Category: Finds

Text and email are polite invitations to a conversation. They happen at the speed and leisure of both the sender and the receiver. In stark contrast, when you get a phone call, it’s almost always a convenient time for the caller and a bad time for the recipient, who I refer to as the “victim” because I insist on accuracy. My philosophy is that every phone conversation has a loser.

Science is an ongoing process. It never ends. There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. And because this is so, the world is far more interesting, both for the scientists and for the millions of people in every nation who, while not prefessional scientists, are deeply interested in the methods and findings of science.

Christians are not bothered in the least that they are risking Allah’s hell by not being Muslims. We all risk the hell of other religions. All I do is risk one more hell than what others do. Once I risk one hell they all look like nothing but empty threats.

To argue with a man who has renounced his reason is like giving medicine to the dead.

If you care whether the things you believe are true – including religious beliefs – you ought to be willing to subject your beliefs to rigorous testing, and to let go of them if a solid body of evidence contradicts them. And if you don’t care whether the things you believe are true, then don’t try to defend and/or spread those beliefs to others.

Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down. down. Amen!

If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.

Whenever it does anything new these days, you have to ask how does it help them collect more data and learn more about its users.

The sciences are not sectarian. People do not persecute each other on account of disagreements in mathematics. Families are not divided about botany and astronomy does not even tend to make a man hate his father and mother. It is what people do not know that they persecute each other about. Science will bring, not a sword, but peace.

It is a profound irony to see religious people praising themselves for their humility while essentially making claims about cosmology, and physics, and astronomy, and geology, and biology, and paleontology, and just dozens of specific sciences that no scientist could make. Every religious person who takes the Genesis account of creation seriously… is essentially saying to somebody like Stephen Hawking, ‘Stephen, you’re a smart guy, and I see you’ve got a lot of equations over there, but you don’t know enough about cosmology, because God did this in six days and He rested on the seventh.’

Thanks largely to smartphones, those networks are under greater pressure every day – one streamed YouTube video has the same effect on the network as half a million text messages sent simultaneously, the equivalent of everybody in Newcastle sending a text at once.

Never mind flowers, I’m not even capable of successfully giving a compliment. Well, that’s not quite true. I have no trouble with many compliments, such as, ‘Nice couch,’ or ‘What a well-dug hole,’ or ‘I thought you delivered that calf expertly.’ I don’t have much call to give them, admittedly, but if I ever need to, I’m confident they will trip effortlessly off my tongue. What I can’t do is successfully compliment anyone on their appearance. ‘You look nice today.’ Such a simple pleasantry, but I find it almost impossible. I mean, how personal. Look at the assumptions it makes: I have been scrutinizing your appearance, I think you look better now than you usually do, I consider myself a fit judge to make such a call. Any one of those, I would find deeply embarrassing. Together, they’re an embarrassment neutron bomb.

Right now I can click, right-click, middle-click, scroll, three, four, or five-finger swipe in four different directions, pinch, expand, rotate, four-finger tap… and those are just the options I’ve enabled. With multitouch, my trackpad can recognize up to eleven different points of contact, meaning the possibilities are nearly endless. All of that on a trackpad with only one button.

What’s sort of surprising is how much more stable our games are on the Mac. Looking at the early data available from the Steam client, the Mac is five times more stable than Windows.