Timeless articles from the belly of the internet.
Manually curated. Served 5 at a time.
My life is better because of microwavable meals. They taste good and fill me up, and they’re ready in 5 minutes. Still, I wouldn’t want to have one every time I eat: I’d miss out on the joys of fresh food and the hard-to-measure satisfaction of meal preparation. Switching to an all-microwave diet would rob me of my humanity, making me feel soulless and uninspired. And yet, America has become a Microwave Economy.
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP is a way to transmit data that is reliable. By this I mean: if you send a message over a network using TCP, it will arrive, and it won’t be garbled or corrupted.
Gardens are a mechanism by which we make life bearable. They protect us from the frenzy and tumult unleashed by history. They counter annihilating and anarchic forces. Gardens have been with us – or we have been with gardens – forever. Some say they emerged after agriculture. But if gardens are to agriculture what poetry is to prose, who knows, gardens might well have preceded agriculture – if one were to take the analogy seriously.
Instead of propellant, it relies on electricity, which in space would come from solar panels or a nuclear reactor. His insight was to use a stack of piezoelectric crystals and some controversial—but he believes plausible—physics to generate thrust. The stack of crystals, which store tiny amounts of energy, vibrates tens of thousands of times per second when zapped with electric current. Some of the vibrational frequencies harmonize as they roll through the device, and when the oscillations sync up in just the right way, the small drive lurches forward.
Now what you have to understand about Tourette syndrome is that it is remarkably peculiar and irritatingly persistent. Tics, as its manifestations are called, can be motor or vocal, hardly noticeable or the equivalent of a fire siren in a library. To ask an individual to restrain a tic is tantamount to requesting that someone stop blinking or breathing; the neurological assault is relentless and overpowering.
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