Nerdcore

Tattúínárdœla saga actually grew out of an attempt to use my time more productively during the busy spring 2010 semester with my upcoming prelims. I felt like reading and studying Old Norse was not going to sharpen my skills up to “prelim” level on its own, and I wanted to find some kind of fun creative outlet that would give me a way to enjoy myself while composing (even to a very limited degree) in Old Norse (and not just in Modern Icelandic). When a colleague pointed out to me how well Star Wars would work as an Icelandic saga, I saw my chance.

Google sees only a fraction of the content that appears on the internet. Stuart Andrews finds out what's lurking in the deep web

I was never really a big machine-code programmer, for one thing — I wrote routines to be called from BASIC, but no complete programs in 6502/6510. And I’ve never been a hardware hacker at more than the most trivial swap-the-video-cards level. But I did have a huge amount of Commodore 64 lore internalised. I knew which memory location always held the scan-code of the key that was pressed at that time; and where the screen memory-map began; and which locations to POKE to play different pitches on the various channels of sound, or to change the screen or border colours. I knew hundreds or thousands of those little bits of information, as well as being completely familiar with the horrible BASIC dialect that was in one of the ROMs. In short, I knew the machine in a way that I don’t even begin to hope to know any of my computers today; in a way that, I am guessing, no-one anywhere in the world knows their machines.

I miss that.

The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), North Korea's state-run (and only) news agency, sporadically releases photos of reclusive 69-year-old leader Kim Jong-il as he makes "on-the-spot" guidance visits.

A clip from Design for Today (1965).

Museums have always drawn photographers. Along their lonely corridors, the shelves of specimens, piles of stuffed animals and high-tech storage units next to Victorian jars provide a rich source of inspiration. We asked three photographers just what draws them to such institutions.

If you want to witness a total solar eclipse and you live in Europe, you’re out of luck until at least 2026. Unless you live in one of a few of Europe’s geographical extremities (i.e. the Faeroe Islands, Spitsbergen, Nova Zembla, Abkhazia and other parts of eastern Georgia or the southern part of Russia), the astronomical phenomenon will pass you by.

Horsetail Falls is a small seasonal waterfall that only appears in late winter and early spring. It flows over the east side of El Capitan, so as a backdrop it has one of the most impressive walls of granite in the entire park. Then – only for part of February, and only when the sky is clear – the very last sunrays of the day selectively linger on the falls, lighting it up with a golden glow that makes the water look like lava.

Das menschliche Gehirn ist konstitutiv darauf ausgerichtet, mit anderen Gehirnen zu kooperieren – und zwar ohne Unterlass. Als »kulturelles Organ« organisiert es seine Struktur ganz nach der Umwelt, in die es hineinwächst. Für Welzer gibt es demnach kein individuelles Gehirn, sondern nur Gehirne in Netzwerken mit anderen.