“Renting rooms in your house, taking odd jobs, and driving people around in your car sound like stories that grandparents told of making ends meet in the Depression.”
Category Archives: Tech
How Intel Killed AMD
Intel paid PC manufacturers out of its own pocket for years to not buy AMD’s chips.
Take Back the Beep
These messages are outrageous for two reasons. First, they waste your time. Good heavens: it’s 2009. WE KNOW WHAT TO DO AT THE BEEP.Do we really need to be told to hang up when we’re finished!? Would anyone, ever, want to “send a numeric page?” Who still carries a pager, for heaven’s sake? Or what […]
DARPA Aircraft to Stay In-Flight for Five Years
(via Metafilter) "The VULTURE Air Vehicle Program is an exploratory development program with the overall goal to develop and demonstrate the ability to deliver and maintain an airborne payload on station for an uninterrupted period exceeding 5 years using a heavier-than-air platform system … The government is not interested in approaches that use either radioactive […]
‘It’s Linux, B-tch!’
Ron and I were talking about the reactions people have when we pull out our Asus EEE PCs. He said that flight attendants always ask about it and whether it is Mac or Windows. Ron said he always wants to say: ‘It’s Linux, bitch.’ Like ‘real people’ know what Linux is. Which is a simultaneous […]
Chimera Twins: 2 Sperm, 1 Egg
Ron and I had it out a few weeks ago after a tense Nova special about twins if it was possible for 2 sperm to fertilize one egg (yes, we fight about Nova – sometimes I think the things we argue about are luxuries compared to what other couples argue over). Ron took it a […]
Archimedes Was on the Verge of Discovering Calculus
An ancient text reveals: The results were more revolutionary than anyone had expected. The researchers have discovered that Archimedes was working out principles that, centuries later, would form the heart of calculus and that he had a more sophisticated understanding of the concept of infinity than anyone had realized. Archimedes wrote his manuscript on a […]
Archimedes Was on the Verge of Discovering Calculus
An ancient text reveals: The results were more revolutionary than anyone had expected. The researchers have discovered that Archimedes was working out principles that, centuries later, would form the heart of calculus and that he had a more sophisticated understanding of the concept of infinity than anyone had realized. Archimedes wrote his manuscript on a […]
Chernobyl Reactor Reveals Startling Organism
Inside the reactor relic nothing should be alive: This slime, a collection of several fungi actually, was more than just surviving in a radioactive environment, it was actually using gamma radiation as a food source. Samples of these fungi grew significantly faster when exposed to gamma radiation at 500 times the normal background radiation level. […]
600,000 Year Old Bacteria Extracted From Ice Core
Carol Channing has competition: The oldest living thing has been discovered in the form of 600,000-year-old bacteria extracted from ice cores, scientists claim. The trick, the discovery suggests, is for organisms to keep some metabolism going over the millennia, so that they can keep their DNA in repair while awaiting a more favorable environment in […]