note: @bobbiejohnson commissioned that enthralling piece by @Jn_Norris on women in tech for @Medium: https://t.co/DiTUjEIEha

I moved to San Francisco 9 months ago from the East Coast bastion of Boston. Despite having experience living in a major US city, I found quite a few surprises coming here. Some have been great, while others not so much. If you’re planning the move here, I hope this will help you know better what to…

President Obama's reelection campaign brought 40 engineers into their ranks to build the technology they needed to get the president reelected. This is the very human story of how they helped out, even if they never fit in. Three members of Obama's tech team, from left to right: Harper Reed, Dylan…

This article was taken from the October 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. Ferran Adrià, world-famous chef, points his finger at the sky and holds it at…

No one can remember exactly who in the Mormon-church hierarchy thought it a good idea to send missionaries into the poor, Asian neighborhoods of Lynn, Massachusetts, but by the time the appointed pair, an optimistic older couple called the Boots, got to the house of a Cambodian woman named Kan Sam…

The next time you’re juggling options — which friend to see, which house to buy, which career to pursue — try asking yourself this question: What would Xiang Yu do? Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and…

Peter Yang Published in the October 2012 issue On or about March 15 of this year, Teller — the smaller, quieter half of the magicians Penn & Teller — says he received an e-mail from a friend in New York. In that e-mail, the friend included a link to a video on YouTube called the Rose & Her Shadow.…

Robert Fripp, pictured at home. 'The greater the success,' he says, 'the greater the pressure to keep repeating yourself' “My life has improved so much since I stopped doing interviews,” Robert Fripp says. So why is the prog rock legend and guitar maestro giving us his first print interview in seven…

Added Aug 2, 2012, Under: Blogging,Good Stories,Kicking A**,Life,Personal Development By Joel Runyon You can read the followup to this post here. — I sat down at yet-another coffee shop in Portland determined to get some work done, catch up on some emails and write another blog post. About 30…

The team at DriveSavers who recovered data from a wiped MacBook Air laptop. From the left, John Christopher, Phillip Reynolds, Ron Powell, Angel Ortiz, and Joseph Novoa. Not pictured: Phil Baca. When my data died, it was the cloud that killed it. The triggers hackers used to break into my accounts…

Scientists are a famously anonymous lot, but few can match in the depths of her perverse and unmerited obscurity the 20th-century mathematical genius Amalie Noether. Albert Einstein called her the most “significant” and “creative” female mathematician of all time, and others of her contemporaries…

Illustration by Charlie Powell. In March 2009, Golan Levin, the director of Carnegie Mellon University’s interdisciplinary STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, invited an enigmatic and famed computer programmer known to the virtual world only as “Why the Lucky Stiff” or “_why”—no, not a typo—to speak at a…

Life inside successful Web startups—especially the really successful ones—can be nasty, brutish, and short. As companies grow exponentially, egos clash, investors jockey for control, and business complexities rapidly exceed the managerial abilities of the founders. Venture capitalist Peter Fenton…

As Apple’s senior vice-president of industrial design, he is the driving force behind the firm’s products, from the Mac computer to the iPod, iPhone and, most recently, the iPad. He spoke exclusively to the Evening Standard from the firm’s headquarters. Q: You recently received a knighthood for…

“Propulsion,” the nine-year-old says as he leads his dad through the gates of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “I just want to see the propulsion stuff.” A young woman guides their group toward a full-scale replica of the massive Saturn V rocket that brought America to the…

An insightful, impassioned & beautifully personal post on gender by @yerdua http://t.co/iaglchN6 I am honored to call this human my partner.

Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ” Pole has a master’s…

A decade ago, Napster's attempt to set music free was crushed by the music labels. Now, Facebook and Spotify (not to mention Google, Amazon, and Apple) have resurrected the dream. Hallelujah. Sculpture: Ebon Heath; Photo: Max Merz Even if Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t been introduced to…

Photo by Anton Corbijn Tom Waits is a born storyteller who loves a good yarn, and like the fast-talking characters who populate his songs, you're never quite sure if he's on the level. "The truth is overrated," he said during this conversation, and you get the feeling those are words he lives…

I was at an event on the Upper East Side last Friday night when I got to talking with a salesman in the media business. The subject turned to Zucotti Park and Occupy Wall Street, and he was chuckling about something he'd heard on the news. "I hear [Occupy Wall Street] has a CFO," he said. "I think…

Update (11/11): The FDA has responded to this story.Update (11/01): This story has been updated with a comment from The Chertoff Group, from which ProPublica had sought comment before publication.A PBS NewsHour story on X-ray body scanners, reported in conjunction with ProPublica, aired on Dec.…

ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle of March, I traveled from New Hampshire to the moist, dim sanctuary of the New England Aquarium, hoping to touch an alternate reality. I came to meet Athena, the aquarium’s forty-pound, five-foot-long, two-and-a-half-year-old giant Pacific octopus. For me,…

Last night I gave a speech to a meeting of the Information Assurance Advisory Council, the UK’s talking shop for government, law enforcement, security services, and private companies around the issues of cybersecurity and the like. The whole thing was under the Chatham House rule, so it’s hard to…

Our possessions define us. Yet today the definition of possession itself is shifting, thanks to cloud services that store some things we hold dear on distant Internet servers. When those belongings reside in Netflix's video service, Amazon's Kindle bookstore, or Apple's coming iCloud service, they…

0 4 - 'en-GB''en-GB' -> 'en-GB' By Laurent Fintoni “I’m not very good at sticking to one genre or tempo for a whole set. I like too much music. Some people hate it though, they’ll say ‘what the fuck is he doing?!’” As one of Manchester’s most interesting and lauded young producers of recent years,…

Those that say there are no big ideas in music/tech aren't looking hard enough. http://t.co/TLNAmgc

In The Score, American composers on creating “classical” music in the 21st century. If the difference between 1911 and 2011 is electricity and computation, then Max Mathews is one of the five most important musicians of the 20th Century. – Miller Puckette In 1957 a 30-year-old engineer named Max…

I turned my attention to the next deadline waiting – a script. It flowed easily and delightfully, was the most fun I've had writing anything in ages, all the characters did exactly what I had hoped they would do, and the story was better than I had dared to hope. Sometimes it happens like that. You…

Hal Abelson is perhaps best known to programmers as the co-author, along with Gerald Sussman, of the classic book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. He and Sussman also created the MIT course of the same name, the legendary 6.001, which between 1980 and 2007 was one of four required…

.@michelet on the new Sherlock Holmes, and intradiagetic text as an elegant solution to a problem of visual design: http://t.co/FJnOhcT

Hi! Please feel free to read, or skip. This is a combination of stuff I've been speaking about in different venues for the past six months. It's in process and has no citations yet. Putting it out here to keep myself honest, and to finish it soon :) I'm especially interested to hear if there is…

Version 1.3: 26 August 2001 BACK TO TOP BACK TO TOP Version 1.2, May 23 2001. Tweaked intro (Thanks, Fred). Version 1.1, May 18 2001. Changed section orders for better organization. (Thanks, Raffi). Clarified "metrics" in 2.6 (Thanks, Andy). Version 1.0, May 15 2001. First draft BACK TO TOP If…

On the tyranny of Tabasco: http://www.somebits.com/weblog/culture/food/tyranny-of-tabasco.html

« Back to Frieze Max Mathews on his 80th birthday (2007) An extensive interview with the late pioneer of computer music, covering Bell Labs, John Cage, Stockhausen and HAL’s voice Max Mathews, known as the father of computer music, passed away last month at the age of 84. In this interview,…

Housed in a former roller skating rink, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop opened the world's ears to entirely new soundscapes with little more than imagination Doctor Who, the British time-traveling series, has proven remarkably resilient; created 48 years ago, its newest season premiered Saturday,…