The Academy Awards were on TV last night, and the many retrospective montages showing 80 years of film made me want to write something about why few of those movies are available legally online today. Remember all those promises back in the late 1990s about how the Internet would soon allow people to watch […]

[Read more →]

The Japanese love beer and they love automatic vending machines. So, naturally, beer can vending machines are plentiful. But what if you want draft beer? The Japanese also have that covered: This little gadget automatically tilts your beer glass to the perfect angle while dispensing beer with just the right amount […]

[Read more →]

  The architecture of Angkor (in Cambodia, the seat of the Khmer empire from the 9th to 14th centuries) reflects the unique sophistication of the Khmer culture.  For example, there are the “elephant gates” of Angkor Wat, the main temple of Angkor, which are built to accommodate royalty that traveled on… well… elephants. […]

[Read more →]

One of Intel’s anthropologists, Genevieve Bell, gave the keynote speech at the Australasian Computer Science Conference last year. After the conference, she was asked if it would be fair to characterize her job as reminding American technology experts that all Internet users aren’t Americans. Her frank reply:
“[T]hat’s certainly one way of thinking about […]

[Read more →]

During the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, China will be presenting itself to the world in part through the architecture of the Olympic venues. Many of the buildings are now nearing completion, and I’ve put together a small collection of my favorite publicly available photos from Flickr.
1. Beijing “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium
Photo by […]

[Read more →]