The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Science/Technology

Cool stuff from the world of science and tech

  • Politics and the internet

    The future of politics is currently being shaped by the Howard Dean presidential campaign in the US: The results of self-organizing are not only more people, but more ideas about how to do local politics. The idea of sending 30,000 letters to Iowa at the last Dean Meetup came from the grassroots, and that has been reported. What hasn?t been reported is that most of the Dean flyers that people are passing out at farmers markets and summer fairs around the country are put together by grassroots organizers working through the Net. Independently of the official campaign, a Seattle group thinks of a flyer idea, which a New York group designs, which they circulate through the Dean listservs, which gets stapled to a Bulletin Board in Missouri by a group of Dean supporters who met through the Internet. A Georgia group designs ?Dean Cards,? which are now spreading around the country.

    This is from a post to Lawrence Lessigs blog where Dean Howard’s been guest blogging. Kinda makes me want to be american so I could vote for him.

  • Book review: Small world

    It is hardly news anymore, but there is a definite shift going on in science. Where the focus used to be almost exlusively on reductionism ie. an effort to understand the world by looking at ever smaller pieces and trying to understand them separately, now more and more attention is spent on the relations between objects.

    Mark Buchanans book small world, uncovering nature’s hidden networks covers one part of this “new” science namely the discoveries in networks that have come very recently in many different areas. So what exactly is the common theme between the internet, fireflies in Thailand, neurons in our brains and the social networks that we’re all part of?
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  • Book review: The tipping point

    Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push – in just the right place – it can be tipped.

    This is how Malcolm Gladwell ends his book The tipping point, subtitled “how little things can make a big difference”. Throughout the book Gladwell examines the circumstances in which large scale change can be brought about by a small effort. From the explosive succes og Hush Puppies (a brand of shoes) to a wave of suicides that plagued Micronesia. From the success of Sesame Street to a syphilis epidemic in Boston in the 90’s.

    Gladwell argues that this sort of change is much more common than we usually acknowledge, and that it is possible because of three factors, the three rules of the tipping point.
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  • Quote

    When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

    – R. Buckminster Fuller

  • Go Reboot

    If you’re interested in the borderland between technology and society, the Reboot 6.0 conference is definitely the place to be on June 20. The speaker lineup this year is unbelievable, and they ‘ll continue and improve on the interactive conference format they introduced last year.

    “What interactive format is that, Alexander?” I hear you ask… Why, it’s Open Space Technology of course. So hurry up and sign up, there are only a very limited number of seats available this year.

  • Goodbye Microsoft

    A couple of days ago, my Office Suite died on me. And for once, this was no fault of Bills. I was cleaning out my harddisk, and must have deleted one file too many. Suddenly Outlook, Word, Excel etc. had stopped working.

    I spent a few seconds in the required (and familiar to any PC user) state of semi-panic, and then the solution came to me.
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  • Rebuilding the food pyramid

    The Scientific American has an excellent article about diet. It explains in detail what’s wrong with the old food pyramid (you know, the one with meat and fats at the top and carbohydrates at the bottom), and gives us a new and improved version. Excellent stuff.

  • Book review: The fifth miracle

    The ultimate question to science must be “how did the universe come to be?”. After that, I think the central question is “How did we come to be?. How did life come to the earth, and how did life create us?”

    Science has been working on these questions for a relatively short time. Remember that untill the late 19th. century, most people believed that the universe was static and unchanging. That the way things looked now, was they way they always had looked and always would look. Some scientists clung to a steady-state universe up untill the 1960’s.

    The fifth miracle by Paul Davies examines the search for the origin and meaning of life. It is a thorough overview of the scientific theories that are currently being used to explain life on earth.
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  • Stomach brain

    How many brains does the average human have? One? Wrong! There’s one in the head, and it seems we also have an extra one wrapped around our intestines. Read all about it.

  • Quote

    How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.
    – Niels Bohr