A laptop, which was intended “for mobile professionals”, with up to 8 hours of battery life, with an $1899 price… in 1985. How was it…

Here’s a subtly impossible figure devised by UC-Santa Cruz computer scientist David Huffman. If it’s a three-sided pyramid, then its edges define the intersections of three planes and should meet in a single point. But they don’t: This is intriguing because…

It is my belief that you, the postgraduate students and job-seekers for whom the book is primarily meant will benefit from reading it; however, it is my hope that even the most experienced research...

U.S. doctors have transplanted a pig heart into a patient in a last-ditch effort to save his life — a first for medical science.

EU police body accused of unlawfully holding information and aspiring to become an NSA-style mass surveillance agency

Programmer chronicles.

Carl Størmer (1872-1957) enjoyed a hobby that was very, very unusual at the time. He walked around Oslo, Norway in the 1890s with his spy camera and secretly took everyday pictures of people. The subjects in Størmer's pictures appear in their natural state.…

AS A SOBER ADDICT and addictions therapist, I understand addiction as a likely outcome of the intersection of human nature and human cleverness. We are

Have you ever noticed that gradients tend to look a little gray and washed-out in the middle? This happens because of a mathematical quirk with RGB colors. Fortunately, we can work around this quirk, and create beautiful, lush, saturated gradients.

Today’s bug: I tried to store a UTF-8 string in a MariaDB “utf8”-encoded database, and Rails raised a bizarre error:

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations, you’ve earned the right to read the results! If not, you could be doing yourself a big disservice and not understanding the true intricacies…

In 2004 I was working for Microsoft in the Xbox group, and a new console was being created. I got a copy of the detailed denoscriptions of the Xbox 360 CPU and I read it through multiple times and su…

Near real-time publication of GOES-East and GOES-West images from NOAA/NESDIS/STAR

Canon joins Sony and Nikon in slowly killing off the single-lens reflex camera design. But how does this affect your lens choice in the future?

  This is the color of something infinitely hot. Of course you’d instantly be fried by gamma rays of arbitrarily high frequency, but this would be its spectrum in the visible range. This…