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A Brief History of Exploding Whales
A dead blue whale washed up on the shore of a small fishing town in Newfoundland last week. A bloated, beached, blubbery bomb of a blue whale. As of 3:30 pm Eastern Time today, the carcass is still...
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A Magic 8 Ball, Armed With Data
There is an allure to a Magic 8 Ball. You roll the thing in your hands, you ask it a question, and—presto!—you have an answer. The whole thing is wonderfully simple. The only problem—and it's a big...
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Sonic Boom
In late January, a group of musicians, led by the trombone player Glen David Andrews, paraded through the narrow hallways of New Orleans’ City Hall and into the chamber of the City Council. They played...
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The Software Canon
1. Paul Ford proposes a software canon, and in the slot at the top, he places Microsoft Office. "What Office provides is a language for doing office things. You don’t go in front of an audience...
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The Great Spaceship of Toronto
On the surface of Toronto, the air is cold. Life survives, but in the winter months, it is just barely in the habitable zone. So, the humans of the city have burrowed underground. It began in the...
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To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand
Psych 101 was about to start, and Pam Mueller had forgotten her laptop at home. This meant more than lost Facebook time. A psychology grad student at Princeton, Mueller was one of the class teaching...
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A Skyscraper-Sized Solar-Wind Tower Could Become North America's Tallest...
The city council of San Luis, Arizona, a town of 15,000 on the Mexico border, last week approved the construction of the tallest structure in North America, a 2,250-foot-high concrete tower that would...
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An Algorithm Knows Who Liked the How I Met Your Mother Finale
Everybody hated the How I Met Your Mother finale, right? Well, maybe not. The hour-long conclusion to the popular CBS sitcom was the target of much derision after it aired March 31. (See: Here, here,...
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Scientists Made Color-Changing Paint Out of Gold Nanoparticles
Something unexpected happened when scientists at the University of California, Riverside, started stringing together nanoparticles of gold. The gold wasn't golden anymore. It changed colors. "When we...
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How to Make a Map Go Viral
Where do we live—or, rather, where do we not live? In the map above, you can see all the Census districts of the United States for which the government records no residents. According to researchers,...
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The White House Looks at Big Data Discrimination
1. The White House issued a report with the classic promise/peril framing about Big Data. One focus: discrimination by machine. "The detailed personal profiles held about many consumers, combined with...
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Arnold Schwarzenegger's Dream Fuel Makes a Comeback
Remember former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s much-hyped hydrogen highway? Back in 2004, the governator, in his typical understated style, rolled up to the state’s first commercial...
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The New Terminology of Snapchat
What is the thing you send on Snapchat? Since time immemorial (or fall 2012), I would’ve answered: a snap. The first syllable of the service’s name—denoting a picture-with-a-half-life—was Snapchat’s...
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The Crazy Economics of the Wind Industry in Two Charts
The news from the wind industry last week didn’t look good. The booming business of minting money out of thin air had imploded between 2012 and 2013, as this chart from the American Wind Energy...
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How Kanye's Vocabulary Stacks Up to Shakespeare's
"I’ll teach you how to flow," Antonio tells Sebastian in The Tempest. Almost as long as hip-hop has existed, scholars both professional and less so have made efforts to compare its lyrics to the work...
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A Manifesto for Outsider Engineers
1. An interview with Julian Oliver, an author of the The Critical Engineering Manifesto. "So what I want to do with my work — and I know this is the same for my colleagues Gordan and Danja in the...
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Things You Cannot Unsee (And What That Says About Your Brain)
I want to show you something simple your mind can do, which illustrates a fascinating emerging theory about how the brain works. First, look at this logo of the World Cup this year. The idea of the...
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A Groundbreaking Mini-Satellite Project May Be Doomed
The plan was to launch a cloud of tiny satellites into space, each one no bigger than a quarter, and scatter them like spare change in the orbital dusk. But two weeks after a successful launch, there...
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What the Internet Sounds Like
In a cavernous facility at Birmingham City University in the U.K., the Internet is not so much a grand idea as it is a great machine. And as a machine—as a beast that hulks and hums and whines and...
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Computer Mice: Still a Thing
For decades, the mouse was a key component of how one interacted with a computer. Invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1963, the pointing device was the key to more accessible interfaces. As Apple and...
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