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A few weeks ago, Fox News breathlessly reported that the embattled WikiLeaks operation was looking to start a new life under on the sea. WikiLeaks, the article speculated, might try to escape its legal troubles by putting its servers on Sealand, a World War II anti-aircraft platform seven miles off the English coast in the North Sea, a place that calls itself an independent nation. It sounds perfect for WikiLeaks: a friendly, legally unassailable host with an anything-goes attitude. But readers with a memory of the early 2000s might be wondering, "Didn't someone already try this? How did that work out?"
Death of a data haven: cypherpunks, WikiLeaks, and the world's smallest nation
Charles 'Charlie' Pellerin. There's nothing unusual about having a bad day at the office. But some people have worse days than others, and in his time Charles (Charlie) Pellerin has had a few notable ones. Not many people find themselves having to explain why an organisation has invested a decade and half and in the vicinity of $3 billion on a project that has failed.
What went wrong with the Hubble Space Telescope (and what managers can learn from it) - leadership, collaboration - IT Services - Techworld
Nowadays our orientation is very often not longer based exclusively on the actual geography and their landmarks. There are loads of alternatives, from street numbers to GPS routing in our smartphones, to guide us to a destination. All of those wayfinding devices have in common that they are abstracted projections of the real world’s spatial arrangement.
Benedikt Groß – Metrography – London Tube Map to large scale collective mental map
Though the origins of the ‘@’ symbol’s visual appearance are murky at best, its use as a shorthand for ‘at the rate of’ is rather better attested. One scholar in particular saw his work reach a far wider audience than might have been expected of an otherwise minor piece of paleographic research: in 2000, a number of newspapers [6] , [7] reported on the work of one Giorgio Stabile, an Italian academic who had finally unearthed convincing documentary evidence of the symbol’s meaning, if not its visual appearance. Stabile’s search for the birth of the ‘@’ started with an analysis of the symbol’s various names.
Shady Characters » The @-symbol, part 2 of 2
I did a lot of things wrong while at Twitter. First and foremost, I took pretty terrible care of myself during our crazy early days (2007 – 2008). I’d had intermittently demanding jobs before, but nothing like the unrelenting stress and chaos of a fast-growing startup. I was a wreck for most of those two years, and I wasn’t even working the insane hours of, amongst others, our head operations guy at the time. During that time period, I was constantly getting sick. I had nothing resembling a consistent sleep schedule.
Alex Payne — Staying Healthy and Sane At a Startup
Continue reading page | 1 | 2 Astronomers have found the first alien world that could support life on its surface. It is both at the right distance from its star to potentially harbour liquid water and probably has a rocky composition like Earth.
Found: first rocky exoplanet that could host life - space - 29 September 2010 - New Scientist
Six ways that artists hack your brain - New Scientist
Since humankind first put brush to canvas, artists have played with the mind and the senses to create sublime atmospheres and odd impressions. It is only recently, with a blossoming understanding of the way the brain deconstructs images, that neuroscientists and psychologists have finally begun to understand how these tricks work. Here we take you on a grand tour of the burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics. You’ll find out how Claude Monet bypasses your consciousness and plugs straight into your emotions, how Salvador Dali triggers neural conflicts and how Renaissance art and trompe l’oeil fool us into believing the impossible. And we turn the spotlight on the artist’s mind, revealing how Wassily Kandinsky drew on his synaesthesia to produce some of the most celebrated artworks of the 20th century.
It was a dark and stormy night on December 18, 1908. Okay—maybe it wasn't so dark and stormy. But it should have been, because that was the night Thomas Edison tried to hijack the motion picture industry. "With his beetle brows, long wispy hair, and beatific look, Edison might have seemed the addled inventor," writes the historian Neil Gabler, "but he was a shrewd businessman and a fearsome adversary who was never loath to take credit for any invention, whether he was responsible or not."
Thomas Edison's plot to hijack the movie industry
Note : le manuscrit original ne comportait pas le titre et fut probablement écrit vers 1830. Il fut publié sous différents titres tels Dialectique ou Dialectique éristique ou L'Art d'avoir toujours raison .
L’Art d’avoir toujours raison - Wikisource
Acupuncture works by inducing body's own painkiller
The art of sticking and manipulating fine needles in specific body parts to relieve pain and fix other ailments has been around for thousands of years. More recently, acupuncture has spread out of China and has been gaining popularity worldwide. While many practitioners swear by acupuncture’s therapeutic powers, there are few scientific studies of how it works, and one of those suggested that any needle stick would do . This has led many people to suspect that the whole process induces little more than a placebo effect. An article in a recent issue of Nature Neuroscience indicates that at least one of acupuncture’s reported benefits may finally have concrete support and a proposed mechanism of action thanks to laboratory experiments.
Claim: President George W. Bush proclaimed, "The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur." Origins: Yet another "George W. Bush is dumb" story has been taken up by those who like their caricatures drawn in stark, bold lines.