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Since 5:43pm yesterday evening, the sun and rain have been engaged in some sort of wild tango — the sunshine whips the rain furiously across the dance floor, the rain stomps forcefully upon the sunshine. One moment is blue and gold, the next is streaked with gray. Lightning and thunder have me constantly looking over my shoulder and out onto the City rooftops. All that I can see is wet and droopy and confused. This type of weather makes me wonder what we've done wrong. Why are we being punished? I blame it on Elizabeth. This is what happens when people go on vacation.
By now,…
I couldn't do it, but these eight physicists rose to the challenge: Explain in one page what the Higgs boson is and why we want to find it.
If you go by the RIAA's claims of $150,000 damage per song caused by downloading (as in this Stereophile story), that would mean that one month's worth of downloads caused be a single P2P site would be greater than the GDP of France—at least according to Donny's Blog.
That works out to over $11 trillion per month. No wonder the record industry is in a world of hurt!
A website devoted to deciphering the lyrics (and name) of Steely Dan. Not quite as comprehensive as The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, but these collaborative efforts improve with time—and participation.
Via Grow-A-Brain.
Rob Pegoraro, The Washington Post's personal technology editor, reviews Microsoft's Windows Media Player 11, which MS claims, possesses an ease of use and simplicity to match iTunes." As if MS would recognize ease of use if it bit them in their text assembler.
First, WMP11 teams up with über-hip MTV and its own MSN store for the music store function. BMAFG! MTV?
It gets worse. Urge, as the music store is called, is so crippled, er, connected to WMP11 that you can't shop there or even play Urge selections on anything else! (Nor can you easily shop anywhere else.) Once installed,…
Over at IGN.com, Hilary Goldstein and Richard George have compiled a list of the top 25 X-Men characters. Granted, it's a shamelessly blatant tie-in to Friday's release of X-Men III: The Last Stand, but it also points to what I suspect will be that movie's biggest weakness, judging from the trailers I've seen.
There's just too much back story to the X-Men—the complete mythos of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters is even vaster than the Buffyverse! That there could even be 25 X-Men, much less a top 25 should be a big fat clue, no? What's next, the top 10 female X-Men by bust size? No,…
Music was playing,
so I sat there, quietly.
so I sat there, quietly.
She walked into the room and noticed me. With deep interest and a bit of urgency, she asked: "What are you thinking about?"
I've learned that "nothing," as an answer, isn't good enough. So I searched for the truth. What was I thinking about? What was the truth?
I was thinking about the bass, how thick and round it sounded. I was thinking about the guitar riff, wondering why they'd placed it there, instead of there. I was thinking of the effect used on the vocals, imagining that they'd applied it in order to conceal…
I remember when The Virginia Quarterly Review was the perfect panacea for insomnia, but something has happened to that august publication: It woke up! These days, it has become a must-read, from Art Spiegelman's latest multi-chapter opus to well-written articles such as this one on Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland.
If you don't know McCay's dreamy, gorgeous artwork, check out the example-packed entry on Little Nemo in Wikipedia.
Just what I need—another daily stop on my Internet rounds. Zimmer, an alarmingly prolific, vastly entertaining science writer, has a knack for explaining complex ideas simply enough for me to grasp. Check out his coverage of the Homo floresiensis (Hobbit Man) brouhaha.