Mostly Yes

Sir Ian Mckellen on Shakespeare’s King Richard III,...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:41:55 +0530

Sir Ian Mckellen on Shakespeare’s King Richard III, reciting and explaining the opening scene. Brilliant stuff.

Warren Ellis » Where My Ideas Come From

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:45:38 +0530

Old but great:

Here’s the deal. I flood my poor ageing head with information. Any information. Lots of it. And I let it all slosh around in the back of my brain, in the part normal people use for remembering bills, thinking about sex and making appointments to wash the dishes.

Eventually, you get a critical mass of information. Datum 1 plugs into Datum 3 which connects to Datum 3 and Data 4 and 5 stick to it and you’ve got a chain reaction. A bunch of stuff knits together and lights up and you’ve got what’s called “an idea”.

And for that brief moment where it’s all flaring and welding together, you are Holy. You can’t be touched. Something impossible and brilliant has happened and suddenly you understand what it would be like if Einstein’s brain was placed into the body of a young tyrannosaur, stuffed full of amphetamines and suffused with Sex Radiation.

link.

Relationship Hacks

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:23:16 +0530

Relationship Hacks:

Brilliant Ask MeFi thread. Absolutely essential material.

Why do we have an IMG element?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:21:28 +0530

Why do we have an IMG element?:

Mark Pilgrim on the origins of the HTML IMG element. I love web history.

Glass Microbiology. That’s E. coli.

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 08:29:00 +0530

Glass Microbiology. That’s E. coli.

A comic about “perspective, misunderstanding, and...

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 08:28:06 +0530

A comic about “perspective, misunderstanding, and people”.

(Via. More by the same artist.)

Why is e^(pi*i) = -1?

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:53:33 +0530

Why is e^(pi*i) = -1?:

Quick refresher.

By loveallthis. See also.

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:03:56 +0530

By loveallthis. See also.

Criticality Accidents

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:59:57 +0530

..that’s what Louis Slotin was doing, slowly lowering the top half of a neutron-reflecting shell over a sphere of fissile plutonium. Today, nobody would attempt that experiment except from a safe distance. Slotin, however, was using his bare hands to hold the shell, and had a screwdriver propped in there to keep the two halves from touching. A crowd of seven colleagues was watching him work when the screwdriver slipped out, sealing the shell and launching a reaction. I call Slotin brave and quick-thinking because, instead of freaking and running, he pulled the shell apart, probably saving his coworkers’ lives. He, however, died nine days later.

BoingBoing

A 11-language quine!

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 23:26:42 +0530

A 11-language quine!

50 Years of Space Exploration (via Adam Crowe)

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 03:23:56 +0530

50 Years of Space Exploration (via Adam Crowe)

Spike Jonze

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 06:29:26 +0530

Spike Jonze, Spike Jonze, Spike Jonze, Spike Jonze, Spike Jonze.

Spike Jonze.

Google Wave Cinema: Pulp Fiction. This is truly epic.

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 04:38:57 +0530

Google Wave Cinema: Pulp Fiction. This is truly epic.

Dive Into HTML5

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 04:31:11 +0530

Dive Into HTML5:

I love how this site looks. Especially when I remember it is all standards-compliant HTML.

A Serious Man. Coen brothers. (Aside: Mr Cowen is right, Fall is...

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 02:59:15 +0530

A Serious Man. Coen brothers.

(Aside: Mr Cowen is right, Fall is good movie season.)

(ukiyo-e bunnies FTW!)

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:55:29 +0530

(ukiyo-e bunnies FTW!)

I've been wrong before

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:39:16 +0530

Programming is an exercise in overcoming how wrong you’ve been in the past. At first you’ll overcome the syntax errors, then you’ll overcome the structural errors, and then you’ll come to align your code with the standards of a greater community and you’ll feel safe and like you’ve made it. You haven’t – you’re still wrong because you’re always wrong. You are playing a game you cannot win. And let’s face it – if it was a game you could win you’d not be playing at all.

link

http://heptapod.org/storylife.html

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 01:40:31 +0530

http://heptapod.org/storylife.html:

Lovely Ted Chiang short story about language, consciousness, memory and free will. This right here is why I love SF.

Kickass lipdub, best shot one I’ve seen in a while. Also:...

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 11:59:00 +0530

Kickass lipdub, best shot one I’ve seen in a while. Also: everything you’d ever wanna know about lipdubs.

The last days of the polymath.

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:56:18 +0530

The last days of the polymath.