The internet age was supposed to be the age of information. The age in which all information known to humankind, could be shared democratically to all of humankind. It was the idea that someone that lived in the Congo could have the same access to information as someone in Paris, so long as they had a connection to the internet (albeit perhaps not as reliable). That was the promise with which it was launched. A naive and childish promise. Sure, the supporters will pipe up and claim that...

We have all seen animal trainers manage to get different animals perform very difficult and complex tasks through training. One of the tools they use to achieve this level of communication with the animals is a clicker (though a short-tone whistle is also used). The point of the clicker is to help the animal map the expected action in their brains when the click is perceived. In a recent episode of Hidden Brain, the origins of this training method, and its potential were explored. At our core, we...

We all know that having an imagination is a powerful gift. We've all had it, and often recall, or even chuckle, those days when we were younger and seemed to have ample reserves of it. Remember thinking you could actually fly like superman, or of unicorns in the forests? Imagination is powerful, it allows us to see things we never thought possible. It breaks those anchors that tend to hold us down to our current reality and lets us think about what it could be, rather than what...

About a month ago I wrote about a motor-less water pump. Moving water from one location to another has always been important, even more so, uphill. Water is an element we have been trying to harness since we grew out of a single-cell organism. Water gives us life, helps us to cultivate life, and feed life. This is why I found this next video fascinating. What if we could convert, and even store, the energy of water for later use. We often covert the energy of water into...

What can we say about 2019? At the very least, it was the year of investigations and impeachment. Not only the talk and threat of impeachment for most of the year, and its culmination therein, but also the big reveals of the Mueller investigation and the house intelligence inquiry. Along with that, we published a great series on Life in the EU and how it differs to the US. We talked about how a simple vaccination could have prevented 100 days worth of pain and ache in our...

Water is a weird substance. Think about it, unlike most other substances, it expands when it becomes a solid. This is the reason pipes can burst in the winter, and why placing a beer bottle in the freezer is a bad idea. To make things even weirder, it is slippery when it's a solid and not for the reason you'd think. This brings us to a motor-less pump called a hydraulic ram pump. This type of pump does not use a motor, and no, it does not "generate"...

It is Winter here at headquarters and things are getting icy, and slippery. But why is that? Why is ice slippery. It makes sense that it's cold, but slippery? One of the more common reasons for why ice is slippery is there is a light layer of water atop the ice which makes the surface slippery. But if that is the case, water should be equally slippery, right? It turns out the reason is more at the molecular level. Want to find out more, see the video :)

There are some things that happen in life for which we do not have an explanation. Like, what is in fact gravity? Or where is the matter in the Universe? Find out why soda explodes when shaken and if salt makes ice colder. As a bonus, you can also figure out how a circle and sometimes get entangled with a chain.

I'm a big fan of the Plex Media system, both the player and the server. We use it as our main source of entertainment. All of our shows and movies are held in the server. We have over 8TB of media indexed by it. The system works perfectly for any TV show and movie, which captures the majority of usage. However, the title of this post is about how to deal with the edge-case that is racing. Racing is like a TV show, in that it has seasons,...

Alphabet, Google's parent company, announced it was purchasing Fitbit for over $2 billion a few days back. This a huge win for Alphabet and Fitbit, but not for us, the consumer. It is thanks to a shriking number of large corporations that consumers are left with little choice in the form of mobile phones, search and browsers. And thanks to these same companies we will also be left with a lesser number of choices in this consumer space, the wearable trackers. If you look at the data, you'll...