Recently in Technology Category
Peak Phosphorus May Follow Peak Oil | Miller-McCune Online Magazine
"Without phosphorus, the world cannot grow food. Yet only three countries control 73 percent of the world's remaining known reserves of phosphate rock.... Phosphorus cannot be destroyed, but it is becoming dissipated in the environment... 'There's a whole industry that needs to be invented to capture phosphorus. We need a new way of growing crops that keeps it in the field instead of letting it run down into the Gulf of Mexico. We need plants that are more efficient at getting phosphorus.'" (Via Ace of Spades HQ.)
Because sometimes you need to know the hexadecimal representation of a floating-point number.
American Wire Gauge table and AWG Electrical Current Load Limits with skin depth frequencies
Don't burn down your house! If you must use an extension cord, make sure it's of a sufficient wire gauge for the electrical load you plug into it and the length of the cord.
SPDY Protocol (Chromium Developer Documentation)
Google is testing a new protocol to speed up communications between web servers and web browsers. It won't change the languages web pages are written in, like HTML. Instead it will optimize the way your browser will ask for those web pages and the way the web site's server responds.
MIT SIPB November 1982 Minutes
In the olden days, if you wanted to use a computer at MIT, the Student Information Processing Board had a slice of time on the MULTICS system to dole out. The very early stirrings of Project Athena are evident in the report on the Committee on the Computing Environment at MIT.
And what is ethanol doing to your big automobile engine? "Employees at the shop regularly rebuilt carburetors gummed up from the so-called "varnish" that builds up from unstabilized gas left sitting in engines. But since ethanol started being added to fuel sold in Florida in 2007, the power-equipment pros were seeing something new: metal parts crusted up, plastic parts stiffened and cracked, and everything rubber, including the tips of needle valves, deteriorated."
The Lunacy of Our Retreat from Space by Charles Krauthammer on National Review Online
"Michael Crichton once wrote that if you told a physicist in 1899 that within a hundred years humankind would, among other wonders (nukes, commercial airlines), 'travel to the moon, and then lose interest . . . the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad.'... Fourteen months from today, for the first time since 1962, the United States will be incapable not just of sending a man to the moon but of sending anyone into Earth orbit. We'll be totally grounded. We'll have to beg a ride from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese.... But look up from your BlackBerry one night. That is the moon. On it are exactly 12 sets of human footprints -- untouched, unchanged, abandoned. For the first time in history, the moon is not just a mystery and a muse, but a nightly rebuke."
Forty Years Ago Today - The Flight Of Apollo 11 (Wizbang)
A link-rich summary of the space program leading up to Apollo 11. "Apollo 11, the culmination of the United States space program that integrated the talents of over 300,000 scientists, engineers, skilled crafts workers, pilots, astronauts, and countless other professionals, was the mission that would finally achieve the goal set forth by President John F. Kennedy in 1962 -- "landing a man on the moon, and returning him safely to the Earth.""
Outwit your inbox - Washington Times
Good advice from Randall Dean, author of Taming the E-Mail Beast, on minimizing e-mail distractions, dealing with e-mail, and making it easier for your recipients to deal with your messages:
"People who constantly check e-mails and phone calls have a 10-point hit on their IQ -- as if you missed an entire night's sleep, or more than double the loss from smoking a marijuana joint."
"Turn off those e-mail notifications. I reset my automatic send/receive parameters to get e-mail every 90 minutes, so I can have blocks of time to get actual work done."
"If you're sending an e-mail, make it extremely clear in first two to three sentences what you want receiver to both know and do with e-mail. Stop sending FYI e-mails, which leaves a lot of room for error and misinterpretation."
(Via Dawn Eden at Conservative Grapevine.)
Free vs Freely Distributed « blog maverick
Interesting piece by Mark Cuban. The gist of it is that you can make money with free content as long as you can control how people get it.
Another well written piece of his on another topic: Advice to recent grads and other job-seekers. Sensible, but not common sense. Probably ought to add him to my blog aggregator.
