placeholder

placeholder

Elsevier — my part in its downfall

The Dutch publisher Elsevier publishes many of the world's best known mathematics journals, including Advances in Mathematics, Comptes Rendus, Discrete Mathematics, The European Journal of Combinat...

Click to view the original at gowers.wordpress.com

placeholder

YCRFS 9: Kill Hollywood

That's one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they're r...

Click to view the original at ycombinator.com

Hasnain says:

"Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise."

Posted on 2012-01-21T06:57:08+0000

placeholder

CERN to announce Higgs boson observation at LHC | ExtremeTech

Tomorrow, at 9am EST, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland are expected to announce, with fairly strong certainty, that they have observed the Higgs boson

Click to view the original at extremetech.com

placeholder

Parrondo's Paradox: Winning Two Games You're Guaranteed to Lose

JM Parrondo is a casino and con artist's worst nightmare. In the 1990s, he invented two games that are sure to lose you everything. They're both mathematically designed to make you go broke, but play them one after another and you are guaranteed to win. Parrondo's Paradox was dreamed up in the...

Click to view the original at io9.com

placeholder

Pizza is a vegetable? Congress says yes

Congress wants to keep pizza and french fries on school lunch lines, fighting back against an Obama administration proposal to make school lunches healthier.

Click to view the original at today.msnbc.msn.com

placeholder

» Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think

Amazon's founder talks with Steven Levy about the new Kindle Fire, cloud computing, social media, cultural pioneering and sending people into space.

Click to view the original at wired.com

placeholder

Man throws 4,800 bottled notes into the ocean, gets 3,100 replies

It's now been 15 years since Harold Hackett began making friends all over the world. He never meets them in person, and doesn't use the phone or internet for contact, but rather leaves his acquaintances up to the tides. Since … Continue reading →

Click to view the original at news.yahoo.com

placeholder

HDD Pricewatch: You know where it’s going — we tell you how much it’s going to hurt | ExtremeTech

Hard drive prices continue to climb, with no relief expected for at least 6 months.

Click to view the original at extremetech.com

Hasnain says:

Apparently hard drive manufacturers forgot the golden rule, "Don't have a single point of failure".

ALL of the major ones had their factories in a single place, which got flooded..

Posted on 2011-11-08T09:07:48+0000

placeholder

» Why Is This Cargo Container Emitting So Much Radiation?

On July 13, 2010, a cargo container arrived in Genoa, Italy. It had torrents of radiation coming out of it. No one knew what was inside, and no one knew what to do next.

Click to view the original at wired.com

Hasnain says:

Really good read. Plus this stands out:

"It was hardly the first fishy shipment to pass through Gioia Tauro. Famously, just six weeks after 9/11, workers there heard noises coming from inside a container being transshipped to Nova Scotia via Rotterdam. Inside, police found an Egyptian-born Canadian carrying a Canadian passport, a satellite phone, a cell phone, a laptop, cameras, maps, and security passes to airports in Canada, Thailand, and Egypt. The container’s interior was outfitted with a bed, a water supply, a heater, and a toilet. Nicknamed Container Bob, the man posted bail in Italian court and was never seen again."

Posted on 2011-10-29T07:14:27+0000