electron'sbro

arxbarba:

Newton’s flaming laser sword is a philosophical razor devised by Alder in an essay (Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword or: Why mathematicians and scientists don’t like philosophy but do it anyway) on the conflicting positions of scientists and philosophers on epistemology and …

(via anghenfil)

Mac has an OS philosophy that preferences should only be shown when needed (e.g. you can only adjust mouse preferences with an attached mouse). Displays too. You can only adjust screen orientation when OS X detects that a rotatable display is connected.

When you only have a built-in screen (for example, on a Macbook) OS X will not let you rotate your display. The problem with this is that the screen is not the only thing that can rotate. I could stand on my head and look at my MBP if I wanted. More likely, I could lie down on my bed and watch a film.

Most of the time I just let my brain do the work of flipping the image an extra 90°, but if any Apple developers read this, please let me rotate the orientation of my built-in screen.

Thank you,

Congrats to Rush Limbaugh on his fourth traditional marriage (via apsies)

You know what I would do? Remove state recognition of marriage. Find ways around the standard rights and obligations of marriage with other documents. You want visiting rights at the hospital? You want a joint bank account? Draft a document that says as much.

Make marriage an entirely religious and/or personal choice. Then everyone will be equal before the law.

The big news today is that four NYU students raised over $100k for a project to challenge Facebook (fueled by geek rage about Facebook’s new privacy changes) on Kickstarter with a project called Diaspora. To me the big take away isn’t this particular project, but rather the potential for…

Eco Coke bottle

Un très réussi projet de fin d’études, par le jeune étudiant Andrew Kim avec “Eco Coke Bottle”. Le concept est simple : transformer la structure des boissons en bouteille cubique, permettant alors un important gain d’espace pour le stockage et une efficacité pour le recyclage.

A very successful final project for student Andrew Kim with the ‘eco Coke bottle.’ The concept is simple: transform the structure of a drink bottle into a cubic bottle while allowing an important gain of space for efficient stocking and recycling. [ed: Just practising my French. Let me know if I stuffed it.].

I don’t know if I like this design. I’m big on efficiency and orderly design, so I like it from that perspective I suppose, but I wonder how much more efficient it actually is. Does the increased efficiency offset the increased discomfort?  Probably.  I’ll shut up.

PS: What’s so radical about this design that it deserves so much reblogging? Ask anyone in logistics what the best bottle design would be and you would get something just like this.

toldorknown:

The United States of Brooklyn, NH - Strange Maps

These are small states on the crowded East Coast, but even their average density is weighed down by relatively rural areas. For really high densities, take Brooklyn, the most populous of NYC’s five boroughs (2.56 million), with a surface of 71 square miles, which works out to a whopping 34,916 inhabitants per square mile. . Now, what if the whole population of the US would live in such a cheek-by-jowlish manner? How much space would they need? Texas? Nope. California? Think again. Pennsylvania? Nu-uh. Florida? Nice try. New Hampshire. That’s how much, or rather: how little space would be needed. The state would be ruined, though (imagine a Brooklyn-like sprawl of that size), but the rest of the country would be green and pleasantly devoid of people! As the legend to these maps point out, a further advantage would be that all Americans would be neighbours. (via 450 – The United States of Brooklyn, NH « Strange Maps)

History is full of tales of revelations that were helped along by such conceptual collisions. Alastair Pilkington came up with the idea for float glass, the inexpensive successor to plate glass, while washing dishes; the grease that pooled atop the water inspired him to pour molten glass onto melted tin, resulting in a perfectly smooth pane. And George de Mestral had the initial brainstorm for Velcro during a 1941 hunting trip, when he noticed how difficult it was to pick Alpine burrs off of his clothes.

This means that tweets about Lady Gaga’s lingerie can help someone debugging Perl code. (Or a tweet about Perl code may help Lady Gaga’s underwear stylist.) A random scrap of information can trigger just the right conceptual collision. It’s hard to know which scrap might do the trick, but that’s the beauty of social networks — they constantly produce potential sparks, for free.