus moon - Foundations for possible life on a Saturn moon.
Why are There 60 Minutes in an Hour? - the Sumerians and Babylonians and Egyptians are to blame!
Window damage on Atlantis threatens six month delay to STS-129 - this must be the deepest analysis of a loose screw I have ever seen ...
New Survey Suggests Modern Humans Originated in Southwest Africa - "Dr. Tishkoff’s team has also calculated the exit point from which a small human group — maybe a single tribal band of 150 people — left Africa some 50,000 years ago and populated the rest of the world. The region is near the midpoint of the African coast of the Red Sea."
Lactose intolerance - how lactose intolerance is distributed around the world. (because I just had a discussion about it)
The man who invented the doner kebab has died - well, it's a classic Turkish dish after all - invented in Berlin in 1971.
Alhazen - because one tends to forget all too easily what scientific achievements were made in times when, in our part of the world, the descendants of Charlemagne were still amusing themselves with their serfs and brawling with their noble friends.
StillTasty: Your Ultimate Shelf Life Guide - for the big questions in life, such as whether you should store opened mustard jars in the fridge.
2,700-year-old marijuana found in Chinese tomb - Bill und Ted hatten doch ne Zeitmaschine?
Mankind's new best friend? - Rats against landmines and TB!
Respectful Insolence: That'll teach 'em for using an actual valid placebo control - "Alas for poor Dr. Ng, he was tripped up by the vagaries of comparing two different (and almost certainly equal) placebos against each other. Do such studies long enough, and inevitably sometimes the "wrong" placebo will win. Science is like that."
Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple? - 11,000 years old. Wow.
NASA - MESSENGER Teleconference: More 'Hidden' Territory on Mercury Revealed - I am a big fan of these robotic and orbital missions. And the Mercury flybys already bring a lot of interesting images.
Tom Otterness - Making the Sculpture - my favorite artist for metal sculptures tells how his sculptures come to life.
Slipstream - Intuition + Money - An Aha Moment - interesting development in silicon wafers. If the 100-fold performance can also be implemented in real products, that would be fantastic news for solar cell-based solar energy.
Why 42 ? - for reference.
Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy: Bad TV - good discussion (i.e. refutation) of the moon landing was fake spinners.
Drinking fruit juice 'may stop medication working' - hmm, Mizolastin is not listed there, but the pharmacy already gave me information about grapefruit juice. Somehow silly, maybe I should drink my usual morning orange juice in the evening from now on ...
The Great Consumer Crash of 2009 - ouch. This reads like a script for a horror movie. And since we in Germany are usually a few years behind the U.S. in all stupid ideas, something similar will certainly hit us here as well (and some of the developments described there can also be observed here - such as living off the credit line).
Edge Cases are the Root of all Evil - how edge cases are used in arguments to kill ideas. Interesting perspective - and have already often observed this in IT discussions.
Watermelon Found to Have a Viagra effect - will there be watermelon spam next?
NNDB Mapper: Tracking the entire world - interesting mapping tool that builds a "social network" of people of public interest based on publications, reports, and rumors and displays it graphically. Perfect fodder for conspiracy theorists!
Study: Smoking ban in England prevents 40,000 deaths - only here the downfall of the West is still predicted by the smoking ban.
The Mundaneum Museum Honors the First Concept of the World Wide Web - steampunk web aus Belgiens 30er Jahre ...