FlorinAndrei

Water too:

http://www.blingh2o.com/

(link is NSFW in stuck-up places and cultures)

Right, so then the definition of racketeering is starting to become inadequate, is the way I see it.

Sarcasm. Whoosh.

So, who killed the electric car again?

I stand corrected.

Some dis-advantages, I guess. Since it's beta, it won't run plugins (yet). Please correct me if I'm wrong.

It's the MS Windows of programming. Everybody uses it, nobody brags about it.

I just use http://is.gd/ when twittering. Shorter by one character. ;-)

I'm still holding back, in large part because most of the books I read tend to be non-mainstream, while the stuff on Kindle so far is largely new releases, etc.

That will probably change at some point.

Terrible idea if you're like me and have calibrated your monitor and now can detect minute changes in the color temperature. :-)

Turn down brightness and/or contrast if you like, but don't mess with the color.

Hm, I'm having trouble parsing that.

It's not just the religions of the Book which use that metaphor. The whole Buddhism, the whole Hinduism (to the extent that such a thing does exist) - they all say: man = spirit, woman = matter.

There's something in your observation that echoes old mythologies and models of the world: men represent Spirit, women represent Matter. I always thought there was some kernel of truth to that metaphor, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. I think you did.

One more reason why TV-delivered news are fodder for morons.

Or it could be a different kind of fusion. Maybe protons fuse in a different way in a metal lattice.

My recipe for efficient writing:

- Put laptop in backpack

- Go someplace where you can be "lonely in a crowd" (e.g. local coffee shop)

- Log out of your Google home page, so all those applets won't claim your attention all the time

- Don't even think of touching anything in the bookmarks

- Keep the email client turned off

- Turn cell phone off too if you must

- Get a nice large latte (either regular or decaf)

- Fire up the text editor

- Let your mind take off

Voila, instant productivity. I get into the "flow" pretty quickly that way.

Good points. That is also the theme of the book - the mystery beyond comprehension. The echoes of Borges (the staggering fictional encyclopedism) serve the purpose of suggesting the titanic struggle of the mind to grasp the unknowable anyway.

Soderbergh's version avoids dealing with the mystery (well, it's pushed in the background) and focuses instead on psychological exploration. The scope is much more narrow, and it's a very simple movie - in a way. But it does what it set out to do very well, it's very focused on its goal and taut. And the images and the camera work are mesmerizing - I was "tripping" mouth agape all the way to the end.

Oh, BTW, the movies are good too.

The one by Tarkowski is a classic and has an almost cult following (almost impossible to criticize it in certain circles). It is a remarkable movie, but I've found it a bit bombastic at times.

The other one, by Soderbergh, is the movie that opened my eyes to the art of cinema - or rather, to telling stories with the image, framing, and camera motion. It's hard to explain, it was like a revelation. I used to be very much focused on music, sound and words, and was almost blind to visual arts. Seeing Soderbergh's "Solaris" was a turning point to me, along with other major changes in my life at that point. I guess I was just getting ready and seeing the movie was probably the catalyst. Now I can actually take pictures in a conscious way and am able to "say" something by just framing the image in a certain way.

I read the book decades ago, when I was a high-school kid. It had a major impact on my thinking. It's a lot more philosophical than what you would expect from a sci-fi novel. Reminding of Borges in a way.

The being with the fully-cryptic (or almost fully cryptic) consciousness is described in the novel "Solaris" by Stanislav Lem - two movies were made after it, one by Andrei Tarkowski, the other by Steven Soderbergh.

It's a great book anyway, regardless of your interest in the issue of consciousness.

In places like the SF Bay Area, that's kind of a moot point.

"EBay plans IPO for Skype, citing limited synergies"

http://www.physorg.com/news158949373.html

Captain Obvious called, wants his headline back.

I'm surely not the only one who thought the Skype acquisition by eBay was a huge WTF. Now they are forced to admit it.

Privacy is dead, move on.

How many FPS in Quake?

(just kidding)

650 billion is a small number. A microgram contains much more particles than that.

Balls of steel. This topic is so poisoned after Fleischmann and Pons, nobody touches it willingly. Well, looks like almost nobody.

But seriously, it's like the bugbear of research nowadays. No matter whether it would be possible to do fusion in those conditions, or not, people avoid getting near this subject for fear of tainting their reputations and destroying their careers.

Personally, I'm not sure what to think about cold fusion. On one hand, making two D particles stick together is hard. On the other, the D soup within a Pd lattice is definitely a complex system and, probably, still has some surprises in store. Time will tell.

white noise? yuk! it's like chewing broken glass.

Pink noise is much more smooth.

So glad I'm not living there.

Because "they" is Stephen Wolfram. :-)

Ah, yes, the sweet sweet sound of FAIL!

Millions of citizens with camera-equipped cell phones linked to Twitter. ;-)

Yup, running your own local DNS cache is almost always better than the ISP-supplied resolvers.

Note: I used to run DJB's software a lot, back in the '90s especially, when there was no secure alternative. But nowadays there's no point in doing that. Bind has cleaned up their act, it's secure and usable enough nowadays.