Mac OS X Mountain Lion vs. a Real Mountain Lion →

Best comparison chart I've read in a long time...

Technology, Hollywood Edition →

Let's amend all of our terms of use to require all movie moguls to use a special "Hollywood Edition" of our products. Here are some of the special new "features" we'll be giving them…

Why Adele's 'Someone Like You' Makes Everyone Cry →

An appoggiatura is a type of ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound. "This generates tension in the listener," said Martin Guhn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2007 study on the subject. "When the notes return to the anticipated melody, the tension resolves, and it feels good."

"Someone Like You," which Adele wrote with Dan Wilson, is sprinkled with ornamental notes similar to appoggiaturas.

The science of music is just fascinating. I had never heard of this before, but now I'm going to be listening for it everywhere.

Algebraic Data Types ( for Programmers ) →

A ground-floor introduction to Algebraic Data Types, which form the basis for languages such as ML, Haskell, and OCaml.

Pew Study: 1 in 8 Voter Records Flawed →

More than 24 million voter-registration records in the United States— about one in eight — are inaccurate, out-of-date or duplicates. Nearly 2.8 million people are registered in two or more states, and perhaps 1.8 million registered voters are dead.

Smart people in technology, please fix this.

Building Windows for the ARM Processor Architecture →

To bring up Windows 8 on these new SoCs that did not yet have a graphics driver, [...] our graphics team wrote a soft GPU driver that was capable of working directly against the hardware frame buffer. Aside from enabling development, it also enabled us to reimagine other things in Windows [...]. For example, when running Windows Setup, or in those rare cases when Windows has a "bluescreen," we were able to give it a friendlier look and even localize it, so that even bad news can be presented more nicely across all platforms.

I thought the new BSOD was a product of the UEFI transition, but turns out it's because of the ARM work.