TIME: “NASA Actually Working on Faster-than-Light Warp Drive”

The findings I presented today change [Alcubierre’s warp drive] from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation, White told SPACE.com. The additional energy reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab.
That’s right, an actual lab experiment, whereby White says he plans to simulate the tweaked Alcubierre drive in miniature, using lasers to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million. Matt Peckham

So NASA can’t even fly astronauts to the Moon anymore, but it’s working on faster-than-light propulsion?! Sorry, but I’ll believe this when I’ll see a working prototype!

Follow individual posts from your friends on Facebook

As 2012 draws to a close, it looks like Facebook is still hard at work, making incremental changes to the site. After renaming the ‘Subscribe’ feature to ‘Follow’ at the beginning of December, the same action is making its way into individual posts from friends in the newsfeed. You may have noticed each post has a small menu in the top right corner and now one of the first options is to ‘Follow post’. It’s available for both public posts and those set to ‘friends-only’. If you enable this you should start receiving notifications whenever someone likes or comments on the story, as though you had commented on the entry – similar to a long-forgotten feature from the extinct Google Buzz. In my limited experience with the feature today, that hasn’t actually happened – maybe it’s just being tested before the final release on the site.

And another small change noticed on Facebook: you can now use keyboard shortcuts to navigate through the newsfeed: the familiar j and k used by Google Reader, Plus and many other online apps.

Update: and notifications started showing up a couple of hours later!

Flickr’s new iPhone app is a huge improvement

A couple of weeks ago I saw an unusual surge of updates for my iPhone apps and among them one update that was long overdue: a new Flickr app! While I couldn’t care less about filters – if you shoot a photo with bad framing or out of focus you won’t be able to ‘fix’ it with a filter – the app has some great improvements. I won’t go through all of them – there are other, in-depth reviews for that – but simply highlight some of the things I enjoy about the app and some minor problems:

Don Melton: “When I first heard the name ‘Safari’”

“Safari”, Kurt whispered.
I didn’t say anything. But Kurt must have noticed that I was more relaxed. “Dazed” as he described it to me later. Probably a little stupider looking than usual, too.
“What do you think?” he asked.
I honestly didn’t know what to think. My mind was a blank because I just didn’t expect it. The name seemed to come out of nowhere. It sounded more foreign at that moment than its actual origin.
“It doesn’t suck,” I finally offered. Don Melton

Well, it definitely sucks less than ‘iBrowse’.

Hard to believe it’s been 10 years since Safari was launched, and how many things happened on the web since. I remember my first encounter with Apple’s browser, back in 2005, at my first job. I wasn’t particularly impressed with anything on the MacBooks – no right-click button on the mouse, Apple, seriously?! – but I loved the browser! In fact I loved it so much that I even tried it out on Windows, a couple of years later – where it wasn’t such a pleasant experience anymore… But I was left with a strange fondness for WebKit, that later translated into my loyalty for Chrome. I keep thinking that Apple could have had more success with Safari on Windows if they took that project more seriously and launched it earlier. By the time Safari landed on Windows, Apple was probably on the way to convert it into a mobile touch-enabled browser.

What’s new in Chrome 25

This new version of Chrome brings a couple of experiments that will probably not be available by default for some time, they need to be manually enabled from the flags internal page. First of all there is the Chrome Apps Launcher (Windows only): mimicking Chrome OS, this experiment adds a new icon in the Windows taskbar. It acts as a launcher for the apps installed in Chrome, as well as a search box, like a mini version of the Omnibox. Personally I don’t see the point to have an extra icon – and a damn ugly one! – when it’s just as fast to open the browser and do anything from there. On top of that, this experiment removes the Apps section from the New Tab page, so the only way to launch them remains this separate icon.

