Blog – page 57 of 75

The first weapon made from code.

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus (by Patrick Clair)

An infographic dissecting the nature and ramifications of Stuxnet, the first weapon made entirely out of code. This was produced for Australian TV program HungryBeast on Australia’s ABC1

William Zinsser on what it takes for travel writing to move from a personal narrative into the realm of literature.

The worlds that those restless hermits wrote about were often interior worlds, tinged with mysticism, and it could hardly be otherwise; they achieved their destiny by following trails that weren’t on any map. But what raises travel writing to literature is not what the writer brings to a place, but what the place draws out of the writer.

Hang on Woody! (by nplus1)

Some people don’t mind starting a company without any customers. I’m too conservative for this. I’m happy to even give up equity to get that first customer. 50% of a profitable company is better than 100% of a company that will probably quickly go out of business.

— The Easiest Way to Succeed as an Entrepreneur Altucher Confidential

Map of the World

This map is drawn using data of the connections of 10 million Facebook users. (via Map of the World Drawn Entirely Using Facebook Connections: Geekosystem)

National Geographic has an interesting article about some recent findings in the search for the real Cleopatra.

[M]aybe finding her tomb would diminish what Shakespeare called “her infinite variety.” Disembodied, at large in the realm of myth, more context than text, Cleopatra is free to be of different character to different times, which may be the very wellspring of her vitality. No other figure from antiquity seems so versatile in her ambiguities, so modern in her contradictions.

Judy Bachrach, writing for Obit Magazine has a piece, Death Be Not Chic, on how Hollywood deals with death, in comparison to people’s real experience of it. Some notable quotes:

Death marks us permanently — and not simply because we are all, in another sense, marked men. Death defines who we are now and, inevitably, how we and our accomplishments will be considered at some later date most of us would generally prefer not to think about. At all.

Dear Photograph is a website with a simple premise: take a picture of a picture from the past in the present.

The results are beautiful:

It’s awesome when an entrepreneur is obsessed with his idea. Every great product that I’m aware of came from an obsession of an idea and every great company followed. But for every entrepreneur that shifted the obsession with the idea into an obsession with the execution of the idea, I know many more entrepreneurs who got stuck on the idea, but never focused on building something from it.

101 Awesome Marketing Quotes

View more presentations from HubSpot Internet Marketing

The following quotes are from Joseph Epstein’s book review in the New Criterion on Stanley Fish’s book “How to Write a Sentence. Epstein, throughout his review, demonstrates that he does not believe Fish to be in a position to teach this art, and provides examples from the book demonstrating his lack of command of the language. However, Epstein provides some helpful nuggets on the craft of writing from what he believes to be the best book on the subject, Style(1955), by F. L. Lucas’s .

[Lucas said, O]ne does best always to attempt to use strong words to begin and end sentences. Straightaway this means eliminating the words “It” and “There” to begin sentences and dropping also the pompous “Indeed.” This advice also reinstates and gives new life to the old schoolmarmish rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition, for a prepositon is almost never a strong word.

Luckiest tennis shot ever.

Kim Clijsters LUCKY SHOT French Open (by AccepthisNEWS)

Learn to steal like an artist (via How To Steal Like An Artist (And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me) - Austin Kleon)

Microsoft’s Kinect is letting hardware and software hackers (the good kind) discover new possibilities in robotics.

Within weeks of the device’s release, YouTube was filled with videos of Kinect-enabled robots. A group from UC Berkeley strapped a Kinect to a quadrotor—a small helicopter with four propellers—enabling it to fly autonomously around a room. A couple of students at the University of Bundeswehr Munich attached a Kinect to a robotic car and sent it through an obstacle course. And a team from the University of Warwick in the UK built a robot that had the potential to navigate around post-earthquake rubble and search for trapped victims. “When something is that cheap, it opens up all sorts of possibilities,” says Ken Conley of Willow Garage, which sells a $500 open source robotics kit that incorporates the Kinect. (The previous non-Kinect version cost $280,000.) “Now it’s in the hands of just about anybody.”

Geek Alphabet (via ABC by *yllya)

(via Work Smarter and More Easily by “Sharpening Your Axe”)

bestrooftalkever:

The zeppelin Hindenburg floats past the Empire State Building over Manhattan on Aug. 8, 1936. The German airship was en route to Lakehurst, New Jersey, from Germany. The Hindenburg would later explode in a spectacular fireball above Lakehurst on May 6, 1937. (AP Photo)

Diagram of geek culture: it’s a big world out there.

Arty Bollocks Generator

Comic Sans Criminal - There’s help available for people like you!