This BusinessWeek interview with Linus Torvalds contains a very interesting point: Torvalds compares the open-source way of developing software to the scientific method. Programmers put ideas forward; they’re critiqued publicly; and, if they stand up to scrutiny and to repeated testing, these ideas

“Oedipus, as you know, was the tragic king who killed his father, then married his mother — a sequence of events that seldom turns out well.” -Bob Costas, commenting on the 2004 Athens Olympics opening ceremony

NASA Technology Transfer Bulletin #A101-753B explains it all for you.

I just had a short article about the upcoming Perseid meteor shower published in the San Francisco Chronicle. This was a fun piece to do–I got to talk with NASA scientists, enthusiastic amateur astronomers, and even dropped in on a stargazing party in the Los Altos hills, where I got to scope out so

This week, skip the movies and catch some shooting stars instead. The annual Perseid meteor shower will be especially spectacular this year, and at its peak on Wednesday night and Thursday morning, you may be able to see as many as one or two shooting stars every minute. That’s a lot of wishes. Ever

Good advice on how to be creative: “If I was just starting out writing, say, a novel or a screenplay, or maybe starting up a new software company, I wouldn’t try to quit my job for a year and make this big, dramatic heroic-quest thing about it. I would do something far simpler: I would […]

What strikes you first about the Panasonic DMC-FZ10 (aka “Lumix”) digital camera is its huge, beautiful Leica lens. With a 42mm diameter, the lens is more closely related to something you’d find on a traditional 35mm single-lens reflex camera than to its tiny cousins in the digital world. This lens

The next time you’re stuck in traffic with a screaming toddler in the back seat, you’ll wish you had one of these strapped to the back of your headrest: A compact portable DVD player with Finding Nemo queued up and ready to go. It’s a virtual guarantee that the kids will stay pacified throughout you

Excuse me, but isn’t our whole country supposed to be a free speech zone??

Law student Thad Anderson has collected a bunch of government documents and made them available via P2P networks such as KaZaA and SoulSeek, through his Download for Democracy project. These documents are publicly available elsewhere, but they’re not always so easy to find. As Kim Zetter’s Wired New

For everyone but a few die-hard photography buffs, digital cameras are the way to go. A digital camera actually makes you a better photographer, because of the instant feedback it provides via the LCD–and because you get much more practice taking digital shots, which are free, than you do with a fil

A bunch of U.S. soldiers have been posting photos of their experiences in Iraq. This stuff is far more vivid than anything you’ll see on the news. If you want to know what war looks like, these moblogs are the place to look. It’s far more raw, immediate, and real than anything I’ve seen in […]