Somewhere in a little town in Belguim.
on a square where nothing really happens. never.
we placed a button.
push to add drama and see what happens!

… Read More → "What happens when you push the button?"

Have you ever needed to look up something about a processor but didn’t know where to go? CPU DB is an enormous database of information about pretty much every processor you’d ever need to research. The folks over at Stanford put it together to let you browse or search all the data (in real time). Each entry for every processor … Read More → "CPU DB is an awesome database of microprocessor specifications and other related information"

In the death of Jack Tramiel, the man behind the Commodore 64 computer, it’s not that hard to see the life of Silicon Valley.

This is a place where companies come out of nowhere, rock the world and then disappear again. Same with people. Tramiel, who died at 84 at Stanford Hospital on Sunday, was a Silicon Valley A-lister in the early personal computing days. His Commodore computers — in addition to the 64 there was the VIC-20 and the PET — helped open a new digital world to enthusiasts beyond the hobbyists who could build their own … Read More → "Commodore 64 pioneer Jack Tramiel lived Silicon Valley’s story"

We’ve still got a little over a hundred days before Mars Science Laboratory tries not to smash itself into a million bits while landing on Mars, but the rover’s stunt double (and its human slaves) are hard at work practicing their moves in preparation for August 6th, when Curiosity will make its thrilling touchdown at Gale Crater.

The crazy (seriously, crazy) sky-crane landing seems like it has to be by far the most dangerous part of the entire mission. While it’s more or less up to the … Read More → "Curiosity Rover gets practice time before Mars landing"

Many great masterpieces reside in museums. There’s the “Mona Lisa” at the Louvre. “Nighthawks at the Diner” graces the wall at the Art Institute of Chicago. And the Cray-1 sits at the Bradbury Science Museum here in Los Alamos.

The first Cray-1 was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976 at a cost of $8.8 million. It set a new world record speed of 160 million floating-point operations per second and boasted 8MB of main memory. According to the museum, it was the first computer to break the megaflop barrier.
via Read More → "Crave visits the Cray-1, a true museum piece"

Scientists call it the “cocktail party problem.” To understand the person talking to you in a noisy room, you’ve got to filter out all of the conversations, clinking glass, and other noises in the background. Fortunately, our brains are up to the challenge, and now — thanks to a little help from a humanoid robot — researchers have found new clues to how we do it.
via Wired

Read More → "Robot study of ‘cocktail party problem’ hints at human hearing glitch"

There are few fuels as potent as youth and genius, and Vergence Labs is sitting on a powder keg. The fledgling startup in Palo Alto is comprised of Erick Miller and Jon Rodriguez a dynamic duo that want nothing less than to redefine the human-computer interface for the 21st Century. Vergence Labs, recently accepted into Stanford’s prestigious StartX& … Read More → "Talking with the founders of Vergence Labs: first steps towards merging man and machine"

Gary Goddard tells the story of the near-construction of a life-sized Starship Enterprise replica in downtown Las Vegas. Goddard successfully bid to build the attraction as part of the 1992 competition to revitalized Vegas’s sagging downtown and bring back tourist traffic that had been sucked away by the strip, but the project was scuttled at the last minute when Stanley Jaffe, then CEO of Paramount, got cold feet. The Enterprise was scrapped and replaced by … Read More → "Secret history of the near-construction of a life-sized Starship Enterprise in downtown Las Vegas"

There are a lot of expensive things out there, but information can be one of the priciest. If you were going to rob Intel, one way to go about it would be to try and make off with bags full of chips, or you could be like ex-Intel engineer Biswamohan Pani and take some documents worth somewhere between 200 and 400 million dollars. Why? To advance his career at AMD. But for documents worth that much, Pani will get nothing but some jail time.
via Geekosystem</ … Read More → "Ex-Intel engineer admits to $400 million in information theft"

If you haven’t thought much about numbers much since that college calculus class, you might not think about how they’re relevant to everyday life, aside from maintaining your bank account and doing your taxes. But Minds of Modern Mathematics, an app from IBM, shows just how important math is in shaping and influencing our day-to-day lives.
via Read More → "Minds of Modern Mathematics: explore a millenium of math history"