Rough Drafts

Groups of people are uncannily accurate at guessing the number of beans in a jar, the weight of a steer, and the like. In fact, the bigger the group, the more accurate its collective guess — a principle known as the Condorcet Jury Theorem. There’s a significant limitation, though: This only works if

This interactive Google Maps mashup shows how much different parts of the world will get flooded by a 1-7 1-14 meter rise in sea level. Navigate to the part you’re interested in and tell the app how much to raise the ocean, and a blue overlay covers up the parts that will get inundated. Scary. […]

Most shocking thing I learned last weekend: A huge Antarctic ice shelf disintegrated over a 35-day period in 2002, much to the surprise of the scientists tracking it. This shelf, designated Larsen B, was about 700 feet thick and covered 3,500 square km — about the area of Rhode Island. The scientist

What I think of as the Microsoft approach to product development is to cram as many features as possible into each product. Interface is an afterthought: All those features exist primarily for the benefit of the feature list, not the user, so who cares if the feature is buried three menu levels deep

What does your computer do when it’s asleep? Well, if you’re the giving type, it might be searching for intelligent life in the universe, helping find a cure for schizophrenia, or perhaps trying to fold some proteins. Scott Draves has a different idea. His collaborative computing project, Electric S

One of the first magazines I can remember subscribing to (apart from Cricket and Ranger Rick) was Creative Computing. I started getting this magazine about 1980, after I fell in love with the neighbor’s TRS-80. It astounded me that he could have a computer sitting right there, on his desk, completel

bali_water_temple_statue, uploaded by crderivative. Listened this week to an amazing talk by anthropologist Stephen Lansing‘s talk on Bali at the Long Now Foundation‘s seminar series. (Thanks to Jon Udell for linking to it.) Lansing’s talk is an account of how Balinese rice farmers managed to create

Not exactly for dummies, actually, but for beginners: Next week I’ll be hosting a webcast on how to select and set up an HDTV set. Two of Ziff-Davis’s top HDTV gurus, Robert Heron and Loyd Case, will be explaining everything you need to know. I’ll be asking naive questions (and we’ll take audience q

Here’s a 5-minute video showing what happens when a laptop battery ignites: It sets off a chain reaction, where successive battery cells ignite, each one releasing more heat and increasingly big jets of flame (up to 6 feet high). Amazing and scary. As the narrator points out, you need to be careful

This is kind of cool: TextMarks is a service that lets you create your own custom SMS quick-response codes. People enter the code and send it to the TextMark short code (41411), and then they get the text that you specify, in return. I set up the keyword haiku to deliver the current day’s haiku […]

Not because of my bluegrass banjo-pickin’ talent, but because I’ve just been selected to go take part in The Climate Project’s next training session, Dec. 1-3. Along with about 200 other volunteers, I’m going to get trained by Al Gore, so that I can go out and give presentations on the global climat

This morning the poll workers in San Mateo offered me a choice of voting on a traditional paper ballot, or using their one electronic voting machine: an E-Slate system from Hart Intercivic. After looking at the machine and being assured that I’d have a chance to review a printed record, I chose the