for a marvelous victory

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

What I always liked about Howard Zinn was I never really thought of him as an Anarchist, but he simply was one. He rarely needed to use the word, instead he framed thoughts in an anarchistic manner, with particular attention to our comprehension and understanding of history via power structures – not your typical anarchist dogma-fare either.

read an interview here where Zinn uses the a-word probably more than all his other texts combined

Google tracking Swine

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

give it 15 seconds to load entirely.

modern real-time map-tracking, Incredible.

maps tag for more maps, terrains, topographies and graphic terrestrial representations.

fire and forget gun speak

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

The recent skirmish at sea that resulted in three synchronized deaths of Somali pirates at the trigger-fingers of US Navy SEAL snipers has lead to an increase of awareness in current gun development, including a recent article at TIME which features this nifty bit of lingo. They’re describing the nature of a gun whose bullets the sniper can essentially “fire and forget”:

fin-stabilized projectiles, spin-stabilized projectiles, internal and/or external aero-actuation control methods, projectile guidance technologies, tamper proofing, small stable power supplies, and advanced sighting, optical resolution and clarity technologies.

They immediately follow saying the bullet,

once fired at a specific target, fly themselves into it by changing shape.

Wowee!

netflix in operation

Monday, April 6th, 2009

Netflix told in pictures at the Boston Globe. I’m a little uncertain of their reporting that Netflix workers sort an average of 500-700 DVDs per hour. At the low end that’s one DVD every 12 seconds; at the high end in less than 10! It also says workers have to inspect the DVDs for scratches and notes left by customers. In 12 seconds? Maybe that’s why the average job only lasts two years.

full slideshow here

FF3 on the up and up

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

IE still maintains over 50% market share but in Europe Firefox 3 has moved past IE 7 by one percentage point to claim the throne of most-used browser:

full usage statistics here

the world turned off

Monday, March 30th, 2009

some pictures from the recent Earth Hour, when an estimated 840,000 pounds of carbon dioxide were kept out of the atmosphere:

Now, has anyone seen satellite imagery from the event? I love that stuff!