Month: June 2014

  • It was in 2007, 14 years after Escobar’s death, that people in rural Antioquia, 200 miles north-west of Bogota, began phoning the Ministry of Environment to report sightings of a peculiar animal. (via BBC News – Pablo Escobar’s hippos: A growing problem)

  • Introduction | Human JavaScript

    Introduction | Human JavaScript notational: Build powerfully simple browser apps. You can read the entire book free online or if you want the ebook file, you can buy it for $39. Enjoy!

  • Had the concept of software been available to me, I imagine I would have felt as though I were installing something that exponentially increased what one day would be called bandwidth, though bandwidth of what, exactly, I remain unable to say. William Gibson, on reading Jorge Luis Borges for the first time (taken from ‘Distrust that…

  • yzma: kim kardashian should have gotten her own conference at E3 for this game

  • That music can move us is no surprise; it’s the point of the art form, after all. What’s new here is the manner in which the researchers have quantified in fine-grained detail the cognitive ramifications of unpacked melodic compounds. This investigation of music’s building blocks may be more relevant than you suppose. Nowadays, experts in…

  • Scientists at Facebook have published a paper showing that they manipulated the content seen by more than 600,000 users in an attempt to determine whether this would affect their emotional state. The paper, “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks,” was published in The Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences. It shows…

  • He smuggled in elephants, giraffes and other exotic animals, among them four hippos – three females and one male. And with a typically grand gesture, he allowed the public to wander freely around the zoo. Buses filled with schoolchildren passed under a replica of the propeller plane that carried Escobar’s first US-bound shipments of cocaine.…

  • From a technological standpoint, distributed and peer-to-peer technologies are far more efficient than Web 2.0 systems. Making better use of network resources by using the computers and network connections of users, peer-to-peer avoids the bottlenecks created by centralized systems…However, despite the many disadvantages in comparison to P2P, Web 2.0 is more attractive to investors and…

  • Storytelling is a political act. It’s making sense of the world and ourselves, and like every other kind of sense-making, it’s as political as it is personal and vice-versa. There is no distinction to be made between the political and the personal. Writing of any kind is political. It’s claimsmaking regarding reality and how to…