For the Long Haul.
“Look back 100 years. If you could have had James Clerk Maxwell and Guglielmo Marconi and Albert Einstein sit around a lunch table in the early 1900s, they would have had all the math necessary to...
View ArticleInternational Ballet Machines.
“Ballet pointe shoes are not typically thought of as technological artifacts, but they certainly are…Dancers on this pointe regimen developed characteristically long, lean leg muscles. Balanchine also...
View ArticleThe Man in the Iron Mask.
As seen in the comments of this strange story, writer, inventor, and science-fiction pioneer Hugo Gernsback shows off The Isolator, a Spaceballs-like contraption designed to allow someone to read and...
View ArticleThe Ruin of Many a Poor Bit.
Speaking of SKYNET, witness here some very old-school technology deriving a binary understanding of the blues: “House of the Rising Sun,” covered by various oscilloscopes. Shades of Sam and Max‘s...
View ArticleGoing Up, Sir?
“If we are to use the death of the old generation of explorers to spur on a revival in the idea for this generation, let’s also learn from their mistakes. Don’t follow a paradigm which results in...
View ArticleSecrets of the Supercut.
“Many supercuts provide hard evidence of the existence of tropes long suspected but never quite proved: imperiled characters fretting that they have no cellphone signal; high-tech investigators asking...
View ArticleHAL’s acting squirrely.
“Deception is not something that comes very naturally to today’s artificial intelligence programs. For most robots, it’s hard enough to navigate the world the way it is without introducing fantasies...
View ArticleAperture Science.
“With a portal at each university, students can stand in front of a vertical 50-inch high-definition monitor and communicate with the help of a webcam, microphone, speakers and a computer running a...
View ArticleThe Blogosphere’s Baby Pics.
They shut down the factory in 2009, but old Geocities home page find a (brief) new life at the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op tumblr, dedicated to researching the Geocities days of the web. The...
View ArticleRun Silent, Run Deep.
“This is the driving idea behind DARPA’s Upward Falling Payloads (UFP) program, which seeks to create technologies that would allow the Navy to leave unmanned systems and other distributed technologies...
View ArticleThe Other Space Program.
‘The mission is ongoing,’ Air Force Maj. Eric Badger, a spokesman for the X-37B program, told SPACE.com. ‘As with previous missions, the actual duration will depend on test objectives, on-orbit vehicle...
View ArticleA Better Cloaking Device.
“Whilst previous cloaking studies have used metamaterials to divert, or bend, the incoming waves around an object, this new method, which the researchers dub ‘mantle cloaking’, uses an ultrathin...
View Article“You’ve Only Made 0 Friends.”
Sometimes your computer, cellphone, and whatnot just don’t know how to let you down easy: Screenshots of Despair, the Tumblr.
View ArticleThe Wheel of Pain…for Dogs.
“The Turnspit Dog, 1500-1900 – A dog specifically bred to run on a small wheel in order to turn meat so it would cook evenly. This took both courage, to stand near the fire, and loyalty, to not to eat...
View ArticleMake it Better Do It Faster.
“Before now, the record for storing quantum data at room temperature was two seconds. One. Two. Done. But researchers in Canada announced they’ve now hit 39 minutes. That’s right — they’ve raised the...
View ArticleRiver of Song.
“The Music Timeline shows genres of music waxing and waning, based on how many Google Play Music users have an artist or album in their music library, and other data (such as album release dates). Each...
View ArticleStep Aside, Human.
“It is an invisible force that goes by many names. Computerization. Automation. Artificial intelligence. Technology. Innovation. And, everyone’s favorite, ROBOTS. Whatever name you prefer, some form of...
View ArticleFools and Their Money.
“What Nigerian scams are to your grandfather, Bitcoin exchanges are to the 20-30 semi-tech-savvy libertarian demographic. Even if the Bitcoin protocol were perfect, and it isn’t, our computing...
View ArticleRdng is Fndmtl.
“[W]hat Spritz does differently (and brilliantly) is manipulate the format of the words to more appropriately line them up with the eye’s natural motion of reading. The ‘Optimal Recognition Point’...
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