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Baby Got Backspace: How Early Tech Helped Make Sir Mix-a-Lot a Star
Things weren't going well, for a time, for Sir Mix-a-Lot. His first two albums, Swass and Seminar, had climbed the rap charts—enough to make him a platinum-selling artist—but his third, Mack Daddy, was...
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Method Journalism
With the launch of new site after new site in 2014, it's been a fascinating time to watch digital media try to figure itself out. Amid the turmoil of disruption, buffeted by tech companies' control...
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The U.S. Army Says It Can Teleport Quantum Data Now, Too
Quantum computing could revolutionize the way we interact with information. Such systems would process data faster and on larger scales than even the most super of supercomputers can handle today. But...
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NASA's Supersonic Parachute Is Running Out of Time
After scrapping five possible launches this month, NASA scientists have one more chance to send a supersonic parachute to the edge of space. The goal is to test flying-saucer-shaped decelerator...
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A Dispatch From the Lead Up to the 2018 World Cup
1. A sports section from April 2018, recently sent out to 130,000 people in Manchester. "How will the so-called beautiful game of global football be different in a world where sport itself, and the...
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Where Life Is: The Search for a Planet Like Ours
Residents of the Pacific Northwest sometimes refer to the region as “God’s Country,” not for the ceaseless rain that soaks the land from October until May, but for those few glorious summer months when...
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The Eccentric Genius Whose Time May Have Finally Come (Again)
I’ve been preoccupied lately with thoughts of marauding broomsticks, genies in bottles, and monkey’s paws. All are literary images the scientist Norbert Wiener used to make the point that we fool...
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The 'World Cup Starter Kit' and the Future of Twitter
I opened my Twitter tab this evening to discover that Twitter had placed a bar across my timeline inviting me to unlock some special World Cup features. Well, I like the World Cup and I love special...
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Facebook Is Expanding the Way It Tracks You and Your Data
There'a a key nugget buried in this morning's New York Times story about how Facebook is going to give its users the ability to see why certain ads are targeted to them. Starting this week, the Times...
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Ball, Disrupted: A Brief History of World Cup Innovation
One of the biggest controversies of the 2010 World Cup—aside from, obviously, those that had to do with vuvuzelas—involved the tournament's ball itself. While Adidas, which has made the World Cup match...
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What's in the Backlog of Documents the Government Hasn't Declassified?
1. Data mining which classified documents the government releases to see what they've left out. "In early 2012, Connelly put aside his research on the Cold War and began studying US secrecy policy. He...
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State-by-State Temperature Map: Red-Hot Out West
Here's the thing about a warming climate: the march upward is not going to be smooth nor is it going to be even. Take a look at this year's temperatures by state. California was five degrees—five...
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The Cirrus Parachute, as Seen From HQ and from a Swamp
Later this afternoon my wife Deb and I will be talking with, and to, a group of executives and employees of the Cirrus Aircraft company in Duluth, Minnesota. The Cirrus line of small planes—which now...
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Meet the Cute, Wellies-Wearing, Wikipedia-Reading Robot That's Going to...
When I first heard about hitchBOT, I figured it was a joke, or perhaps a thought experiment by Frauke Zeller, a roboticist at Ryerson University in Canada. I mean: how could a robot hitchhike across...
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The Out-of-This-World Cup
Whether you call them footballs or soccer balls, they are spherical little feats of engineering—globes designed to work both with and against the forces of nature. But soccer balls are also designed,...
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Before Twitter and the OED, 'Hashtag' Was Just the Nerdy #
Hashtag is among the spate of words just added to the the Oxford English Dictionary, the OED reported in a blog post today. If this news sounds familiar, it's because hashtag has already made its way...
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The Machine That's Saving the History of Recorded Sound
When recorded sound was in its infancy, more than 150 years ago, inventors still hadn't answered what was, to them, a fundamental question: What does sound look like? They knew what sound sounded like,...
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A Cord Cutter's Guide to Watching the World Cup
Most of the world can watch the World Cup for free. Not so much in the US. The tournament, which began yesterday, will largely air on cable; streaming matches online also requires a television...
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You Can't Escape Chemicals
It's easy to believe that a mix of white vinegar, salt, and dishwasher liquid soap is somehow different from a nasty chemical-y weedkiller. But, as comedian and writer Glen Tickle's Twitter joke, seen...
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Tech Isn't All Brogrammers, It's Still Nerds Building New Things
R. Stanley Williams works at HP Labs, and he has for a long time. In the video of him that I am watching, his pony tail flows out over his blue-collared shirt, and onto his lumpy sweater. He wants to...
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