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The Aquanaut
The first thing you should know about Sylvia Earle is that she has a LEGO figurine modeled after her. One that has little yellow flippers instead of little yellow feet. But you should also, if you...
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Today's Malaysia Airlines 370 News: What It Means That Apparently It Kept on...
Overnight the Wall Street Journal reported (paywall) that the Boeing 777 flying as Malaysia Airlines 370 was transmitting data about its location for five hours after its transponders stopped...
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The State of New York City's Infrastructure
1. The state of New York City's infrastructure: better than it was in the 1980s, but 30 years older, too. Much of New York City’s skeletal infrastructure dates from the first part of the 20th century....
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Reading to Have Read
If you’re a person who reads, you may have read about Spritz, a startup that hopes to “reimagine” reading. Like most tech startups, reimagining entails making more efficient. Spritz promises to speed...
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Dust, the Ledger of Past Existence
Across the American Southwest, dust has become lethal. Valley fever is transmitted by fungi-laced dust that blows from dumping and construction sites, as well as from the deserts of Arizona,...
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Technorican: The Life and Times of Candy Torres, Space Lover
It wasn't easy being a Puerto Rican woman in South River, New Jersey, who wanted to go to space. Sure, it was the 1960s, and the astronauts of the Mercury and Apollo programs were national heroes. But...
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Malaysia 370 Update: Landing Strips, Cell Phones, and More
The ongoing Malaysia 370 investigation coincides with my being in transit, with family, and away from the Internet most of each day. (Writing this from the passenger seat of a car on a four-hour drive,...
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Where Malaysia 370 Might Have Landed: An Interactive Map
Recent I mentioned WNYC's map of airports where Malaysia Airlines 370 might theoretically have landed, considering how far the plane might have flown and how large a runway it would have required. The...
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'The Future Is About Old People, in Big Cities, Afraid of the Sky'
1. Bruce Sterling's keynotes at SXSW tend to get more fascinating as time goes by, but here it is right as it goes into the bottle. "The future is about old people, in big cities, afraid of the sky....
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According to Facebook, Daylight Saving Made Us Tired But Happy
On the Monday morning after Daylight Saving Time kicks in, we’re both groggier and happier—or, at least, that’s what Facebook says. The insight comes from the company’s Data Science team, which works...
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Malaysia 370, Day 10: One Fanciful Hypothesis, and Another That Begins to...
I rejoin the Internet after a day away to find no additional hard evidence about the fate of Malaysia Air flight 370, but a number of new rumors and possibilities. To run through a few: 1) The "Radar...
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'The Big Bang Theory' Gets Real: The Genesis of a Viral Video
Imagine that you have spent 30 years of your career working on a single project, dedicated to a single idea. Imagine that there have been doubters along the way. Imagine that you, yourself, have...
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An Amazing App for Learning Music
All musical notation is a kind of compression, which is to say a compromise between ease of transmission and depth of reception. The notes on a score tell you a lot about a song, but not everything....
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Are Transponders the Main Problem? In a Word, No
My friend and colleague Gregg Easterbrook has an op-ed in the NYT today saying that one big lesson of the 9/11 attacks, which should be re-learned because of the Malaysia 370 mystery, is that pilots...
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A Little Metadata Goes a Long Way
1. What even a little tiny bit of metadata can say. "Mayer and his team showed that participants called public numbers of 'Alcoholics Anonymous, gun stores, NARAL Pro-Choice, labor unions, divorce...
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A 26-Story History of San Francisco
1 140 New Montgomery is the San Francisco headquarters of Yelp. The local business information company occupies nine floors of a newly refinished building that once served as the headquarters of the...
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'One of the Greatest Discoveries in the History of Science' Hasn't Been...
Big scientific discoveries—the kind that shift our view of the world and our place within it—don’t come along very often. This week, though, one did. New data seem to offer, for the first time, direct...
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Treble Versus Bass in the Earbud Decade
1. Treble strikes back against the forces of bass in the age of the drop. "At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, with the possibilities for high-fidelity recording at a...
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How a California Earthquake Becomes the News: An Extremely Precise Timeline
Early Monday morning, Los Angeles suffered the strongest earthquake it had seen in 20 years. The 4.4-magnitude seismic event woke up sleeping Angelenos, but thankfully did little additional damage....
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How to Start a Conspiracy Theory on Facebook
In a 2013 report summarizing global challenges, the World Economic Forum singled out "massive digital misinformation" as "one of the main risks for the modern society." Social networks may be...
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