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It used to be that kings actually were better than everyone else. This was because of their diet; a prince or dauphin growing up would receive a lot more meat than a peasant child, not to mention how much more varied their diet was. So when they finally got to be king, they ...

Alright, so I just got done with Assassin’s Creed, and while jumping across the rooftops of Damascus and stabbing people in the throat is great fun, what I found really interesting is the story. Spoilers Follow for Assassin’s Creed and Bioshock The story in Assassin’s Creed is about a guy wandering through the 12th century holy land ...

I’ve always said that one of the great and terrifying things about the internet is that it allows all of the niche people to find each other. This means chat rooms and message boards that 99% of the population can’t relate to, and online stores where you can buy pretty much anything. Cannibalism, for one ...

So I was watching the latest episode of Caprica, which features a digitized person trapped inside of a computer chip. The computer scientists were talking about why they were unable to make a copy of the chip, and the reason that they come up with is that the chip encodes something analog instead of ...

If you’re the sort of person who reads this blog, you probably know that Duluth is in the running to become a test city for Google’s proposed ultrahighspeed bandwidth test. At first, I really liked the idea of living in a city with 1 gigabit connection speed, aside from the fact that Google has ...

I like the idea of AuthorBot. Once I’ve learned enough, I’ll at least make an attempt at PoetryBot, because people are generally more forgiving when your lines don’t match up well (besides which, attempts have already been made for proof of concept). But more than AuthorBot, I like all the things that it ...

So let’s say that you take the sum of all human English literature, and feed it into a computer program. Would that computer program, if properly written, be able to make judgments about the nature of literature? My guess is yes. The tricky part is the “if properly written” clause. When we talk ...