Winging It: America's Cup Racers Push the Sailboat to Its Limits →
The next America's Cup race takes place in 2013, but one thing is already sure: The event's pioneers wouldn't recognize their sport now.
72-foot high carbon-fiber winged catamarans traveling 48 mph? Yeah, doesn't sound like my dad's version of sailing...
War Plan Red →
The following is a full-text reproduction of the 1935 plan for a US invasion of Canada prepared at the US Army War College, G-2 intelligence division, and submitted on December 18, 1935.
"Red" was apparently the military color code for Britain, where Canada was appropriately "Crimson", and the U.S. was "Blue". Also interesting, besides them naming every major city in Canada a "strategic interest"?
In 1934, War Plan Red was amended to authorize the immediate first use of poison gas against Canadians and to use strategic bombing to destroy Halifax if it could not be captured.
(via Tory Briggs)
IBM's New Transactional Memory: Make-or-Break Time for Multithreaded Revolution →
The BlueGene/Q processors that will power the 20 petaflops Sequoia supercomputer being built by IBM for Lawrence Livermore National Labs will be the first commercial processors to include hardware support for transactional memory. Transactional memory could prove to be a versatile solution to many of the issues that currently make highly scalable parallel programming a difficult task.Apparently the memory supports transactional code blocks in atomic fashion using processes similar to "load-link/store-conditional" (PowerPC) and "compare and swap" (x86), and it's all done using FPGAs. Pretty nifty.
Alexa Meade: Real-Life Painting-Performances →
American artist Alexa Meade creates her representational paintings directly on her subjects, covering people and objects in layers of acrylic paint before photographing them. The works offer an unusual conflation of painting, installation, and photography, as the three-dimensional forms are collapsed in space, taking on a 2D appearance in the prints. In her exhibitions, Meade frequently paints over small rooms in which a human subject sits for the duration of the show, offering a performative aspect to her work.
Bizarre, but creative, for sure.
If there are jetpacks in the future, the future is now. Jetman Yves Rossy flies over the Grand Canyon with his 2 meter wide, jet-propelled, wearable wing. Update: You'll also find Rossy on the cover of this month's National Geographic.
via Metafilter, h/t @cosentino.
Perhaps the coolest thing I could ever think about doing. Certainly the time of his life.
The basic model seems to be: Get a TechCrunch writeup, make a lot of noise, cash out quickly and maybe linger on as a pseudo tech celebrity. And anyone who spends more than a week making the rounds of tech industry parties in San Francisco will quickly notice a whole group of people who seem far more concerned with "making the scene" than they are with actual entrepreneurship.
— Tech community, are we MTV or TED? - The Washington Post
A great set of quotes and good words on the state of tech and entrepreneurship right now. I refer you to "Farming vs Mining" by Will Shipley again.
Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.
I have to agree that this is pretty terrible.
Password Jape Named Top Joke at Edinburgh Fringe Festival →
For once, a nerd joke didn't fall flat in front of a mainstream audience. Comedian Nick Helm's joke about computer passwords won the top prize at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the BBC reports.
