Recent Posts
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Explore the sea of names, letter by letter...watch trends rise and fall, and dive in deeper to see your favorite name's place in the historical tides.
The Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager is an interactive portrait of America's name choices. Start with a "sea" of nearly 5000 names. Type a letter, and you'll zoom in to focus on how that initial has been used over the past century. Then type a few more letters, or a name. Each stripe is a timeline of one name, its width reflecting the name's changing popularity. If a name intrigues you, click on its stripe for a closer look.
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Body-mod artists Jesse Jarrell and Steve Haworth's original idea was to implant a magnet to carry metal gadgets. It turns out that doesn't work: If you try to carry something magnetic on your implant regularly, the pinched skin between the magnets dies and your body rejects the implant. But they came up with a new application when a mutual friend suffered an accident that left a shard of iron in his finger. He worked with audio equipment, and found that he could tell which speakers were magnetized from the sensation that passed through his finger at close range.
That gave Jarrell and Haworth a new direction: Could they obtain that effect deliberately, extending the sense of touch into a sense of magnetism?
Todd Huffman, a graduate student at Arizona State University with a background in neuroscience, joined the project and brainstormed with Jarrell and Haworth about how, and where, to best implant a powerful magnet. He helped come up with the most effective design for an implant, and eventually became the first recipient. "The fingertip was chosen because of the high nerve density, and because the hands are constantly interacting with the environment, increasing the chances of sensing electromagnetism in the world," Huffman says.
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If you want to know why so many computer programs are so bad these days, take a look at the Adobe-Microsoft mess.
These two powerful software developers have gotten into an argument over whether Microsoft can include a new feature in its upcoming Office 2007 productivity suite -- the ability to save your work as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file.
In the process, they're showing how old-fashioned greed and the more modern ailment of lawsuit phobia can turn a promising program sour.
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Adobe has its own monopolistic instincts: Last year it bought what was by far its biggest competitor in the graphics-software business, Macromedia. And it's been happy to exploit the demand for its free Adobe Reader to push unrelated software on users -- the Windows version normally comes with a Yahoo toolbar and Adobe's Photoshop album photo organizer.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has a history of taking standards developed by other companies, then writing software that somehow makes them work best, or only, on Microsoft operating systems. That conduct helped Microsoft lose many of its antitrust battles in the past decade; it's easy to see why the company wants to avoid a return to those days.
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