There are numerous ongoing examples of governments and political institutions preventing the sharing of information – often in the name of “security” but often, more accurately, in the name of “not being embarrassed”. The United States is one of the biggest hypocrites in this area, applying a “the same rules we want for other countries […]
A generation ago, one of the biggest insurmountable challenges in computing was writing a chess program that could beat the world’s best human player. That eventually happened in 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue beat the greatest Grandmaster of all-time Garry Kasparov (of course, computers had been beating inferior players for much longer – including ChessMaster 3000 […]
Watched the “State of the Union” address and thought it was pretty decent – not Obama’s best by far – but good. A few random thoughts… Boehner always looks like he’s about to cry Can’t remember what the point was about but I counted exactly once where Boehner clapped and Biden didn’t. Love the focus […]
A very cool statistical representation of various world statistics. (H/T to Kelly P. on Facebook)
Saturday Snap – 1988 Computer Specs, originally uploaded by headtale. My mom was cleaning out some papers at home and found the original spec sheet/packing slip for the first computer our family ever bought in 1988 which is when I was in grade nine. It doesn’t have the actual price mom and dad paid but […]
Guility. Yep. Definitely. Learned it in Typing10 a million years ago. Hard to break a habit like that. (H/T to CP on FB for the link)
(Trying the “Press This” WordPress bookmarklet…) 8 Smears and Misconceptions About WikiLeaks Spread By the Media | | AlterNet. [Edit: Oh, and here’s a Reddit thread that summarizes, beyond the hype and lies, “what has WikiLeaks actually done?”]
A Google Labs project, the strangely named NGram Viewer allows you to search for various words and see how their usage in books within the Google Books archive has changed over the past 200 year (or any time frame you specify). Examples: Hitler Computer (note the weird blip around 1900?) War Socialism Negro Canada (highest […]
A Religious Bird, originally uploaded by headtale. I don’t normally make a habit of taking photos of strangers without their permission (honest!) but I thought this one was pretty funn. A woman sitting across from me on the bus the other day was reading her daily devotions while cross-referencing the Bible. Meanwhile, I was reading […]
WikiLeaks (which is down as I write this for reasons I’ll get to) is a site that’s been around since 2006 and first got a mention on this blog just over a year ago for a library-related story. Since then, the site has released two fairly large dumps of information obtained from a single army […]
