Well, now there’s apparently reasonably pure water ice fricking everywhere. I’m not even surprised anymore. Maybe they ought to just start listing the planets that don’t have ice on them.
Companies
Thursday Morning Omnipost
I have to run and get on a train, and my new iPhone has chosen this moment to apparently take its own life, maybe because it couldn’t face an eternity of running Wurdle over and over again. I will vent my frustration on you with a hasty and incoherent blog post.
Not that the world isn’t, on its own, fundamentally incoherent. Evidence: …
“When Will,” a Poem by Google’s Little Search Suggestions Thingy
I’ve been trying out some old-school Ask.com natural language queries on Google lately. This little gem sprang up fully-formed when I was in the middle of typing “When will the Narnia books be in the public domain”? (Answer: 2033.) I reproduce it here verbatim. Notice how the last stanza gently reprises the themes of the first …
Authors vs. Critics — Round One, FFFFight!
Sorry about the recent posting rate. It has been teh infrequent. This is not the shape of things to come. The shape of things to come is more about giant global ant colonies.
Now for an off-topic post, because I feel like I have to say something about the completely mental interactions that are going on between authors and critics …
X-Rated iPhone Apps?
One interesting thing Apple showed off at the Developers’ Conference today was parental controls. With the 3.0 version of iPhone’s OS, which will be disseminated next week, you’ll be able to set your iPhone so that your kid can’t download age-inappropriate content to it.
While I have always found the concept of parental controls …
The 500 Most Frequently Used Words on Twitter
With their frequencies, as compiled by the lexicographers of Oxford University Press, based on a sampling of 1.5 million tweets.
the=407614
i=401053
to=350737
a=298042
and=190859
is=186112
in=170708
it=169459
you=168292
of=167362
tinyurl.com=160107
Alice. Remember Alice? This is an iPhone app about Alice…
I found Alice today in the iPhone app store. Remember Alice? It has a special place in computer-games history: It was the only game to ship on the first Apple MacIntosh computer.
The chess-related entertainment was written by Steve Capps, a legendary hacker who lives out here in the SF Bay Area. Among other things, Capps worked on …
The iPhone: How It Will Play Out
This is not an actual post, but merely a shadow post, linking to a post by somebody else which is much funnier than anything I could have written.
Bill Gates, the Early Years: Damn, This Thing Works!
I’m going to post a lengthy excerpt here from the conversation I had with Bill Gates earlier this week, because, well, I have so much of it, and it kind of works as this wonderfully absorbing dramatic monologue about where Microsoft came from. This is him essentially telling the story of how he and Paul Allen figured out that writing …
Bill Gates Is Not Running for Prom King
I don’t generally like to work when I’m on vacation. I like to vacation when I’m on vacation. But I got an e-mail last week saying that Bill Gates was thinking about doing some press around his Harvard Commencement address today, and whenever there’s a chance to talk to Gates, I take it. Hence my getting on a plane to Seattle on …