Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
At its F8 developers conference today, Facebook offered a first look at a solar-powered drone capable of beaming internet access to remote areas around the globe. Built by Ascenta, the solar-powered droner developer Facebook acquired last year for $20 million, the drone is huge. It has a wingspan larger than that of a Boeing 737…
Credit Illustration by Javier Jaén Not long ago, our blockbuster business books spoke in unison: Trust your gut. The secret to decision-making lay outside our intellects, across the aisle in our loopy right brains, with their emo melodramas and surges of intuition. Linear thinking was suddenly the royal road to ruin. Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational”…
KABUL — In life, Farkhunda would have been an unlikely role model for empowering Afghanistan’s women. Every day, she wore the head-to-toe black garment favored by conservative Muslim women. She studied at an Islamic religious school. She believed, her father said, that women should be educated in order to raise their children in a good…
Green Lantern (Photo : Facebook/The Art of Nigel Carrington) “Fast and Furious 7” actor Tyrese Gibson is the new Green Lantern, rumors say. After director Zack Snyder released an image of Jason Momoa as Aquaman with the tagline “Unite the Seven”, fans arrived with the concept that “Seven” refers to the seven members of the…
51 photos Smoke rises from the front line of a clash south of Kirkuk, Iraq, on Saturday, March 14. 51 photos A group of Kurdish Peshmerga troops take a break from fighting ISIS militants south of Kirkuk on March 14. 51 photos Iraqi security forces and allied Shiite militiamen gather in Tikrit on Friday, March…
Where’d you go, conservative defenders of free speech and academic inquiry? Just a few days ago, you were championing a college student who said he’d been removed from class for expressing skepticism over some very dubious sexual assault statistics. But now that the story has taken a turn, you’ve grown so quiet. Last week, Reed…
Meet your next fire extinguisher. Photo: George Mason University George Mason University engineering students Seth Robertson and Viet Tran encountered plenty of doubters when they settled on an idea for their senior project. Even the typically experimental thinkers of academia thought a fire extinguisher that puts out flames with sound waves was outrageous. And in…
Choose easy to understand and short names for variables and functions. Bad variable names: Also bad variable names: incrementerForMainLoopWhichSpansFromTenToTwenty } createNewMemberIfAgeOverTwentyOneAndMoonIsFull Avoid describing a value with your variable or function name. Might not make sense in some countries: Works everywhere: Your code is a story – make your storyline easy to follow! Global variables are…
Beautiful Syntax A. Parens, Braces, Linebreaks // if/else/for/while/try always have spaces, braces and span multiple lines // this encourages readability // 2.A.1.1 // Examples of really cramped syntax if(condition) doSomething(); while(condition) iterating++; for(var i=0;i<100;i++) someIterativeFn(); // 2.A.1.1 // Use whitespace to promote readability if ( condition ) { // statements } while ( condition )…
There’s a brand new man in late night — freshly-minted “Late Late Show” host James Corden — and yet even as his own “Tonight Show” era recedes further into the distant past, Jay Leno is still around trotting out his same tired old shtick. Leno still can’t shake the controversy that dogged his final years…