ideonexus

Month: May 2008

  • The Price of Food: Who’s to Blame?

    On May 3, speaking to the issue of rising food prices, President Bush Jr cited developments in India, where the “middle class is larger than our entire population” and added, “when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food, and so demand is high, and that causes the price to go…

  • Sunday Adventuring: NY Hall of Science

    The 1964 World’s Fair boggles my mind. I can’t believe there was a time in America when science was revered, celebrated on such an incredible scale, and monuments were built to it. The NY Hall of Science is built up within the grounds of this wonderful event, and area in Queens filled with great big…

  • A Twittering, Flickring World

    Here’s a really neat way to visualize our world in Real Time. twittervision takes the text-messages posted on twitter, and shows them on a google map as they are being posted. Watching this application with the “3D View” turned on, I was able to watch Californians planning their night as I was turning in to…

  • PMOG: The Passively Multiplayer Online Game

    My Habits Make me a Pathmaker in PMOG Education is an adventure. We quest for knowledge throughout our lives, whether its the daily news, OTJ, or sitcoms. Every fact collected in our minds a tool for accessing new information and clarifying the old. Every fact is also a weapon in debate, which are battles in…

  • Acronym Speak

    Today I sat in on a meeting about USCG training and qualifications that went like this: “Why doesn’t the application cover the J?” “Because they program to the 3710.” “So we need to submit a CG22 to change it.” “Are we sure we only want the BA and DM updated?” “We can follow the other…

  • Stephen Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought

    “Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.” – Hobbes The Stuff of Thought I once had a conversation with a girl that went like this: “Ryan, you’re a bama.” “What’s a ‘bama?’” “It’s… you know… what you are.” “That makes no sense.” “A bama’s…

  • The Top 10 Human Genes

    As the purposes for various genes are identified on a weekly basis in the news, this list will be obsolete in a few months, but I wanted to post this. There aren’t enough plain-English reviews of human genes out there. I apologize if I bullox up something. My criteria was based on the importance of…

  • Elitists Rule!

    Hillary Clinton, when recently asked if she could name one economist who thought her “Gas Tax Holiday” was a good idea, responded: I’m not going to put my lot in with economists… We’ve got to get out of this mind-set where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage…

  • Seeing His Holiness, Sir Mr. Pope, in NY

    My sister and I had some difficulty getting into the MoMa because the street was closed so the Pope could come down one of the adjacent roads. Luckily, my sister showed me how to get past the police barricade (you wait until their dealing with someone else and walk past them). Of course, a friend…

  • The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art: Design and the Elastic Mind

    I was in New York recently to see this fascinating exhibit before it moved on, and I was not let down. Science, knowledge, and technological progress are cultural tools available to us all, and they grow exponentially. The more science we know, the more doors to knowledge are open to us. The more technology we…

  • Suicide Support Online

    A recent study in the BMJ Suicide and the Internet, found that results for suicide-related search terms most frequently support or encourage suicide. I like to think of the Internet as one big ecosystem of ideas, or memes, where our minds naturally select out the good ones. Obviously, if most sites are pro-suicide, then we…

  • The Joys of Windows Vista

    Microsoft has come up with a novel solution to the issue of security in Windows Vista. The basic principle is don’t let the user do anything. You see, if users are prevented from any productivity whatsoever, they can’t screw things up right? Take for instance User Account Control. This is a new “feature” (note the…