I can still remember the satisfaction I took from dragging a crayon against a particularly toothy piece of paper in a coloring book when I was very young. Unlike the cliché, I was trying to stay in th
If the need for a new approach to the American electorate wasn’t clear enough to Republicans on November 6th, it certainly has been since Mitt Romney delivered his graceless coup de grace a few days l
Introduction In April of 1965, Electronics magazine published an article by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. The article and the predictions that it made have since become the stuff of legend, and like
The break up The headline of Apple's press release reads, "Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors Beginning in 2006." How did it come to this? What's it all mean? Here's how I feel as a Mac enthusiast sin
Opinion The Quiet Ones EVER since I quit hanging out in Baltimore dive bars, the only place where I still regularly find myself in hostile confrontations with my fellow man is Amtrak’s Quiet Car. The
Ducking Google in search engines By , PAOLI, Pa. — N ot far from Valley Forge, around the corner from Bravo Pizza, up the road from Paoli Auto Body, there is an odd-looking office building that resembles a stone castle. An eye doctor is on the first floor. On the second floor is a search engine. The…
A couple of months ago, I decided to start learning Python . I say “start” because, as a hobby to fit in between my personal schedule and work for the site, learning the language is still very much a
To celebrate the publication of The Particle at the End of the Universe , here’s a cheat sheet for you: mind-bending facts about the Higgs boson you can use to impress friends and prospective romantic entanglements. 1. It’s not the “God particle.” Sure, people call it the God particle, because…
I wrote two posts on the topic of WebKit font smoothing before, but unfortunately the situation has grown worse since then. In allowing the designer to pick their own font smoothing mode with the -web
Siri is a promise. A promise of a new computing environment, enormously empowering to the ordinary user, a new paradigm in our evolving relationship with machines. Siri could change Apple’s fortunes like iTunes and App Store…or end up being like the useful-but-inessential FaceTime or the…
"If a meteor made out of diamond and 100 feet in diameter was traveling at the speed of light and hit the earth, what would happen to it?” —Aidan Smith, Age 8, via his father Jeff Nothing made of matt
Actually Getting Big Things Done is a series of guests posts on how to make things happen from those who know how to… well… actually get big things done. Today’s post comes from Erin Feldman whose blog, adorable drawings and recent ebook, Write Right continue to inform and delight. I’m sometimes…
Siri, as shipped, appears already capable of adding functionality according to which applications are installed on the iPhone. Here’s a screen shot of before and after I removed Apple’s Find My Friends app from my phone. How does it do that? Where’s “Where’s Jason?” gone? I’m busy so I’ve not…
Dan Crow, another former Apple employee from the 1990s, also says Apple has shown itself to be doomed without Steve Jobs, in a piece for The Guardian headlined “ We’ve Passed Peak Apple ”: Why do I th
I was born to young parents who were not ready for a child. They separated when I was five and neither was able to independently care for me. The next few years were a jumbled mess as I moved back and forth between one or the other of my grandparents’ homes, supervised by them and whichever aunts or…
The following was written in August, 2012. It was published a month ago in the first issue of Marco Arment’s iOS-only publication The Magazine . Marco has generously allowed his contributors to retain copyright and the option to share their work on their own sites after a time. If you have an iOS…
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People always seem surprised to find out I use Evernote , despite all of the plain-text tools at my fingertips. I thought I’d offer some explanation as to why and how I use Evernote. The biggest knock
November 7, 2012 The Best When I got back to San Francisco after a three month trip to Southeast Asia last year, I had no possessions. I was living out of hotels. Everything I carried had to fit into
I was on an airplane last night as the election was decided. As the plane landed after midnight on the East Coast, I confess that my hand was shaking as I turned on my phone for the news. I did not wa
Why political journalists can’t stand Nate Silver: The limits of journalistic knowledge October 31, 2012 | Mark | political journalism The more I think about the rift between political journalism and
Mitt Romney has always had difficulty drawing a winning Electoral College hand. Even during his best period of polling, in the week or two after the first presidential debate in Denver, he never quite
Sign Up for Your Weekly Dose of Culture! Travel The Dual Legacy of Artificial Islands: Engineering vs. Ecology Explore the rich history and modern impacts of artificial islands. From ancient civilizat
Why I Love the Electoral College By: Garett Jones Categories: Public Choice Theory By Garett Jones, Oct 20 2012 SHARE POST: There’s some evidence that democracy itself makes people happier, but largel
An artist visits the world's premier quantum mechanics labs. Beauty ensues. "Momentum," displayed at the Wilmotte Gallery in London (Alejandro Guijarro) Blackboards, the legend goes , were invented by
Earlier this year, through a series of events that involved a predawn drive deep into the Mojave Desert, I came into a windfall of Mid-Century Modern furniture. I loaded up a U-Haul trailer with what I considered to be high-quality designs: a Danish Modern dining set; a long, teak credenza; and, the…
The Boltzmann Brain paradox is an argument against the idea that the universe around us, with its incredibly low-entropy early conditions and consequential arrow of time, is simply a statistical fluctuation within some eternal system that spends most of its time in thermal equilibrium. You can get a…
Amir D. Aczel writes often about physics and cosmology. His book about the discovery of the Higgs boson, Present at the Creation: Discovering the Higgs Boson, is published in paperback by Broadway Books in November 2012. If somebody told you that there are angels floating in space, observing our…
How Romney Would Treat Women IN this year’s campaign furor over a supposed “war on women,” involving birth control and abortion, the assumption is that the audience worrying about these issues is just
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Apple cannot afford to get too big or too disorganized. That’s my takeaway from yesterday’s shocker that not only is Scott Forstall out at Apple, but also that his fiefdom is being split between Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, and Jony Ive. We learned a lot about Tim Cook yesterday. First: retail chief…
When Eyes Wide Shut came out, a few months after Stanley Kubrick’s death in 1999, it was severely misunderstood, which came as no surprise. If you go back and look at the contemporary reactions to any Kubrick picture (except the earliest ones), you’ll see that all his films were initially…
A Different Perspective A week ago, I sat in an auditorium and listened to Steve Sinofsky talk about the tablet market. He talked about how the iPad was a great device, and a logical extension of the
The world divides into people who think of Apple as a company, and people who think of Apple as a brand. The former group includes all stock analysts , of course, but it also includes most technology journalists. The latter group is, well, most of the people who buy Apple products. The difference…
Today, Apple announced a retina 13-inch Macbook Pro , brand new iMac , updated Mac Mini, and, of course, the iPad Mini . That’s a lot to announce, and I think this was one of Apple’s best events in th
Media inquiries and licensing please email thedeathdelusion@gmail.com Comparison with the original: http://youtu.be/pjeHZ9poew4 Making of: http://youtu.be/jpjkaxeMGak I made this video for fun and for
the best computer A few years ago I had a burgeoning interest in photography. As I researched the websites and listened to the podcasts requisite with developing my new hobby, I kept coming across a c
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