There's a school of thought in anthropology that the form and vocabulary of the language you speak deeply affects how you think, even to the point of limiting if you can think about certain things. This is called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. There's definitely something to it, although probably not in …

Andrew Cooper, a local astronomer, laments the continued belief in astrology, which apparently is so detached from the facts that they'll print "The Sun has entered Aries," when, due to precession, the Sun is still well inside Pisces.

Hawai'i is a place of deep spirituality, both mainstream and New Age …

As far as I know, you cannot program the iPhone with Ruby. However, you can program OS X Cocoa applications with Ruby and, as a learning experience, it's very helpful.

I am coming to believe that the biggest barrier to learning how to program Cocoa are tutorials that emphasize the …

The Pragmatic Bookshelf  is going Kindle and iPhone compatible, with support for .epub (iPhone) and .mobi (Kindle) formats.

I just downloaded RubyCocoa on the Kindle and it looks excellent -- with listings in monospaced font! -- but most of my other books are not yet available in Kindle format.

Pragmatic Programmers have …

In response to a request from the esteemed Director of the FBI Blogs, these are some of the blog posts that have gotten the most traffic through the years:

• 15 Exercises to Know a Programming Language
• Top 10 Things I've Learned About Computers From Movies And Any Episode of "24 …

I'm honored to be part of the FBI Blogs link-cycle. Although, having lived here only five years, I still feel very much a newcomer to the island.

I don't blog much about Hawai'i or the Big Island because I figure that most people subscribe to this site in order to …

My latest SD Times column is the first of a short series on Oslo.

I wish that I could put something the size of, say, a briefcase on my roof, leave it there for a month, bring it down, plug in a USB cord, and read "A solar water heater would have generated X% of your hotwater needs. A PV installation of X panels …

The Ars Technica article lithium breakthrough could charge batteries in 10 seconds reports on a Nature article describing a very fast way to charge or discharge batteries. The upshot is that an electric-car battery could be charged in five minutes ("which would make electric vehicles incredibly practical") but would …

Amazon has released a Kindle application for the iPhone. It nicely synchronizes with your Kindle library (which is all stored "in the cloud") but, strangely, it seems to only pick up books and not periodicals or blogs.

The display is okay (I mean, it's the iPhone display. Duh.), nothing compared …