That’s probably the thing I miss most about mix CDs that doesn’t really translate to the playlists I now create in the cloud: They were so often dictated by discovery. Back in middle school, in those earliest days of mix… Read More ›
Articles
The best articles of 2020
If you are looking for some decent longform articles, this selection from Pocket will keep you busy for a while. Well worth checking out no matter what Read Later service you use.
27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful
My daughter found my Psion 3a the other day, tucked at the back of a cupboard she was clearing out for me. It looked fine and is still in excellent aesthetic condition, and fortunately I had left no batteries inside… Read More ›
Castles in the Sky
While renovating a house in San Francisco, a couple discovered a diary, hidden away for more than a century. It held a love story—and a mystery. A few years ago, my husband and I decided to buy a house. We… Read More ›
Why there has never been a female chess world champion
“The way the boys treat Beth in the series is a dream; sadly, the reality is not like that,” Judit Polgar, a Hungarian former professional chess player and the only woman to have cracked the Top 10 in the game’s… Read More ›
Torturing Geniuses
Beth, the protagonist of the TV show The Queen’s Gambit, is not someone you’d want as a friend. She takes money from her childhood mentor—the old janitor who taught her chess—and never pays him back, visits him or thanks him… Read More ›
Remembering the Ditto and Mimeograph
When I was at the library recently, I reviewed a 1946 publication by an urban planning agency. The purple color of the text of the document jogged my memory. The pages had been printed on a ditto machine. I had… Read More ›
Phone addiction not driven by notifications
Smartphone addiction is unlikely to be caused by notifications, a study by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) suggests. It found that 89% of interactions with phones were unprompted, with only 11% responding to an alert. Group… Read More ›
The future of Moore’s law seems uncertain
Moore’s Law was first proposed in 1965, then again in revised form in 1975. Assuming an 18-month average doubling period for transistor density (it was ~1 year early on, and lately has been ~3y) there have been about 40 doublings… Read More ›
Video games can improve mental health
Video games are fun and interesting, and doing fun, interesting things makes you happy. Would we need a study to show that watching a few episodes of a beloved TV show makes you feel good, or that sitting down with… Read More ›
McGST 