ideonexus

Month: January 2010

  • Star Trek Online: Explore Strange New Worlds, Seek Out New Life and New Civilizations…and Kill Them: Looking for Science in Star Trek Online Beta

    For the past two weeks I have been on a quest. A quest in which I have invested over 20 hours, at the expense of doing much more productive things, like bathing and other basic hygiene tasks. My quest has been to find the science in Star Trek Online’s (STO’s) beta test. Vulcan Science Officer…

  • A Review of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget

    You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program. When they design an internet…

  • Science Online 2010

    This last weekend I burned several month’s worth of Science Friday and This Week in Science episodes to CDs for the ride and made my yearly trip to the Sigma Xi conference center in Durham North Carolina to spend a couple days being overwhelmed with fantastic resources, ideas, and projects in the realm of online…

  • Enlightenment Tagging

    Awhile back, I was visiting Monument Park in Richmond Virginia, which requires crossing a very long suspension bridge running underneath the highway across a river. While crossing this bridge, I happened to look up and spot some graffiti on the underside of the freeway. It was an incredibly impressive place for someone to tag with…

  • Glen Beck’s Confusion Over What Constitutes “Race” on the American Census

    Types of Human Race On his radio show, Glen Beck recently objected to the term “African American being included with the terms “black” and “negro” on a census form: African-American is a bogus, PC, made-up term. I mean, that’s not a race. Your ancestry is from Africa and now you live in America. Ok so…

  • The Decline and Fall of Second Life

    Carbon Buckeyball Model at the Second Life Science Center I’m one of those people who saw incredible potential in Linden Labs’ Second Life and sang its praises, while so many critics demanded to know what the virtual world was good for. All too well I remember critics of the Internet over ten years ago complaining,…

  • 2009 Year in Science

    ideonexus 2009 Science Links Tag Cloud The National Ignition Facility went online, focusing the power of numerous high-powered lasers on a single point to produce the environment inside a star… but then we didn’t hear anything else about it. Space Shuttle Discovery took a bat to space clinging to the external fuel tank. Scarlet Knight…