Rss - Latest News
 |
Q&A: John Hodgman on Perfecting the Illusion of Expertise more»»
John Hodgman is an expert. At everything. (OK, maybe not sports.) But where he really excels is in creating the illusion of expertise — and not letting pesky facts intrude on that authority. From his first book, a compendium of faux trivia aptly titled The Areas of My Expertise, to his fiction-spewing shtick on The Daily Show to his role as the bloviating PC in those Mac ads, Hodgman handles the most obscure subjects with an aura of invincible confidence. The fact that it's fake? All the funnier. Hodgman talks to Wired about his latest book, More Information Than You Require (out in October), and his new area of bona fide expertise: being semi-famous.
Wired: Is your character on The Daily Show the same person narrating your books? Or, for that matter, the PC in your Mac ads?
Hodgman: I should clarify at this point: I'm not that John Hodgman. There's a guy who goes on The Daily Show claiming to be me. And there's a guy who goes on the Mac ads claiming to be me.
Wired: You should sue!
Hodgman: No, I would say that the Resident Expert on The Daily Show is all me, or at least a heightened aspect of myself. Aside from finding humor in the deadpan descriptions of things precisely as they are, I just veer off into the fantastic and the absurd.
Wired: And that has made you slightly famous.
Hodgman: Well, I always had this desire to celebrate and somehow be a part of things that I thought were really great. When I wrote about Battlestar Galactica for The New York...
Wired.com
|
|
Oct. 13, 1884: Greenwich Resolves Subprime Longitude Crisis more»»
1884: Geographers and astronomers adopt Greenwich as the Prime Meridian, the international standard for zero degrees longitude.
The late 19th century was an era of standardization. With the Second Industrial Revolution stimulating world trade, the Treaty of the Meter established the International System of weights and measures in 1875. With railroads linking together entire continents, nations were replacing hundreds (or even thousands) of diverging local times with a system of hour-wide time zones. (The United States adopted its zones in 1883.)
Amid all this, navigation at sea -- and the charting of stars in the heavens --
often remained a matter of local, national or even religious preference. Maps might be based on longitude east or west of Jerusalem, Saint Petersburg, Rome, Pisa, Copenhagen (think Tycho Brahe, Oslo, Paris, Greenwich (just east of central London), El Hierro (in the Canary Islands), Philadelphia (former U.S. capital) and Washington, D.C. These divergent reference meridians -- representing a mixture of astronomical, theological and maritime power -- ranged over 112 degrees of longitude.
You could do the math, but that meant you did the math. These were the days before computers and even the bulkiest of mechanical calculators. Got abacus?
Many state boundaries in the U.S. West were determined by the Washington Meridian, which then ran through the Old Naval Observatory in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood. But an 1850 law established its use "for...
Wired.com
|
|
Obama v. McCain: The Wired Scorecard more»»
What do Barack Obama and John McCain say, and what have they done, about policies that matter to Wired? Here are descriptions and analysis on five issues: Broadband, H1B Issues, Investment in Green Tech, Net Neutrality, Spectrum. They may or may not come up in Wednesday’s third and final debate. But that doesn’t mean you have to be uninformed or apathetic.
Wired.com
|
|
Microscope-On-a-Chip Is One Step Closer to the Tricorder more»»
: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com
LOS ANGELES, California – In the very near future, drawing blood may be obsolete. Instead, implants will be able to image your blood and monitor it constantly.
This is because scientists at Caltech have squeezed a microscope onto a computer chip not much larger than a dime. And that’s just the demo unit.
Shrinking a standard microscope to this size is practically impossible due to the layers of optics involved, but Caltech professor Changhuei Yang decided to skip the optics altogether and put microscopic samples almost directly onto a photo sensor chip — just like the one found in your cheap point-and-shoot.
The microscope-on-a-chip uses standard, off-the-shelf hardware sensors with a clever modification — pixels on the sensor are forced to only look through microscopic holes, which allows the chip to image very tiny things. The standard hardware makes future mass production cheap and easy and Yang’s lab is already working to create a small batch of iPod-size prototypes. He hopes to have working units in doctor's hands in a year or two, with full production in five5 years.
In addition to the handheld devices, Yang envisions blood- monitoring implants that provide instant health warnings and diagnoses. Click through the gallery to learn exactly how this ingenious invention works.
Left:
A working sample of the microscope-on-a-chip placed next to a dime shows how small it actually is. The part that does most of the work is the...
Wired.com
|
|
'Children in Need' Could Unite All Surviving Doctor Whos more»»
Reports claim the seven surviving actors who played The Doctor will reunite for this year's BBC 'Children in Need' telethon. That means David Tennant and Peter Davision would join Tom Baker, Colin Baker, Sylvestor McCoy, Paul Mcgann and Christopher Eccleston for a reunion fans thought was impossible.
Wired.com
|
|
