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When I was in college in 1994, I discovered CMJ New Music Monthly, a magazine which came...

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:01:00 CST

...with a CD every month of singles and b-sides off new releases. I still listen to those CDs - I kept them all, now ripped to MP3 - but my subscription lapsed long ago due to the expense. Now, thanks to Google Books, I can relive the nineties in print form, too, because nearly all of CMJ New Music Monthly are available online, inlcuding their "Fargo scene" article by Jennifer Baumgardner.

I don't know how many times I've been out of the house, away from the kitchen, with...

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:12:00 CST

...a bowl full of food in front of me - without any utensils. Ineke Hans has the solution, small enough to fit in your wallet, for when emergency cutlery is required.

Hello, I Am A Robot!, a book depicting a world populated by robots...but it looks like the...

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 08:54:00 CST

...robots are us. Note the inclusion of Vaucanson's "digesting duck," otherwise known as the least appealing toy duck ever.

Published writers always have advice for struggling writers - not always good advice, but it's generally always...

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:38:00 CST

...honest, and in some way about as effective as anything else a writer might try. Take, for example, Pseudonymous Bosch's 'winning' advice.

Last year was the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and 150th anniversary of The Origin of the Species, so...

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:43:00 CST

...how did the world handle it in the face of increasing Creationist bull-hooey? The National Center for Science Education has compiled the top ten evolution-related news stories of the past year. It's somewhat skewed towards NCSE activities, but it points out some of the bigger events, both for and against evolution's place in the world's knowledge base. My favorite: Project Steve.

Jim Lehrer, of what I always called "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour", has revealed his rules for journalism. "Carefully separate...

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 08:55:00 CST

...opinion and analysis from straight news stories, and clearly label everything" is one that strikes me as missing greatly from the news pretenders today (especially channels with 'news' in their name), and it also seems to me that these are parallel with the expectations The Daily Show demands from the news programs they lambast nightly. Via.

Today may be Zamenhofa Tago - 'Esperanto Day', in honor of Esperanto inventor LL Zamenhof - but...

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:27:00 CST

...film-lovers have an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an entirely new language. In James Cameron's new movie Avatar, the aliens speak Na'vi, an artificial language invented by linguist Paul Frommer. The actors in the film were not required to be fluent (they learned their lines phonetically), leaving Frommer as the only Na'vi speaker on this planet. You can join his exclusive club with a dictionary and a system of grammar, and if you end up on a distant planet inhabited by giant blue creatures, you'll be set. See also: Atlantean, the Divine Language, and, (More)

In 1927, Frank Hutmacher, a Russian-German immigrant, married Veronica Nuss and spent the next three years building...

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:34:00 CST

...a home made of stone slabs, clay, rocks, and what little wood there was available. The Hutmachers and their children continued to live in the earthen home until the late 1970s. In 1979, the property was added to the National Register of Historic Places because so few earthen homes of its kind survived so long, but time and the elements have continued to wear on the farm's buildings. In recent years, however, efforts have been made to restore the structure, using historical construction methods in hopes of keeping this rare surviving example of Ukrainian stone architecture (More)

The MIT Media Lab, my favorite MIT department, has done it. DARPA challenged the internet to...

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 09:30:00 CST

...find ten red balloons, each numbered and identified with a DARPA sign, scattered around the Untied States on December 5th. Entrants had until the 14th to report the winning GPS coordinates, but MIT had them in within nine hours (a bit longer than I predicted). Their ingenious plan was to try to include people instead of firewalling out false positives and blocking spies - and paying cold, hard cash for successful hits, a'la MLM.

The stock markets are usually intangible, you pass around money and imaginary chunks of property and companies,...

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:08:00 CST

...and maybe you've traded in gold but you have never held it in your hands. That is, until some poorly-written software and a gentrified pier conspire to deliver 28,000 tons of actual coal to a commodity futures trader. Via.