Designing an Energy Efficient PC?

If President Obama wants to reduce 2005 level greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by 2020, and 83 percent by 2050 then we have to make some significant changes – and one major area to do that is with computers.  Concurrent with the President’s news announcement is one at Computerworld that reported “Harvard study: Computers [...]

Readability

Most people hate reading on a computer screen, but many of those people also spend hours reading online, so what’s the solution?  Try Readability.  I was reading an interview with John Joseph Adams, an editor for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a guy who has to do A LOT of reading, and he [...]

iStories: The Short Story Hit List 100 Weekly

Let’s face it, the heyday of the short story as a popular art form was decades ago, probably as far back as when F. Scott Fitzgerald got rich and famous selling stories to the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers.  Except for would-be writers, required reading for students, fan fiction fanatics and a damn few diehard [...]

Inventions Wanted: Universal Photo Database

I often wish I had photographs of certain people or places from my past.  I constantly damn myself for not chronicling my life better.  I’ve even wondered if anyone else might have photographed those people and places.  This gave me an idea for a great invention, the Universal Photo Database (UPDB).
I have lots of old [...]

The Weight of Paper

Nanny, my grandmother on my mother’s side, was born in 1881 and grew up before the automobile, airplane, radio and silent film.  She watched all the technology emerged that in my boyhood I took for granted, like electricity, the telephone, refrigerators, cloth washers and dryers, air conditioners, etc.  She died a couple years after Neil [...]

Magnificent Desolation by Buzz Aldrin

I’ve read other memoirs by the Apollo astronauts who went to the Moon, most of whom wrote about their tremendous efforts to become space jocks and their stories always peaked with their lunar adventures.  Buzz Aldrin second autobiographical book starts with the Apollo 11 landing and quickly wraps that adventure up, because his book is [...]

She Had a Mind Like an Intel Core i7

As I get older, I realize my mind is slowing down. I was never a quad-processor kind of thinker, but I’d like to believe my brain could chug along like a good ole AMD X2 chip.  Now my thoughts feel like they are powered by the original Pentium.  I’m starting to pay attention to the [...]

Pale Blue Dot

I discovered over at Mike Brotherton’s blog that today, 11/7/9, is Carl Sagan Day, and Mike makes some interesting observations about Sagan and Richard Dawkins and the public’s attitude towards their atheism.  For awhile, Carl Sagan was the face of science to the general public, sort of like Stephen Hawking is today.  Any second rate [...]

NOVA – Becoming Human

The PBS show NOVA began a three part series called Becoming Human that is an excellent roundup on the science exploring the evolution of humans.  The show aired on Tuesday night but most PBS stations repeats NOVA throughout the week, and you can also watch the episode online.
Evolution is a controversial topic in this country, [...]

Prayers for Atheists 1

Why would atheists want to pray if they don’t believe in God?  Let’s make a theoretical assumption that tomorrow we all wake up and it’s obvious to everyone that God doesn’t exist.  Do we just throw away all the sacred books, bulldoze the churches and forget religion completely?  Or would we recycle the components of [...]