On Friday morning, October 7, I pre-ordered two new iPhones: a black, 16GB iPhone 4S for me, and a white one for Anna. A week later they were delivered by FedEx. Anna’s white iPhone is the first white
Blinded by the light Light pollution is amateur astronomers’ worst enemy — and a waste of electricity
EAST BAY — As a kid growing up in Harris Heights off Metacom Avenue in Warren, George Huftalen and his friends would head to a nearby field at night and perch themselves on top of a big rock. They’d…
In March 2010, Barry Duncan, master palindromist, was locked in an epic struggle with the alphabet. He was totally absorbed in the completion of a commissioned piece. “It’s draining me of every bit of energy I have,” he explained at the time. He was also just getting over a cold, his first since…
The Macalope paid his respects to Steve Jobs on Thursday , so today we’re back to punching morons. And, though it seems like a million years ago now, it was only Tuesday that Apple announced the iPhon
The Macalope’s going to keep this short because he’s not a eulogist, he’s not a poet, he’s just a pointy instrument for skewering silly pundits. His hooves can’t do someone like Steve Jobs justice. No
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In honor of the Nobel Prize , here are some questions that are frequently asked about dark energy, or should be. What is dark energy? It's what makes the universe accelerate, if indeed there is a "thi
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AllThingsD marks the anniversary of Steve Jobs’s death with Walt Mossberg’s memories of the man, originally published Oct. 5, 2011. That Steve Jobs was a genius, a giant influence on multiple industries and billions of lives, has been written many times since he retired as Apple’s CEO in August. He…
How did we acquire our beautiful brains? How did the savage struggle for survival produce such an extraordinary object? This is a difficult question to answer, not least because brains do not fossilise. Thanks to the latest technologies, though, we can now trace the brain’s evolution in…
To see past the distracting, dopey teenager and glimpse the adaptive adolescent within, we should look not at specific, sometimes startling, behaviors, such as skateboarding down stairways or dating fast company, but at the broader traits that underlie those acts. Let's start with the teen's love of…
To see past the distracting, dopey teenager and glimpse the adaptive adolescent within, we should look not at specific, sometimes startling, behaviors, such as skateboarding down stairways or dating fast company, but at the broader traits that underlie those acts. Let's start with the teen's love of…
Kindle Fire The Kindle Fire’s slogan says it all: “ All the content. Ultra-fast web browsing. ” That’s the best sort of marketing message: simple, appealing, and true . Well, we’ll see how fast their
This talk by John Gruber and Merlin Mann at SXSW 2009 came up again from John’s link to a fan video , and it was a great reminder to redownload the audio and listen again. It has become much more famo
The huge gap between current CMS offerings and what the world needed occurred to me during my time as CTO of The Huffington Post . When we were acquired by AOL in 2011, I inherited 53 properties built on dozens of different content management systems. It wasn't long after that I soon realized they…
Ethernet was invented by Bob Metcalfe and others at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the mid-1970s. PARC’s experimental Ethernet ran at 3Mbps, a “convenient data transfer rate […] well below that of the computer’s path to main memory,” so packets wouldn’t have to be buffered in Ethernet…
There aren’t a lot of bats, balls or rackets in northern Afghanistan. There are goats, horses, men and dusty plains, and they have been there ever since Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde swept into the neighborhood in the 13th century. Their game, then, is simple. Men on horseback grab a goat…
There’s something incredibly unnerving the first time you start “following” the liked items of other users on Instapaper. Instapaper makes no suggestions to you of popular users and offers no list of
With so many projects, if the customer is willing to go without a small subset of the functionality they think they need, it can save a massive amount of effort, cost, and complexity and result in a m
* Paper title: Interpreting supernovae observations in a lumpy universe * Authors: Chris Clarkson et al. * First author’s affiliation: University of Cape Town Distant objects race away from us at ever-faster speeds, a cosmological expansion of space itself driven by dark energy ( DE ). The speed of…
It’s more than a week later and we’re still cleaning up the mess of the storm that raged through our community. No, not hurricane Irene, hurricane Steve Jobs Steps Down (which, like Irene, would make
While people of all cultures experience sleep paralysis in similar ways, the specific form and intensity it takes varies from one group to the next They died in their sleep one by one, thousands of mi
Last weekend I spoke at the Turing Festival in Edinburgh. It was a new talk. Short - just 20 minutes - and presenting some new material. Since the talk was short, I necessarily omitted a certain amount of additional material I wanted to mention. I also presented some data that might be perceived as…
This isn’t a brand-new phenomenon, but it’s worth repeating and re-emphasizing: What makes Apple so successful today — and so threatening to its competitors — isn’t just its design and engineering cap
An expedition into the chaos of a cell's control center has returned with intriguing insights into a poorly understood process that shapes every cell in the body. By linking changes in gene activation
An exploration of mathematical shapes could explain why skin gets wrinkled after too much time in the tub. Understanding the geometry of wrinkly skin could help design new materials that can stretch out without losing strength. “The paper explains a mechanism that can explain the structural…
One example always cited of Steve Jobs’ genius at the helm of Apple is his decision to kill off the iPod Mini, the best selling product at the time, and introduce an entirely new product line in its p
It’s called simply the “Amazon Kindle”. But it’s not like any Kindle you’ve seen before. It displays content in full color. It has a 7-inch capacitive touch screen. And it runs Android. Rumors of Amaz
• Title: Experimental test of airplane boarding methods • Authors: John H. Steffen, Jon Hitchkiss • First Author’s Institution: Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics Today’s astrobite doesn’t have
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Type Ia supernova PTF11kly in the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101) 21 million light years away. Image credit: Astronomy Picture of the Day. Last night, I was in the Berkeley-based remote control room of the Kec
In last week’s Build and Analyze , we speculated about what the future Amazon tablet might be, fitting the most credible rumors we’ve heard so far. (This is basically an expanded version of that, so i
There’s no other way for me to start this other than by firing away:Last week I left my full-time job at Joyent , for the sole reasonso that I can write Daring Fireball as a full-time job. Two years a
A supernova discovered yesterday is closer to Earth — approximately 21 million light-years away — than any other of its kind in a generation. Astronomers believe they caught the supernova within hours
• Title: The Discovery of Y Dwarfs Using Data from the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) • Authors: Michael C. Cushing et al. • First Author’s Institution: Jet Propulsion Laboratory Today we
The Phantom Menace of Sleep-Deprived Doctors A pediatric resident naps in an on-call room during an overnight shift. The TV is often left on for white noise. Credit... Jessica Dimmock for The New York
HP folds like a cheap card table while RIM says “Maybe you’ve hit bottom, but I haven’t hit bottom yet! I got a ways to go!” Google just put a lot of money down, but is there anything in its hand? Fin
HP acquired Palm at the end of April 2010 , for $1.2 billion. HP’s CEO was Mark Hurd. Three months later, in early August, Mark Hurd was forced to resign over that scandal with forged expenses and lie
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