Ramblings & ephemera
From The New York Times‘ “Form Follows Function. Now Go Out and Cut the Grass.“:
Failure, [Henry] Petroski shows, works. Or rather, engineers only learn from things that fail: bridges that collapse, software that crashes, spacecraft that explode. Everything that is designed fails, and everything that fails leads to better design. Next time at least that [...]
Posted on May 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments Off
From Ulises Ali Mejias’ “A del.icio.us study: Bookmark, Classify and Share: A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community“:
This principle of distribution is at work in socio-technical systems that allow users to collaboratively organize a shared set of resources by assigning classifiers, or tags, to each item. The practice is coming to be [...]
Posted on April 29th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society | Comments Off
From The Telegraph’s “Skeleton woman’ dead in front of TV for years“:
A woman’s skeleton was discovered in her flat three years after she is believed to have died, it emerged today.
Joyce Vincent was surrounded by Christmas presents and the television and heating in her bedsit were still on.
The 40-year-old’s body was so decomposed that the [...]
Posted on April 15th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, True Stories | Comments Off
From “Relativity, Uncertainty, Incompleteness and Undecidability“:
In this article four fundamental principles are presented: relativity, uncertainty, incompleteness and undecidability. They were studied by, respectively, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. …
Relativity says that there is no privileged, “objective” viewpoint for certain observations. … Now, if things move relative to each other, then obviously [...]
Posted on March 29th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, science | Comments Off
From “World’s oldest ship timbers found in Egyptian desert“:
The oldest remains of seafaring ships in the world have been found in caves at the edge of the Egyptian desert along with cargo boxes that suggest ancient Egyptians sailed nearly 1,000 miles on rough waters to get treasures from a place they called God’s Land, or [...]
Posted on March 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, history | Comments Off
From “Mummified woman died naturally“:
A woman whose mummified body was dressed in a white gown and placed in front of a television for 2½ years died from heart disease. …
Officials never suspected abuse or foul play after finding Johannas Pope, 61, in her Madisonville home Jan. 4.
Pope told her caretaker, Kathy Painter, she didn’t want [...]
Posted on February 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, weird | Comments Off
From Jim Hanas’ “The Story Doesn’t Care: An Interview with Sean Stewart“:
I think that every means of communication carries within itself the potential for a form of art. Once the printing press was built, novels were going to happen. It took the novel a little while to figure out exactly what it was going to [...]
Posted on February 6th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: On Writing, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society | Comments Off
From Giampaolo Garzarelli’s Open Source Software and the Economics of Organization:
Whenever organizational forms present rapid change because of their strong ties to technology, public policy issues are always thornier than usual. Indeed, historically, it seems that every time that there’s the development of a new technology or production process, the government has to intervene in [...]
Posted on November 29th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, overheard, politics, science | Comments Off
From BBC News:
A man lay dead in his flat for 15 months before his body was found.
Recording an open verdict into the death of Derek Perkins, 63, coroner Dr Nigel Chapman said he had never known a body to be undiscovered for so long.
The exact date of Mr Perkins’ death is unknown, but a [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, weird | Comments Off
Bookmarked 2 links
Added 2 products to their wishlist:
Bookmarked 2 links
Added a product to their wishlist:
Shared an image: like a record...
Bookmarked a link: 10 useful jQuery plugins :: ENHANCE
I now have one week to finish my book on Google. Freak out mode has officially begun. (I'll finish it ... I'm just gonna freak out during)
Bookmarked a link: FILExt - The File Extension Source
Just had two Wash U students & a HS student stop by asking me to help the Obama campaign. I said yes. Good to see kids involved in politics!