technics

You've seen one fireworks display, and, well, the next one doesn't seem all that different.

However, those who went to see San Diego's Independence Day fireworks last night surely left with a feeling like no fireworks display had ever given them.

For instead of 20 minutes of flash! whoosh! red, white, blue! ooooooooh! -- the whole shebang went off with a bang. At once.

Yes, they were gone in 15 seconds.

As CNN explains it, San Diego's "Big Bay Boom" was definitely big and definitely booming, as the fireworks were set off five minutes … Read more

There is much excitement over the discovery of the Higgs boson particle.

Physicists everywhere are, as I understand it, overjoyed that all of their theories have been proved to be correct. Which certainly puts them far ahead of any economists.

However, for one man this discovery has come with a cost.

For Stephen Hawking admitted to the BBC that he'd just lost $100 over Higgs boson's arrival.

Hawking is clearly impressed with this breakthrough.

"It should earn Peter Higgs the Nobel Prize," he told the BBC.

There is, though, a certain melancholy for Hawking, too.

"… Read more

I worry that Google's doodlers have been given a little time off, just at the time when something supremely animated was needed to lift America's dreariness on July 4.

Today, instead of some glorious and uplifting doodle, Google offers a very simple affair, the logo spelling out the words: "This Land Was Made For You And Me."

The only unusual accompaniment is that of an acoustic guitar, a homage to Woody Guthrie, whose "This Land Is My Land" includes the doodle's line.

Guthrie was very keen to offer of his guitar that "… Read more

This is for all who believe trust between humans was dead.

This is also for all who somehow thought that homo sapiens were frightfully sapient people, merely hamstrung by the limitations of the technological world.

For this is a Twitter feed called NeedADebitCard. It serves a vast social purpose.

Yes, it reveals all those who happen to share pictures of their brand new debit cards. Full frontal. Numbers exposed. Names attached.

It is currently unknown who is behind the site. However, the names of those who indulge their Instagramming, most creative selves in order to expose their debit cards seem … Read more

It's hard to keep quiet these days.

One suspects that even in the most silent religious orders, the monks and nuns have heard about Twitter and Facebook and wonder how it might change their lives.

Sometimes, though, Facebook and Twitter are the digital parchment for huge amounts of vile bile.

The latest example is that of Swiss right-wing politician, Alexander Mueller. Clearly feeling the need to make his feelings heard, he took to Twitter and declared that there should be a "Kristallnacht...this time for mosques."

Kristallnacht -- often referred to as "The Night of Broken … Read more

Cell phone providers can be annoying. They do all sorts of unspeakable things like charge us for texts that cost them very little to send.

However, one gentleman seems to have enjoyed an extra level of irritation at the services provided by T-Mobile in the U.K.

I am grateful to TechCrunch for directing me to footage posted on YouTube that shows a gentleman in a T-Mobile store in Manchester, England, who expressed his displeasure a little too aggressively. … Read more

The occasional program on the Food Network can be quite frightening.

There's "Outrageous Food", for example, where you can watch people build a 105-pound burger in Clinton, N.J.

However, please place yourself inside the stomach of 18-year-old Stephanie Milan as she sat at home watching the Food Network and was overtaken by a harsh queasiness.

For her door was broken down and in walked a SWAT team, which was not in the mood to make her a burrito.

The Evansville Courier-Press offers that the ingredients of this raid were somewhat confused.

The SWAT team was looking … Read more

Can we agree that humanity is pickled?

Our politics are an embarrassment. Our economies stink far more pungently than a full trash can in 100-degree humidity. And our inter-personal relations are so lifeless that they are enacted without bothering to meet face-to-face.

So along comes Google, looks at the state of the world today and says: "What a sorry, irrational mess. We just can't let these sorts of humans dominate our culture. It just looks bad in the third-eyes of our alien friends."

Unlike so many corporate beings who bury their heads in the sand and simply … Read more

Some clouds can simply eliminate others.

At 11.21pm ET last night, as the deep and the desperate began to settle down for a weekend of streaming movies and retro photography, thunder and lightning decided to bring a natural end to their plans.

Forbes reported that such bastions of modern entertainment as Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram were eliminated from the firmament.

The cause was reportedly an outage at Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud in North Virginia, brought on by a thunder and lightning show. Yes, Amazon's clouds are actually Earth-based.

Naturally, as panic ensued across so many smoke-filled living … Read more