Relativity centenary

By -
Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity was first published a hundred years ago, during the week of November 18-25, 1915.


It remains such a colossal achievement of intellectual imagination that few people come to grips with it. The other day, on French television, a journalist suggested that an expert in science might tell us whether he preferred the photo of Einstein poking his tongue out. To my mind, that’s a little like asking Lincoln’s widow what she thought of the play Our American Cousin, or suggesting that the Creator might talk about his recreational activities on the seventh day.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Steve Lopez and the Importance of Newspapers

By -
Image
It has been one year since I cancelled my subscriptions to The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times . In that time, I continued to read both publications online. My assessment of this experiment is that reading newspapers and journalism online is vastly inferior to the hard copy thrown on my porch each morning. So I restarted my subscription to the Los Angeles Times and I have made it a point to buy The New York Times as often as I pass one of those coin boxes or my local news stand. The catalyst for this re-evaluation resulted from catching the film, The Soloist on cable last week. I liked the movie, although the scenes I found most interesting were the ones that showed columnist Steve Lopez at work. I realized the book was sitting in my “to-read” stack, so I pulled it and began reading. The book, as I expected, is better than the film. Lopez clearly addresses the revolution occurring in journalism, and worries about his future with the paper even as he researches and writes
Keep reading

The interoperability of Web Component polyfills

By -
At the moment, there are two polyfills for the upcoming Web Components standard (roughly, for widgets): Polymer by Google X-Tag by Mozilla Fortunately, the three ways of writing a Web Component (via the Polymer polyfill, via the X-Tag polyfill or by using the APIs directly) are interoperable. Quoting “ Custom Element Interoperability ” by the Polymer team: We’re happy to say that, yes, custom elements of any variety (be they Polymer, X-Tag or vanilla) can all happily coexist. The blog post explains how that works and provides an example that you can download from GitHub. Third Web Component polyfill: @b_lionel told me about Bosonic , which is partially based on Polymer and also interoperable .
Keep reading

Ideas for fixing unconnected computing

By -
I traveled quite a bit recently and got exposed to a negative aspect of current technology: Things work well if you have a solid internet connection with no traffic limits and are plugged into a power outlet. Otherwise, things do not work well at all. This blog post describes the problems that arise and suggests solutions. Managing data traffic Cell phones are quite good at conserving traffic, laptops much less so. This becomes a problem when your laptop has a mobile connection (e.g., via tethering or in a hotel with data caps). I once accidentally started iTunes in such a situation and immediately used up my daily allowance of traffic. Similarly, mobile email is frugal with traffic (only the current folder is updated, attachments are only downloaded on demand, etc.), desktop email is usually not. How can this be handled better? I’d like to see three traffic modes for all operating systems: “full”, “restricted”, “minimal”: In full traffic mode , all data transfers are allowed and happe
Keep reading