A more promising idea was announced recently on the Chromium blog: a new API allowing the default search engine to customize the New Tab page, for example with a custom search box. Naturally, the only search engine currently integrated with the new API is Google; you can see the resulting New Tab page by enabling the flag Enable Instant extended API. While the idea is far from new – as always, Opera did it first, including a secondary search engine on their Speed Dial – the integration with Google goes deeper: the Google logo is replaced with the Google Doodle of the day; another nice feature is that the search terms on the search results page are shown directly in the Omnibox, making more room for the actual results. I didn’t like the changes to the New Tag page at first, because it leaves little space for the ‘Apps’ and ‘Most recent’ sections and you can’t reorder apps anymore, they are arranged more-or-less randomly. On the other hand I really like the stripped-down version of the Google search results without logo, the black bar and the search box, so I might stick with this experiment for a while. It you’re missing the links for ‘Recently closed tabs’ and ‘Other devices’ on the revised New Tab page, you will find them under the wrench-menu.

Salman Rushdie - Pămîntul de sub tălpile ei

Cu un asemenea titlu, romanul nu putea să fie decât o poveste de dragoste și avându‑l ca autor pe Salman Rushdie promitea o călătorie interesantă și complexă cum puțini pot să născocească. Întinzându‑se peste jumătate de mapamond și de secol, romanul ne poartă pe urmele a trei copii dezrădăcinați ai Indiei în încercarea lor de a găsi un nou cămin, un pământ solid sub tălpile lor, născând în același timp mișcarea rock‑and‑roll. Scris sub forma unui jurnal din amintirile lui Umeed „Rai” Merchant, acțiunea începe de la final, momentul fatidic al morții Vinei într‑un cutremur devastator la începutul anilor ‘90, pentru a reveni la copilăria lor în India, prima lor întâlnire, secretele întunecate care le‑au măcinat familiile, tragediile care i‑au marcat pe viață, circumstanțele în care fiecare din ei a părăsit India pentru a nu se mai întoarce decât sporadic, traiectoria lui Ormus și a Vinei prin Anglia și mai apoi America, de la obscuri cântăreți în cluburi de noapte la o faimă imposibil de egalat sub sigla formației VTO.

Dar ceea ce dorim noi este dragostea, nu eliberarea. Care om e mai nefericit? Cel iubit, căruia i s-a împlinit dorința inimii, dar se teme întruna că o să-și piardă visul, sau omul liber, căruia i s-a acordat o libertate pe care nu o căutase, și care se simte gol și singur printre oștile de captivi de pe pământ?

Cam acesta e scheletul general pe care Rushdie construiește romanul, adăugând nenumărate alte imagini, personaje și povești secundare, care se întrepătrund repetat cu cele centrale, încărcând pe nesimțite sute de pagini. Ca și în Versetele satanice, dimensiunea mitică joacă un rol extins și îmbracă personajele în straturi succesive de semnificații care se modifică pe măsură ce povestea evoluează. Dar aici mitul e privit printr‑un ochi mai critic, căci, spre deosebire de Ormus, care se hrănește din viziunea lui inexplicabilă a unui frate‑geamăn mort și a unei lumi ascunse în spatele celei reale, și de Vina, care absoarbe cu aviditate orice noutate și mit și le adaugă la imaginea ei schimbătoare de zeiță rock, povestitorul Rai este ateu, scepticul dintre cei trei, care se folosește de imagini și analogii în relatarea lui fără a le întări cu credința în ele.

Paul Krugman: “Asimov’s Foundation novels grounded my economics”

A non-nerdy concern – or anyway, a less nerdy concern – would be this: Now that I'm a social scientist myself, or at least as close to being one as we manage to get in these early days of human civilisation, what do I think of Asimov's belief that we can, indeed, conquer that final frontier – that we can develop a social science that gives its acolytes a unique ability to understand and perhaps shape human destiny? Paul Krugman

A good review of one of the most famous series in science-fiction, Asimov’s Foundation trilogy; also a testimony to the influence and power of inspiration coming from good sci-fi ideas. As for the actual science behind the fictional ‘psychohistory’, it’s unlikely to ever become reality; chaotic fluctuations and interactions will pretty much ensure predictions will start diverging widely from reality in just a couple of years. I’m not sure if I read this somewhere, but psychohistory is more-or-less equivalent to thermodynamics: the motion of a single gas molecule is impossible to predict among billion other, nevertheless the properties of the gas as a whole are well described by a single theory.