Rough Drafts

Avast, ye scurvy swabs!

One of the big medical mysteries of the past decade is the alarming rise in the number of autism cases among children. In 1991, autism hit one kid in 2,500. It was rare enough that it lurked in the background, a spooky but not terribly immediate possibility for most parents. Since then, the rate has

Thought I’d post a quick tip on this, since I couldn’t find it published anywhere else: If you’ve got a table you want to put inside an MT entry, you’ve got to put all the HTML table code on a single line. Otherwise, MT will add <br /> tags after every line — and when […]

My latest feature for Mobile pits the top 10 notebook vendors against each other to see who provides the best tech support — and who’s the worst. No holds barred! UPDATE 6/16/06: This story got slashdotted. Woo hoo!

We’ve just published a second “100 Greatest Gadgets of All Time” story — this one featuring 100 of the best gadgets suggested by readers–including the slide rule, the Princess phone, and Merlin. The #1 gadget of all time, according to Mobile‘s readers? I don’t think you’ll be surprised to find out w

Somebody wrote a giant message to his sweetie in the Utah desert. A satellite captured a picture of it, and now you can see it thanks to Google Maps. (via Googlesightseeing)

I’m wasting way too much time playing shooting arrows into oncoming hordes of medieval soldiers, archers, and ogres. I haven’t had this much fun with trajectories since Gorillas.

Here is one cool 8-year-old: Hey, Klingons Have Feelings Too “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Federation of Planets, and to the galaxy for which it stands, one universe, under everybody, with liberty and justice for all species.”

“Anytime you lose a high-profile customer, that hurts in ways that are not quantifiable but that still hurt.” –Sageza Group analyst Clay Ryder, who clearly has no clue how to read a budget and calculate the loss of a major customer’s business. Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips

MIT’s Technology Review has a little piece on the first computer game ever, 1962’s Spacewar for the DEC PDP-1. Also see Stewart Brand’s 1972 writeup.

What happens if oil isn’t cheap anymore? Our farming and food systems collapse, the suburbs implode, a period of violence ensues, and in the end, we’re all living in small farming communities, riding bikes and milking cows by hand. So says James Howard Kunstler, who predicts this all may start to ha

It’s 1:50. Plus 1,439 other minutes–all illustrated with multiple photos–at the curiously engrossing Human Clock. A new shot every minute, of course.