Archive for May, 2010

Music by the ‘Click of Death’

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

If you’ve used a computer long enough, chances are good that you’ve heard it:

The click of death.

It happens (inevitably) when your hard drive physically fails to read some data, signaling its soon-to-arrive death.

More specifically, the drive arm swings quickly back and forth across the data plates/disks because it can’t read data, creating a clicking sound that can prompt a tech nerd to nearly experience a myocardial infarction. I’ve heard the dreadful sound twice in my days on Earth, and each time it sent me running to a computer store to buy a new hard disk.

So anyway, I’m in the market to rebuild my desktop (running out of space, my data backup plan is crummy, I like a techy challenge, etc.). While I’m brushing up on RAID configurations, the latest hard drives, backup/recovery solutions, etc. when I stumble across this: (more…)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Music, Technology | No Comments »

Tracking the oily devastation

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

If there’s one thing to definitively say about the Deepwater Horizon oil leak, it is that it’s bad.

Really, really bad. Dire. Catastrophic. Disastrous. Etc.

And it’s getting worse:

On that last point, we can expect more of the same from coastal states near the Gulf — and soon. (more…)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Environment, Technology | No Comments »

A failed attempt at 48 Hour Magazine

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

- Thomas Edison

Well, I did my best to sneak into the pages of 48 Hour Magazine — a “raucous experiment in using new tools to erase media’s old limits.”

Unfortunately my 430ish words didn’t make the final cut for their “issue zero,” which was themed around the word hustle.

Alexis Madrigal of WIRED tells me that my piece made it far, in fact sailing into the second round. But there it met demise in the face of stiff competition.

Low on battery power, high on hopes, and swimming in motion sickness, I gave it everything I could while crammed into a Ford Escort during a 20-hour road trip to Florida. And regardless of the circumstances, I still think it’s a pretty neat piece. (See below.)

But please don’t mistake my words for whining; that makes for poor company, and even poorer blogging!

This was a hell of a lot of fun, I learned a lot, and I’m extremely thrilled that I even had the opportunity to try, follow through with a submission, and make it as far as I did in the selection process.

I’ll rest peacefully tonight knowing that 48 Hour Magazine appears to be a shining, glorious, smashing success — congrats to all of you guys and gals, contributors included — and that there will always be next time.

That said, here’s my submission:

(more…)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Experimentation, Science Writing, Space and Astronomy | 4 Comments »

On immortality

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

Immortality. Something more esoteric than I usually brave to tread, so please cut your mental parachutes and join me in free fall. (Don’t worry, I packed us a backup ‘chute.)

First, some back story:
This March at a science writers mixer, I met Rita King — CEO of Dancing Ink Productions, IBM innovator, mayor of Loveland, writer, and so on. Suffice to say, she wears a lot of hats.

I mined advice from King in anticipation of the then-upcoming social media panel. We spoke about good presenting techniques, social media trends, virtual and augmented reality technology, and increasingly more far-out and futuristic conjectures that nerds tend to have after drinking one too many Black and Tans.

So it goes.

Today, King invited me to comment on her recent post at The Imagination Age about filmmaker/Current TV host/personality Jason Silva‘s Turning Into Gods, a new full-length documentary exploring immortality.

Here’s the trailer:

From my limited vantage point, Silva seems very bright-eyed about a future with immortality in it.

Good for him!

Me? I think it a future with immortality in it is profound and exhilarating. But it also freaks me the hell out.

Allow me explain. (more…)

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Brain, Space and Astronomy, Technology | 2 Comments »