As you stand in endless lines this holiday season, here’s a comforting thought: all those security measures accomplish nothing, at enormous cost. That’s the conclusion of Charles C. Mann, who put the T.S.A. to the test with the help of one of America’s top security experts. By Tim Boyle/Getty…

Analysis Despite all the excitement and expectation encompassing the RaspberryPi , the most remarkable thing about this low-power credit card-sized computer is its price tag: little more than £20 for a fully functional system capable of, among many things, 1080p video playback and…

Institutional memory comes in two forms: people and documentation. People remember how things work and why. Sometimes they write it down and store that information somewhere. Institutional amnesia works similarly. The people leave and the documents disappear, rot, or just become forgotten (as it…

Were you a big Gowalla fan? Did you like Dodgeball ? Did you think Trunk.ly (gasp!) was better than Pinboard? Did you make a lot of contributions to Nextstop ? Do you miss Aardvark and EtherPad ? Did " I Want Sandy " change your life? These projects are all very different, but the dynamic is the…

Business is noisy. Business is full of people worrying loudly about projects, process, and other people. These people have opinions and they share them all over the place — all the time. This collective chatter is part of the daily regimen of a healthy business, but this chatter will bury the…

If you're interested in what we work on, please apply - we're hiring: http://mixpanel.com/jobs/ This post is a follow up to We’re moving. Goodbye Rackspace. Cloud computing is often positioned as a solution to scalability problems. In fact, it seems like almost every day I read a blog post about a…

The finest pianos in the world were built about a hundred years ago. Due to evolution in engineering, exhaustion of raw materials, and flagging business standards, we will never see their like again. Some people may build very good pianos; new forms of the instrument may exceed (in narrow ways) the…

Management has a set of power words that it’s appropriated as a means of giving it a sense of identity. This list is endless and entertaining . When these words are spoken, they are said in such a way that you are meant to wonder in awe, “What does that mean?” but you don’t ask for fear of looking…

While there’s a good deal of substantive policy writing to be had, ad nauseam, about media plurality, freedom of speech, the right to investigate, and so on, those weren’t the things most at risk from this Tuesday’s proceedings. The real risk was to the perception of the UK in the rest of the world.…

Building Printer-Friendly Page…

This is the first in a series of posts relating to best-practices in startup and software, including many things we have learned in the very young life of our company. This post is about the continuous deployment methodology we use, and how it has helped us quickly get reliable code up and running…

. Up: Colorless Green Ideas [] « ^ » « T » Monday, May 9, 2011 Time's Inverted Index (1) When robots write history we can get in trouble with our past selves. (2) Search-generated, "false" chrestomathies and the historical fallacy. I use a number of tools to sort things through. For example, I've…

I've just had a really amazing experience: a guided tour of the nuclear reactor complex at Torness on the Scottish coast. What made this tour unusual is that the tour guide in question, Les, happens to be one of the reactor engineers (as well as a friend) -- and he showed me (and a couple of other…

The Magazine for Men Commentary — 23/3/11 Far from a battle of geeks vs arty types, Marcus du Sautoy finds that mathematics + theatre = the perfect play My two great passions in life are mathematics and theatre. (And the Arsenal football club, but I regard that as a combination of the two.) In the…

01.24. 2008 I discovered bedbugs and modafinil on the same eventful night a little over a year ago in San Francisco. I had just moved back from China and was staying in a dingy Travelodge on the corner of Valencia and Market streets. I had a song in my throat, a dream in my heart, and - thanks to a…

Pinboard Blog A number of people asked about the technical aspects of the great Delicious exodus of 2010, and I've finally had some time to write it up. Note that times on all the graphs are UTC. On December 16th Yahoo held an all-hands meeting to rally the troops after a big round of layoffs.…

What's it like getting your DNA results back from 23andMe by phil on Wednesday Feb 23, 2011 1:30 AM I have in my inbox an email from 23andMe with the subject line, "Your Genetic Profile is Ready." I was planning on going to bed, but now I can't, knowing this email is sitting here. I've been waiting…

February 7, 2011 The Feltron Annual Report The raw materials... A page from the finished report. Nicholas Felton published his annual report today. Unlike years past where he cataloged, analyzed, and quantified a single year of his own life, this time he examined the life — the entire life — of his…

- - - - For the past three weeks our team of engineers has analyzed the most popular e-readers on the market in order to confer our annual "Editor's Choice" Award. Devices were judged on a variety criteria to see how each functioned given a set of circumstances. The criteria themselves were weighted…

This is Node.js is genuinely exciting by Simon Willison, posted on 23rd November 2009. Tagged async, comet, couchdb, eventio, http, javascript, node, nosql, redis, ryandahl, tornado, twisted, v8 View blog reactions Next: Crowdsourced document analysis and MP expenses Previous: Why I like Redis

It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, "I drank too much last night." You might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the vestiarium, heard it from the golf links and…

as useless to the soul as a funicular railway · 31. January 2011, 20:15 ON one of those gold mornings which April borrows from June, I set out alone in search of new adventures. And as I steered my slow and careful way out of London the joy of the road and the freedom of the days ahead sang wildly…

A few daysago, John PerryBarlow twetted a series of Adult Principles, and I enjoyedreading them. When he was asked where they camefrom, hesaid : They're from a list I assembled for myself on the eve of my30th birthday. Many years ago. This is the collected set from his twitterfeed: AdultPrinciple #1…

Increasingly, enterprises are looking at cloud services such as Amazon Web Services for their deployments. Datacenter virtualization is much more sophisticated than its desktop counterpart is, providing a whole suite of tools that allow you to control every aspect of your deployments. Join Sean Hull…

Samuel Beckett Cascando 1 why not merely the despaired of occasion of wordshed is it not better abort than be barren the hours after you are gone are so leaden they will always start dragging too soon the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want bringing up the bones the old loves sockets filled…

16:12, Sunday 9 Jan., 2011 Link Marcel Mauss on magic: In practice, magic differs from religion in desired outcome. Religion seeks to satisfy moral and metaphysical ends, while magic is a functional art which often seeks to accomplish tangible results. In this respect magic resembles technology and…