Encephalosponge » Soaking Up Life

After McCain finally released a technology policy, Lawrence Lessig takes a comparative look at the two candidates’ policies. Save our intarwebs!

Learn the principles of chemistry with the Chemical Party video [hat tip Peter Srinu].

I was inspired by the Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell to show off my new desktop look.
In traditional Lifehacker style, I’ll mention the pictured applications. The operating system is obviously Ubuntu. Avant Window Navigator is my dock. The IM application is Pidgin, which includes the Facebook Chat and MusicTracker (displays currently playing [...]

Vendors Rally While Windows Sleeps by Mike Elgan (PCWorld) I must say I have to agree with this article. Windows appears to be complacent and vendors are seeing an opportunity to create custom solutions for people by bypassing Windows when it’s not needed.

A recent post on Ars Technica explains how researchers are converting adult stem cells from patients with certain diseases into embryonic stem cells. This will hopefully make studying the cellular basis of diseases like Parkinson’s easier by providing a virtually unlimited supply of tissue, which was previously difficult to come by. This technique [...]

A comment on Mark Pilgrim’s Hello Darkness My Old Friend:
“No one cares about freedoms for the same reason that no one cares about oxygen. As long as they’re there, why bother? Freedom zero is so abstract to most people that no one even thinks about it, let alone care. It’s like the string theory. It’s [...]

So I went to check out the replay of last night’s phenomenal 4×100 Men’s relay only to find an annoyingly disturbing message: the NBC Olympics vidoes don’t “support” Linux. First of all, what kind of ludicrous claim is that? They’re freakin’ videos. If I’ve got the correct codecs installed, then I’ll [...]

Harvard made a great video called The Inner Life of a Cell a couple of years ago using some great computer graphics [hat tip Sadie]. It tells a brief story of the mechanism of inflammation being activated in a leukocyte. It was put to some great music by Studio Daily. I highly [...]

Surprise, Surprise. Vista gets seriously pwned at Blackhat 2008 [via Gizmodo]. The exploit is actually based in a bunch of Java and .NET exploit that takes advantage of Internet Explorer’s ActiveX controls. Giz claims that this has potential to infect many other systems (theoretically because they’re not based on platform specific technologies). [...]

Some people on an airplane videotaped a solar eclipse (via Gizmodo). Sweet!