To decode da Vinci, you need a firm grasp of art. To learn from Archimedes, you need to get your hands on something a bit more sophisticated. Like a synchrotron that accelerates electrons to nearly the speed of light to produce x-rays. At least, that’s what scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelera

A new generation of backcountry gear offers the perfect balance of high performance and low, low weight. Your back will be ecstatic. Big Agnes Seedhouse Superlight 2It might not be blizzard-worthy, but this sub-3.5-pound, two-person tent is as easy to pitch as it is to haul. And for three-season cam

Summer is all about the right mix of sun and surf. It’s the perfect time – and light – for fun pics but can be brutal on a typical camera’s innards. That’s why you need a waterproof shooter. Unlike standard models that are often accessorized with a cumbersome dive case, these cams come ready to […]

GoLite’s Wisp windjacket ($50-60) is made out of faerie wings. OK, it’s really made out of alien space fabric. Whatever the material, it’s mysteriously lightweight, so the whole jacket only weighs 2.5 ounces and you can squish it down to the size of a large orange and jam it into a corner of your pa

Blog comments are like drive-by shootings: Someone fires off a comment, then disappears, never to be seen again. There’s no follow-through, and it’s hard to engage in a sustained back-and-forth shootout, I mean, conversation. Subscribe to Comments changes that. It’s a free WordPress plugin that acco

The old grade school puzzler goes like this: Which is heavier: A pound of bricks or a pound of feathers? If you’re eight years old and you’re not paying attention, you say “bricks.” JP Rangaswami, who writes the IT blog Confused of Calcutta, used a similar analogy in a discussion I had with him last

The videonet is here. Data point: People upload 50,000 videos to YouTube every day. In turn, the site delivers 50 million video views each day. That’s huge. One of the most useful panels at Supernova covered “the rise of the videonet.” One of the panelists, Mary Hodder of Napsterization, quoted some

How real is the Net advertising boom? “Only about 6 percent of all advertising spending in the United States went to the Internet in the first quarter of the year … but it was clearly the fastest-growing category — up 38 percent year over year.” Waiting for the Dough on the Web

It’s a stellar networking event. The presentations were way too long, and too many of them were packed with empty platitudes about collaboration, change, innovation, “user generated content,” the “long tail,” blah blah blah. I nearly fell asleep several times. There was a lot of wit and intelligence

Conversation at Supernova today: Big podcaster: We had over one million people listen to that podcast! Intel exec: Yeah, we got about 200,000 downloads from people you referred to us. So that was pretty good. Not, you know, millions, but pretty good. Me: Is there any way you can tell whether people

I’ll be at Supernova 2006 here in San Francisco, tomorrow and Friday. If you’re going to be there, drop me a line and let’s see if we can meet up: Email dylan_tweney at ziffdavis.com (or just post a comment here). PS I’m also going to try to spend some time at Bloggercon, although it looks […]

Gol dang, Shane, them rustlers keep bustin’ through our fences. We gotta protect our property: Intellectual Property Prosecutions Double, Says Justice