March 2, 2020
High-Tech Treehouse Roundup
Even for the most austere person who doesn’t need lavish, exotic, or elaborate surroundings, there is something fascinating about treehouses. Not the kind that are every kid’s dream and every parent’s bad trip. If you were a kid who grew up in…
February 25, 2020
Smithsonian Opens the Digital Doors
When we’re working in digital, one of the hairiest issues can be finding appropriate imagery and other resources to build on without stepping on a creator’s rights or paying through the nose. That’s why you see so many blogs and social media posts…
January 24, 2020
Voter Turnout: Throw More Parties?
On voting, Americans tend to swing widely between the hyperbole of having an inviolable moral obligation to vote in every single election for every single position, to believing that if elections could really change anything, “they’d make them…
December 23, 2019
Cryptocurrency Beyond Good and Evil
In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche lists “objection, evasion [and] joyous distrust” as signs of health. By that standard, and perhaps that standard only, cryptocurrency’s public image is healthy. I mean, if you do a search for crypto…
December 23, 2019
Space Debris and Cooperation
Space debris is a big problem. There’s a whole lot of it orbiting our planet, fragments and parts and stuff crashing into one another to produce even more, from dangerous large bits to even more dangerous small bits that are harder to detect. It…
November 12, 2019
Corporate Spending on 2019 Municipal Elections: Mixed Results in Seattle
The story that will emerge from the 2019 Seattle, Washington elections should be of interest to anyone working in campaigns, from data appending and other management services to more ephemeral strategists. The big picture part of the story is this:…
November 8, 2019
Time Travel Roundup
Writing for Live Science, Adam Mann suggests that the concept of time travel might be hardwired into our brains. Our tendency to conflate time and space in our linguistic structures is possible evidence of this “structural” tendency to believe that…
October 30, 2019
Does Quantum Computing Mean the End of Cryptocurrency?
Traditional computing models are actually “pre-modern” in that the model of physics they take as their starting point is “classical.” They rely on formulae more analogous to Newton’s laws of motion than the quantization paradigm. But quantum…
October 24, 2019
The Cyber Danger Zone
The Peter Parker Principle is the name given to society’s acknowledgment of that immortal quote from Amazing Fantasy #15, the origin of Spider-Man: “With great power there must also come—great responsibility.” The quote even appeared in a United…
September 24, 2019
The Weirdest of Weird Tech
Tentacle tech What it is: Researchers have managed to replicate octopus flesh, developing “a structure that senses, computes and responds without any centralized processing—creating a device that is not quite a robot and not quite a computer, but…