For the last 30 years PCs and the PC supply chain dominated the technology industry, and PCs and their components were used for all sorts of things that weren't actually personal computers - everything from ATMs to industrial control equipment. Today that's clearly ending - it's now the smartphone…

‘Diamonds are costly because we desire them. But what if that isn’t true? What if they are desirable because they are costly?’ A glass of water costs very little; a diamond costs a lot. Yet there is nothing more useful than water, while the most prized uses of diamonds are decorative. This apparent…

What is the Islamic State ? Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special…

It’s been just over 45 years since the Apollo Moon landings, and some would have it that we are failing to build big anymore ; that we've since become too fascinated with the small, too impressed by our tablet computers, games consoles, and smartphones that we don't invest in grand, world-changing…

A protest against the poll tax in 1990. The British Library exhibition shows the Magna Carta as a call to stand up for your rights by any means necessary.Photograph: Rex The most powerful work of art in the gripping Magna Carta exhibition portrays a king being attacked by peasants. They come at…

@gak_pdx Apple is the world's foremost manufacturer of goods. At one time, this statement had to be caged and qualified with modifiers such as "consumer goods" or "electronic goods," but last quarter, Apple shipped a Boeing 787's weight worth of iPhones every 24 hours . When we add the rest of the…

I know you are probably like me. You go to a web service. What do you do? Free trial. Sign Up Now. The very, very last thing I am going to click is “Contact Me.” The last thing I want, as a web-centric small customer/user, is some sales rep selling me on some product I just want to try for 20…

Perhaps the most disconcerting part of the Apple Watch demo was the familiarity of its feature set: check stock prices, count steps, send messages, pull up a flight schedule and boarding pass, open the door to a hotel room when you’re nearby, or the garage door at home when you’re far away. Its…

Anthony Legge Anthony Legge was actively farming throughout his school years, with his own livestock to look after from a young age. He recalls being far more interested in what was happening in the agricultural world than what was going up on the blackboard. “I’d get back and Dad would ask ‘what…

The river Wye near Monsal Dale in the Peak District national park. Photograph: Alamy F or Warren Slaney the devil is in the details. Details that could easily escape the attention of many visitors to the Peak District national park, because Warren's world exists along the edges and the margins and…

The statistics for this incredibly successful indoor farming endeavor in Japan are staggering: 25,000 square feet producing 10,000 heads of lettuce per day (100 times more per square foot than traditional methods) with 40% less power, 80% less food waste and 99% less water usage than outdoor fields.…

Benedict Evans is not your typical Silicon Valley figure. Looking something like Dustin Hoffman from The Graduate wearing Harry Potter’s glasses and speaking with an English public school lisp, Evans talks so rapidly he can often cover both sides of an argument within one extended, multi-clause…

I've known Adam Curtis for nearly 20 years. We're friends. We see movies together, and once even went to Romania on a mini-break to attend an auction of Nicolae Ceausescu's belongings. But it would be wrong to characterise our friendship as frivolous. Most of the time when we're together I'm just…

In real life he was the laird of the Hebridean island of Great Bernera and claimant to a principality in Dalmatia. In fiction, however, Mirrlees was Sir Hilary Bray, Bt, a genealogist with the College of Arms whose identity Bond assumes to trace the criminal mastermind Ernst Stavro Blofeld in On Her…

Madonna Unauthorised by Christopher Andersen Joseph, 279 pp, £14.99, December 1991, ISBN 0 7181 3536 9 Christopher Andersen’s book begins, as it should, with the prodigal, the violent, the gross. But what do you expect? Madonna’s wedding was different from other people’s. The plans were made in…

It’ll be a Skype interview, says the producer from Greek television, and not live. In TV-speak that usually means not urgent and not important, but I’ve become vaguely interesting to Greeks because of the ‘Moscovici draft’ — a doomed attempt to resolve the crisis, leaked to me amid denials of its…

Bruce Sterling is a prominent science fiction writer and a pioneer of the cyberpunk genre. His cyberpunk novels Heavy Weather (1994), Islands in the Net (1988), Schismatrix (1985), The Artificial Kid (1980) earned him the nickname “Chairman Bruce”. Apart from his writings, Bruce Sterling is also a…

Hanna Barczyk A MONTH ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular…

Since this week saw the 15th anniversary of this blog I thought I’d celebrate by actually writing a post, and a technical one at that. Before we get to it, I have to recognise that I’m blogging in the 21st century now, so here’s a meme: Recently I’ve been musing over the way we tend to architect…

Editor’s Note: Noah Brier is the co-founder of Percolate , a New York-based marketing technology start-up, and is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Social Media. Over the last few years I’ve gotten the pleasure to work with a large number of really talented engineers —…

I became an engineering leader accidentally. I now realize that this taught me the single most important thing about leadership. Effective leadership is all about humility. I do know that there is no way to talk about humility and still seem humble. But, for me, leadership has really never been…

Why Do All Records Sound the Same? Turn the knob, have your perception analyzed ( Source ) Desperate to get their music on the radio at all costs, record labels are employing powerful software to artificially sweeten it, polish it, make it louder— squeezing out the last drops of its individuality…

‘I still haven’t had a break. I’m tired and hungry. We still have 35 patients in A&E. It never stops.’Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian I am a senior registrar A&E doctor in a major teaching hospital. I qualified over 10 years ago and have been an A&E doctor for three quarters of my career.…

Johnson: Blasphemy THE news from Paris today has been grim. Gunmen killed, at the current count, twelve people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo , a French satirical weekly. The obvious cause of the rampage is Charlie Hebdo ’s habit of satirising Islam. It had eagerly joined a debate that has roiled…

I n my life, I have given a fuck about many people and many things. I have also not given a fuck about many people and many things. And those fucks I have not given have made all the difference. People often say the key to confidence and success in life is to simply “not give a fuck.” Indeed, we…