This has really gone too far: When the WSJ starts writing about how cool Moleskine notebooks are, and even BoingBoing starts drooling over the things and talking about how many bloggers love them, you know something is amiss. Really, now: Moleskines are cute, black, metrosexual notebooks with off-wh

This interesting essay in City Journal examines how classic literature — often disparaged as a “canon” of irrelevant works by long-dead white males — has in fact been profoundly liberating for more than a century of working-class autodidacts in the U.S. and Britain. In fact, the article points out s

I love it when judges smack down the fundamentalists. It happens so infrequently that it’s especially gratifying when it does happen. In this case, a judge saw through the transparent creationism lurking behind a Georgia school board’s “evolution warning stickers,” (see parodies here) and ruled that

It’s not like me to brag too much, but at the recent Vegas trade show CES, I got to party with Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler and American bike racing hero Lance Armstrong. OK, I didn’t actually party with them–but I did get to party *near* them, and that was pretty cool to me. Also cool: […]

Gabrielle and Kenneth Adelman have been flying up and down the California coastline in a helicopter, with a Nikon D-1 digital camera and a GPS receiver. They’ve photographed almost the entire coast, and put their images online. It’s an amazing project! California Coastal Records Project

Flexibility and ease of use are not mutually exclusive, though most camera makers don’t know that. You shouldn’t have to choose between pocket point-and-shoot cameras and larger, bulkier, and complicated models that let you make manual adjustments to ensure the perfect shot. It’s a bogus trade-off:

Film-camera snobs, cower in fear. The Canon EOS 20D is a shot across the bow of your beloved 35mm camera. More than that: It’s the first digital camera we’ve tested that has the mettle to go head-to-head with high-end film cameras and come out on top. Make no mistake: This camera is for serious phot

Ron Avitzur got laid off from his job as a software consultant at Apple in 1993. But he refused to give up on his project, so he just kept coming in and working on it. Eventually he got the software–Apple’s Graphing Calculator–QA’d, translated into 20 languages, and bundled into shipping Macs, all w

William Alwyn Bentley spent four decades around the turn of the century — the last century — photographing snowflakes. He worked in snowstorms, collecting flakes on a blackboard and then carefully transferring them to microscope slides with a splinter of wood, holding his breath while photographing

A spooky looking me, from the Mobile PC moblog.

U. Pittsburgh Linguist Scott Kiesling has researched how young Americans use the word “dude:” … the four-letter word has many uses: in greetings (“What’s up, dude?”); as an exclamation (“Whoa, Dude!”); commiseration (“Dude, I’m so sorry.”); to one-up someone (“That’s so lame, dude.”); as well as agr

Skeletal systems of cartoon characters by Michael Paulus. Eerie!