Our sonification of all German Twitter traffic is now online 24/7 (or until SC crashes): http://tweetscapes.de/

john Boswell

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.

Syzygryd is a town square for the collaborative creation of music. It’s a public space, it’s a sculpture, and it’s a professional musical instrument. It’s the most beautiful expression we can imagine of the joy we take in community, music, technology, fire, sculpture and architecture.

Artist-technologist Honor Harger listens to the weird and wonderful noises of stars and planets and pulsars. In her work, she tracks the radio waves emitted by ancient celestial objects and turns them into sound, including "the oldest song you will ever hear," the sound of cosmic rays left over from the Big Bang.

Boolean logic in the server

Drumbeat is a global community of innovators like you, building a more awesome web and world. Connect with others. Find projects that need your help. Or share your own.

Mozilla is all about shaping the future of the web for the public good

How Big Is The Internet? [Infographic]

Cathy A. Trower, research director for the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at Harvard, argued that the oldest professors—those born as late as 1945, who are called "traditionalists"—have attitudes about their careers that are very different from the youngest academics', like the Millennials'. Traditionalists tend to be loyal to employers, for example, while Gen-Xers are skeptical. Baby boomers are seeking titles and recognition for their work, while Millennial employees are primarily interested in meaningful work.

we turn back on the year whose end we celebrate tonight and take a look at the tastiest tidbits of interestingness that made our radar during the 4,500+ hours we poured into Brain Pickings in 2010.

Wikimedia Commons Pictures of the Year
Creative Commons Picture of the Year: According to Wikimedia Commons, “The Commons Picture of the Year is a competition that was first run in 2006. It aims to identify the best freely-licensed images from those that during the year have been awarded Featured picture status.”

But the tech industry has given you the impression that making adjustments is difficult and time-consuming. It is not.

And so below are 10 things to do to improve your technological life. They are easy and (mostly) free. Altogether, they should take about two hours; one involves calling your cable or phone company, so that figure is elastic. If you do them, those two hours will pay off handsomely in both increased free time and diminished anxiety and frustration. You can do it.

Stephen Wolfram ponders what a unified theory of the universe might look like.

Now researchers are starting to look for ways to engage contributors in more substantive ways, taking advantage of what the Internet pundit Clay Shirky calls the “cognitive surplus” of online brainpower.

The Manual of Style (often abbreviated MoS or MOS) is a style guide for Wikipedia articles that encourages editors to follow consistent usage and formatting. This main page contains basic principles. Subpages with greater detail are linked in the menu to the right. If the Manual of Style does not specify a preferred usage, please discuss the issue on the talk page.

Developer training that's free, open and globally accessible

Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University are creating the School of Webcraft, a powerful new way to teach and learn web developer skills. Our classes are globally accessible, 100% free, and powered entirely by learners, mentors and contributors like you. Our goal: create a vibrant, peer-led system that helps people around the world easily access and build careers on open web technology.

... music is never so powerful as when it breaks down the self’s defenses. John Cage once defined it as the art of listening to other people, and it’s an idea worth living by. From time to time, subject yourself to a sound that seems to lie outside your sympathy or understanding.

Techotopia is a library of free on-line IT books covering a wide range of topics including operating systems, programming, scripting, system administration, databases, networking and much more. The IT Essentials series of books are designed to provide detailed information that is accessible to both experienced and novice readers. Each on-line book contains everything that is needed to gain proficiency in the corresponding technology subject area.

Madeleine Peyroux

Reality Sandwich is a web magazine for this time of intense transformation. Our subjects run the gamut from sustainability to shamanism, alternate realities to alternative energy, remixing media to re-imagining community, holistic healing techniques to the promise and perils of new technologies

searchable archive of ICMC Proceedings

WikiLeaks combines the protection and anonymity of cutting-edge cryptographic technologies with the comfortable presentation style of Wikipedia, although the two are not otherwise related. Our network also collects materials in person and from postal drops. We also run a network of lawyers and others to defend our work and our sources.
WikiLeaks information is distributed across many jurisdictions, organizations and individuals. Once a document published it is essentially impossible to censor.

New Model Captures Spread of Personal Information through Social Networks
If you ever share personal information with friends online you probably already use a special set of rules to determine what to reveal and what to keep secret. Now a new model of social networks attempts to capture that process.

At both birth and death, the phrase "Do everything possible" is increasingly incompatible with a good life.

a page with all manpages

The Pain of Fame
Why so many artists, from Proust to Warhol, are frequently under the weather


Doesn't the hypochondriac—anxious, death- and age-obsessed, hypersensitive and self-absorbed—sound suspiciously familiar? Pumped into lumpy strangeness at the gym, filleted and stitched by the surgeon, embalmed in Botox, our contemporary celebrities look more like survivors than people who are going places.

Knowledge is not power, but learning is. As kids, we made art with paint-by-number kits. Simply matching the outline numbers with an oil paint gave us the illusion of mastery. I've worked in all facets of the IT industry: as IT management, as a consultant, systems administrator, developer and instructor. And, I still see a lot of paint-by-number projects which try to be the real thing. IT leadership is about reading the numbers, then going outside the lines and taking risks.

the highly-anticipated epic living encyclopedia covering all aspects of sound recording, is releasing the first six exclusive scenes, available for streaming and digital download online.

Amusing predictions by american fashion designers from the 1930s of what the well-dressed man and woman would be wearing in the year 2000. www.itnsource.com Pathe BP200339118416  

As Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities I speak today to underscore the importance of the humanities at a time when the world is in flux and the judgment of its leading democracy is in question.

If you would like to engage your students on campus here are some excellent resources “Student Statement on the Right to Research.” http://www.righttoresearch.org/

The 19th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony introduced ten new Ig Nobel Prize winners. The winners traveled to the ceremony, at their own expense, from several continents. The Prizes were handed to them by a group of genuine, genuinely bemused Nobel Laureates, assisted by a large number of assorted Ig personnel, all before a perpetually standing-room only audience.