Only in San Francisco

Only in San Francisco will you sit next to a guy with a Blackberry phone in one hand and a copy of “Amish Gardening Secrets” in the other.

Insane bike tricks

This just gets crazier and crazier…

The thinking man’s alien movie

Likely the most original film I’ve seen all year; tremendously rich premise and insightful commentary. Still the requisite blood and guts for an alien/monster summer flick, but I could have watched 2 hours of just the social commentary, presented in a mix of faux news footage and documentary-style camera shots. And like the best speculative…more

Go for quantity

Point the Hubble Telescope at nothing and we find 10,000 galaxies. With an estimated 100 billion galaxies in the universe, and 100 billion stars in each, God sure wasn’t stingy with his creativity. YouTube – The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D.

Hemingway on cycling

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country…more

Open source personal robots! Open source to enable interoperability with others…

“It is difficult to get the news from poems; yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” – William Carlos Williams

“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.” – Donald Knuth

How is America going to end? – fascinating report on what people think will happen to the U.S., based on a future scenarios game and broken down by demographics.

Our biases about the future

This post by Robin Hanson strikes me as a gold mine of opportunities for concept design: We seem primed to confidently see history as an inevitable march toward a theory-predicted global conflict with an alien united them determined to oppose our core symbolic values, making infeasible overly-risky overconfident plans to oppose them.  We seem primed…more