Embracing Chaos

Last week I went to the Indoor Sun Shoppe in Fremont and got a couple new CF bulbs for the house. I love their selection — they have everything from tiny 7W candelabra bulbs to these massive 150W bulbs that look like death-rays. A giant 105W bulb (pictured) is now trying to make my monstera deliciosa’s home in the living room a little more like tropical mexico and less like winter-in-seattle. In addition to a huge range of powers, they also clearly show you the color temperature of each bulb. Some of my friends have avoided CF bulbs because of…

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Creative Commons is a type of license, which is somewhere between a traditional all-rights-reserved copyright and public domain. There are many variations of CC licenses, and they’re onto the 3.0 version of the licenses, so expect more soon. Generally CC licenses require Attribution, which is to say, you can do stuff with this content, so long as you say where you got it from. Often this is in the form of a hyperlink back to the original author’s website. Flickr popularized this by making CC licenses an option on all their photos. You’ll see that almost all of my photos…

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A new biography of my grandfather has just been published called “The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius .” I’m quite excited about it for a number of reasons I’ll describe below. The summary of the book on the publisher’s site is great: The first full biography of Paul Dirac, the greatest British physicist since Newton – and one of the strangest geniuses of the twentieth century, who may have suffered from autism. Paul Dirac was a pioneer of quantum mechanics and was regarded as an equal by Albert Einstein. He predicted, purely from what he…

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A while ago I posted about how to stop getting Dex phone books delivered in Seattle. Unfortunately doing that wasn’t enough to stop all the dead trees from showing up on my doorstep. Now there’s a new grass-roots service called Yellow Pages Goes Green which handles this nation-wide across all providers of phone books. They liken themselves to a national do-not-call registry for dead trees. If you use the internet or your phone to look up people and businesses, I encourage you to visit http://www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org/stop-yellow-pages/ and stop the unsolicited deliver of unwanted phone books. Even if recycled, these books waste…

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