Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
15 Internet Annoyances, and How to Fix Them – PC World explains how a few simple fixes can make surfing the web whole lot easier.
100 Niche Search Engines Every College Student Needs – While the big names like Google and Yahoo will likely always rule the search engine market, sometimes you want something a little more focused when it comes to finding what you need on the web. That’s where these niche search engines come in handy.
Aviary – One of the best image editors on the web is now available for free!
ShadyURL – Don’t just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening. That way, no one will touch it!
SmartyPig – This online service bills itself as a “social banking” website. Basically, it’s a savings account that allows other people to make deposits while helping you to keep track of your savings goals. It’s not revolutionary, but it looks like a better solution to collection donations than PayPal.
Read the rest of this entry » » »
1856
The first US patent for the tintype photographic picture process is issued to Professor Hamilton L. Smith of Gambier, Ohio. The patent describes the patent as being “For the Use of Japanned Metallic Plates in Photography” to obtain “positive impressions upon a japanned surface previously prepared upon an iron or other metallic plate or sheets; and it consists in the use of collodion and a solution of a salt of silver and an ordinary camera.” (US No. 14,300) The patent describes the preparation of the black varnish, along with the varnish’s application and baking.
1878
Thomas Edison patents the phonograph. (US No. 200,521) His first recording is of himself reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb” by speaking into the device’s large horn, which transmits vibrations to a needle, which inscribes a recording onto a tin-foil cylinder, which is rotated by hand. Read an excellent history of the Edison phonograph at the US Library of Congress website.
1946
Alan Turing presents the “Proposal for the Development in the Mathematics Division of an Automatic Computing Engine (ACE)” to a meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, England.
1970
The Soviet Union launches the Sputnik 52 space probe and the Molniya 1-13 communications satellite.
Read the rest of this entry » » »
The nature of the personal computer revolution is simply not fully understood by companies like Apple (or anyone else, for that matter). Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the ‘why’ out of the equation – as in ‘why would I want this?’
1908
Thomas Edison is issued a patent for an improvement to the “Alkaline Storage Battery.” (US No. 879,612) Its purpose is to reduce foaming of the electrolytes in alkaline batteries, an effect which Edison attributes to the presence of microscopic quantities of organic matter. To correct the problem, the alkaline solution is filtered through bone black that has been purified in a hot potash solution.
1913
English Chemist Frederick Soddy introduces the term “isotope” to describe atoms of the same element that have different atomic masses. He suggests that different elements produced in different radioactive transformations can occupy the same position in the Periodic Table, and dubs such forms of an element “isotopes” from the Greek word for “same place.”
1929
The first Academy Awards are announced. Nominees for outstanding picture are the films 7th Heaven, The Racket, and Wings.
1930
Clyde Tombaugh discovers the planet Pluto, becoming the only American astronomer to find a planet inside the solar system. The discovery is the culmination of three decades of work at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, which involved taking millions of photographs of the night sky one tiny sections at a time in search of the one moving point.
Read the rest of this entry » » »
Man is now hard-at-work naturally selecting for the traits that make software more conscious. Humanity cannot resist an overwhelming urge to create unnatural life in the image of natural life. But this effort at Unnatural Selection is still Natural Selection. The end result will still be an arithmetic reordering of pie shapes and pie slices. The overall pie of life will be much larger, for it will now include vitology as well as biology. And within that larger pie, there will be slices accorded to each of the types of vitological life and biological life that successfully self-replicate in a changing environment. Mindclone consciousness will arrive vastly faster than its biological predecessor because Unnatural Selection is Natural Selection at the speed of intentionality.
508
CSS
XHTML
Website Credits &
Disclaimers