1. 哎呀 Ai ya (ay yah) — “Oh, my!” An exclamation used to cover everything from mild surprise to real or pretend shock. Not exactly an indispensable phrase, but it is useful as it helps you to express a degree of dissatisfaction or amazement while at the same time breaking some social ice. The locals…

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The Problem with Statements Like "No candidate has won the election without " or "No President has been reelected under " [[Each panel is a variation on the others, with the date in a small box at the top left, a stick figure speaking the line in the main panel, and the concluding sentence…

I was baffled but not really surprised by a relatively new discovery by Dr. David Dunning that the most likely persons to overestimate their skills in a area are the ones that do not have any skills in that area.

NOT long ago wearing a uniform around an average town in Germany could get you beaten up; and even today it draws frowns, says Jan Ströhmer, a naval commander in Kiel. That is because many Germans, at least in the former West, have since the second world war been militantly pacifist.

There comes a moment in every very ambitious person’s life when she sees with perfect clarity that the path before her is blocked. For Marissa Mayer, Google employee No.

July 13, 2012 Announcing an audacious proposal The overwhelmingly positive response to my blogpost, What Twitter could have been has been inspiring. The post has generated 80K pageviews thus far. Without really meaning to, I touched a nerve. The responses to my post largely fell into two camps. One…

This article initially appeared on TechCrunch — with a minor update highlighted in red below. Ah. We’re back to discussing convertible debt again. This time by the efforts of Adeo Ressi to introduce a new kind of structure called “ convertible equity .” I applaud all efforts by people to take on…

“What do you do with your mom when she can’t do anything for herself?” Michael Wolff (right) with his mother Van and sister Nancy in 1958 Photograph: Observer O n the way to visit my mother one recent rainy afternoon, I stopped in, after quite some constant prodding, to see my insurance salesman. He…

Who created the Internet and why should we care? These questions, so often raised during the Bush-Gore election in 2000, have found their way back into the political debate this season — starting with one of the most cited texts of the preconvention campaign, Obama’s so-called “you didn’t bu

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is an intimidating interviewee. It’s not so much the worry about keeping up with the brain that invented the world wide web; it’s that when you Google him (in the circumstances, there seems no shame in this method of research), you soon find he has compiled a list of answers to…

On November 9th, 2010 an old friend posted the following status update on Facebook: “Dying. Pain. Fear. Missing all my old friends, especially from Edmonton. Looking fwd to seeing Pete tomorrow. Also my lovely Maggie – I love and miss you too. Good luck with your Betty Moon gig in LA. Might be my…

Mark Kitto and family; Photo: Eric Leleu Death and taxes. You know how the saying goes. I’d like to add a third certainty: you’ll never become Chinese, no matter how hard you try, or want to, or think you ought to. I wanted to be Chinese, once. I don’t mean I wanted to wear a silk jacket and cotton…

Emoțional mi-ar fi plăcut să merg la Cluj, dar știam că la București sunt condițiile cele mai bune. Înainte de a da examen, tatăl meu m-a plimbat prin câteva fabrici, am discutat cu câțiva fizicieni care terminaseră facultatea în București, cum e și Gábor Kolumbán, care a jucat apoi un rol important…

Culture complicates things In the US, extroverts are loved. I would say that in Europe, extroverts are not as highly valued, but you do have to have a certain degree of self-confidence in your abilities to get by. This is not universally true. Although we in the West admire students who exhibit…

Partir vivre à l’étranger installe-t-il une frontière invisible avec les proches restés en France ? Changement de mentalité, incompréhension, agacement, éloignement, beaucoup d’expatriés sentent que la distance n’est pas seulement une question de kilomètres Après de longs mois à l’étranger, le…

Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of…

Node kid on the block Talk with any developer about real-time technologies for long enough, and the conversation will inevitably turn to Node . Node is a JavaScript runtime that was created for the sole purpose of building fast, scalable Web apps and servers that are capable of sending and receiving…

Posted on May 15, 2012 Posted by John Scalzi I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect,…

It is becoming both easier and more difficult to experience the thrill of being an outsider Illustration by C. Corr FOR the first time in history, across much of the world, to be foreign is a perfectly normal condition. It is no more distinctive than being tall, fat or left-handed. Nobody raises an…

Editor’s Note: This Guest post is written by Max Zachariades, who spent the last five years at Microsoft in various roles. He blogs under the name Max Zografos . I first used Windows on a TULIP portable computer, some twenty years ago. Graphical user interface, icons, mouse, an amazing new world was…

Lifehacker reader Gabriel Wyner was tasked with learning four languages in the past few years for his career as an opera singer, and in the process landed on "a pretty damn good method for language learning that you can do in limited amounts of spare time." Here's the four-step method that you can…

Entrance of the Vieux Port in Marseille. Photograph: Alamy O ne of the central paradoxes of life in France is that for all the French preen themselves as the most civilised nation on Earth, they are also quickly prone to collapse into self-lacerating fits of low self-esteem. They even have a term…

Postmortem After the update completes, Rossi looks at various aspects of the system to make sure that the changes didn't break anything. His team has access to a sophisticated set of analytics tools that they use to track Facebook's status. The main dashboard shows a multitude of line graphs that…

The performance of computers has shown remarkable and steady growth, doubling every year and a half since the 1970s. What most folks don’t know, however, is that the electrical efficiency of computing (the number of computations that can be completed per kilowatt-hour of electricity used) has also…

Chris Pizzello/Associated Press A poster for the documentary “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,” which was among 17 Kickstarter-sponsored films that played at Sundance. One night last week there was a late-night party at Sundance — one of many — this one hosted by an outfit that had helped finance 10 percent…

ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had…

Lockdown The coming war on general-purpose computing By Cory Doctorow - This article is based on a keynote speech to the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, Dec. 2011. General-purpose computers are astounding. They're so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what…