Acts of Volition

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Paul Miller, a tech journalist for The Verge, is leaving the Internet for a year. He’s an avid StarCraft II player, and writes about (and on) the web for a living. He’s going to continue to use a computer (offline) and continue to write for The Verge.  •  Miller is a great writer and I get the …

Kepler 22b, the extrasolar planet discovered by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope is apparently around 600 light years away. I wondered how long it would actually take for us to get something there. Maybe if we start today, we could surprise our descendants with a signal from a probe in a 10,000 years …

While lamenting the state of the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, my wife pointed out that, as consumers of oil, we’re all a party to it. I seemed so obvious that I was embarrassed that it hadn’t occurred to me earlier. Most things in my life - the heat in my home and office, the gas in my …

It’s easy to romanticize the medium of our youth. I’m too young to miss vinyl; for me vinyl means Nana Mouskouri’s Christmas album. No one really misses cassettes; except maybe for mix tapes, which we mostly loved because of how much work we put into them. CDs are also hard to lament. They were …

After having used Aliant (now Bell Aliant) as my Internet service provider (the term high-speed is useless in its relativity) for several years, I switched to Eastlink - the only alternative. My service with Aliant had been fine, but due to some bizarre Internet-topography, to get from my house … read more »

This 9-part lecture on New Urbanism (in 10-minute bite-sized chunks) is a pleasantly common-sense criticism of car-centered urban planning.

In all of the talk about devices that provide pervasive internet connectivity (like the iPhone, Palm Pre, and Android phones), I had yet to see anyone address what I see as the most significant drawback of such devices. Until, that is, Tim Bray wrote up his experience with his Android G1 phone and …