Two bits of science news appeared on my radar today with not much in common except that they’re both exceedingly bad news for the political class. That more or less guarantees that they’ll get poor or nonexistent coverage in the mainstream media and is a good enough reason for me to write about them. First,… Continue reading Junk science double fail
Month: January 2012
Power Grid: The Robots – a review
Friedmann Friese’s Power Grid is one of the acknowledged classics of the modern Eurogame genre. It embroils 2 to 6 players in a simulation of running power companies, competing to light up the most cities. Strategy involves a mix of positional play, resource management, and (most entertainingly) competition for new plants in an auction every… Continue reading Power Grid: The Robots – a review
The Smartphone Wars: Mystery of the Android tablets
Some new market research says Android tablets have now taken 39% of global market share. There are reasons to suspect that Nook and Fire tablets account for a bit more than half of that, but we’re still left with something of a mystery to explain.
The Smartphone Wars: CyanogenMOD Rising
CyanogenMOD, the third-party, fully-open, bloatware-free port of Android, has recently passed a million installs. And there’s talk of creating an underground Market app for CyanogenMOD to distribute apps that the cell carriers and the MPAA/RIAA don’t want you to have. Set this against Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil new Eula for iBooks, and it couldn’t… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: CyanogenMOD Rising
Another bite of the reposturgeon
Five weeks ago I wrote that direct Subversion support in reposurgeon is coming soon. I’m waiting on one final acceptance test before I ship an official 2.0; in the meantime, for those of you kinky enough to find the details exciting, description follows of why this feature has required such a protracted and epic struggle.… Continue reading Another bite of the reposturgeon
Site statistics are enabled
I finally got around to installing a site statistics plugin on this blog, about 20 minutes ago. There have since been 94 views. I’m mainly interested in the order of magnitude. Do I have 1K readers per day? 10K?, 100K? My wild-ass guess is on the order of 10K. Now we’ll see.
Hollywood vs. Obama
The huge groundswell of opposition to SOPA and PIPA is having some interesting ripple effects. Barack Obama announced he would veto these bills if they came to his desk, and now it seems that Hollywood is pissed off over this.
Calling all hackerspaces
This is a shout out to all hackerspaces and engineering schools within easy reach of Philadelphia. I’ve got a nice little design-and-build project that would do the world some good, but I don’t have the skills or facilities to do it myself. The problem: build a ruggedized special-purpose test enclosure to be mounted on a… Continue reading Calling all hackerspaces
Sugar is in ultrasound health
This is a status update for those of you among my regulars who have been following the saga of Sugar, our cat. She had her 90-day followup ultrasound today.
The Smartphone Wars: Dinosaurs mating?
Just when you thought the smartphone industry couldn’t get any more soap-operatic, everybody’s favorite pair of aging drama queens – Microsoft and Nokia – may be at it again. There’s a rumor, from a gossip with a good track record, that Microsoft intends to buy Nokia’s Smartphone division.
Through a mirror, darkly
Today the New York Times is carrying a story on Chinese fears of “cultural encirclement”. “We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration,” Mr. Hu said. “We should deeply understand the seriousness… Continue reading Through a mirror, darkly