I’ve developed cataracts. Nothing very surprising there: there’s a family history of cataracts, and 42% of people here in the US between 52 and 64 are affected. So I’ve moved quickly through the various stages of understanding: Shit, what’s happening to my eyesight? Did my optometrist screw up my last prescription? Hmmm, I’m having difficulty…
Read More An unexpected experience connects with my childhood love of scienceHerewith a few of my thoughts about the iPad after living with it for nearly a week: If you only read one review of the iPad, make it this wonderful essay by John Gruber over at Daring Fireball. The KeyNote and Pages apps look beautiful, and work pretty well, but they are going to be…
Read More iPad thoughts after a few daysHere’s a nice piece about my friend Art, the “IBOL guy”. If you sew, knit, weave, or just dig fabric, check out the IBOL website. UPDATE: Link fixed – thanks for catching that, Marion.
Read More Iraqi Bundles of Love(Via PZ.)
Read More What a brilliant idea!Visualizing huge numbers can be very difficult. People regularly talk about millions of miles, billions of bytes, or trillions of dollars, yet it’s still hard to grasp just how much a “billion” really is. The MegaPenny Project aims to help by taking one small everyday item, the U.S. penny, and building on that to answer…
Read More Visualizing "lots and lots"Inspired by a colleague of mine, I just acquired a pair of Vibram Fivefingers KSO shoes. A couple of years ago I spent most of the summer in some really thin “river runner” style shoes, and it was the closest thing I’d found to having the freedom of going barefoot while still providing some basic…
Read More On the toe liberation front….Maybe I’ll have to buy myself a copy of PhotoShop….
Read More HmmmmSpaceX did it! Fantastic work.
Read More Orbit!Enough politics: let’s talk about probability. The Quantum Pontiff has a delightful piece up about “Gambler’s ruin”: Gambler’s ruin is one of my favorite basic probability exercises… Suppose you have access to a game in which you have a slight advantage in winning… [W]hat is your probability of ruin, given a starting bankroll of D…
Read More On "Wisely Using Your Advantage"File this under “things that I expected to happen, but not so soon”: Researchers from the Cybernetic Intelligence Research Group at the University of Reading have developed a robot whose movements are controlled by neurons growing in a culture dish. The really beautiful bit of the experiment is that the neurons seem to have self-organized…
Read More Building a nervous system from everyday parts