November 2011

Look, I’m not much of an abstract thinker. In my field—trying to do something about global warming, the worst problem the planet has ever faced—I’ve long since figured out what […]

I have in front of me a late 1960s advertisement from the Burroughs Corporation. It shows a sketch of a guy — in a snappy suit and crisp haircut — […]

Time Lapse From Space – Literally. The Journey Home. from Fragile Oasis on Vimeo. Via Wired Science, astronaut Ron Garan made an amazing 7 minute time lapse video of Earth […]

Avail to Prevail

“Prevail Project” is about the subtle and interesting notion that some day soon, some of us may not be human. My readers are presumably human, and so might find this […]

Google achieved dominance in the search engine market through a simple algorithm, PageRank, that made it easy for people to find information in an increasingly complex and deep internet. I […]

via YouTube Carl Sagan would have been 77 today.  Sagan, better than anybody else, understood both the insignificance of <i>homo sapiens</i> in the cosmic scheme of things, and of the […]

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo. When we say flock-like behavior, this is what we mean. The starlings don’t see the whole picture, they only see their neighbors. But […]