Tired Words from Wired: “Unicorns and Other Things We Must Stop Talking About in 2016”
It’s been a long time since I posted one of my “Tired Words” posts, where I point out a word that has been over-used, mis-used, and ab-used. B...
Author: charlie
“Settings are for geeks”
As far back as I can remember, I’ve fiddled with the settings. Computers, lab instruments, routers, phones – a chief selling point was how much acce...
Blindspot: OMG – how much time has humanity wasted with spinning hard drives?
I got my first computer with a solid-state drive (SSD) last year. For me, the biggest thing I noticed was the fast boot time. My daughter got a computer with an...
Will Clinton push for university accountability for student loans?
This presidential election cycle will likely continue the growing discussion around higher-ed, loans, and student debt. I’ve been trying to parse out what...
Is OpenTrons the Makerbot of biotech? In some ways.
When I was a molecular biologist, folks used to ask me what I did. I used to say, “Squirt things into tubes and wait.” OpenTrons takes that drudgery...
I think it’s dead, Jim: When large companies kill small ones
I can think of many reasons a large company might buy a smaller one, only to kill them. For example: Perhaps it was a smaller competitor causing the larger comp...
Spam robot cut-up fiction
In one of my meanders through the web this weekend, I was reading about Jack Kerouac, which led to William S Burroughs, which led to Burroughs’ cut-up tec...
Ebola exposes chinks in our techno-optimistic armor
If you’re a bio-nerd like me, you’ve known about Ebola for a very long time. You knew it was trouble from the get-go and wondered how it would unfol...
Cow, goat, sheep, alpaca, camel, or buffalo? Which milk do you like?
I thoroughly enjoy making yogurt. But, of course, most yogurt is made of cow’s milk. I was able to find some goat and sheep milk yogurts in my local store...
A New Kind of Stalking
There wasn’t much to it: be a waiter at a catered government event, or an usher at a Hollywood red carpet gala, or a bouncer at a big music show, and have...