May 2008
8 posts
Teen decomposes plastic bag in 3 months
Daniel Burd, a high school science fair participant from Waterloo, ON, discovered a way to decompose a plastic bag between 40 to 80 times faster than nature (pdf). The process is cheap and could be implemented on an industrial scale. While Wired and the aforelinked TheRecord.com claim that plastic bags take over 1000 years to decompose in nature, the non-hyped consensus seems to be 10 to 20 years....
Using Twitter for blog comments
I was thinking about putting some kind of comment section in my blog when I realized that I already have an amazing one. It is linked above and it is called Twitter. I realize that Twitter wasn’t made for this, but it seems to me that Twitter wasn’t made for any specific task at all. Twitter is given meaning by how people use it, whether that is posting news, darth vader...
Dataportability makes us all happy
One of the main reasons that I started this blog was to have an “online home.” What frustrated me was that so many sites wanted to hold on to your data. Now, I understand why they do this, mining that data is their business model, but anyone who has entered the same stupid profile information more than once knows that the system is broken. The dataportability project is trying to help...
Bibliography analysis
Maybe this exists and I am just behind the curve, but why there is no good software or online service that analyzes your bibliography and suggests other entries? I don’t think this would be hard to implement. There are at least two ways this could be done. Simply matching keywords would be a strong start. Google Scholar already has an option to suggest articles that are similar to a given...
Hard drive swap, links
Sorry for going quiet for a few days. My laptop has a new harddrive and I can’t migrate my time machine backup over until my sister mails me the OS X install CD. I might be out for a few more days, so here are some links to keep you (and me) busy: Wii Friend Codes From Twitter - I have been playing a lot of Mario Kart lately, and anything that makes swapping friend codes easier is a good...