RobbyEdwards.com…delivered with maximum freshness

jkottke: Joshua Katz has been studying American dialects and has made more than 120 maps of some of the differences in American speech. Here are a few examples: (thx, everyone) These maps are a fascinating representation of the differences in American speech. I was surprised by several of them. I’d be interested to see one […]

laughingsquid: When The Wife’s Away

President Obama Comes Out Strongly Against Patent Trolls; Here Are The Details | Techdirt That said, get ready for the pushback. Pharmaceutical companies, giant patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures (and some other legacy tech companies who are long past their innovation days) and a gaggle of people claiming vaguely to represent “small inventors” are about […]

Windows 8.1 given first official outing, and yes, the Start button is back | Ars Technica Another article on Ars Technica detailing the changes in Windows 8.1.

A video showing new features coming in Windows 8.1, such as better multitasking, better customization for the start screen (animated backgrounds, using the desktop background and more tile sizes) and improved search. Mostly focuses on the start screen, but does contain a glimpse of the desktop and the start button. The ability of use the […]

As Vandals Deface U.S. Parks, Some Point to Online Show?Offs – NYTimes.com It was the latest example of a trend that has been unnerving park officials from Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado to Arches in Utah and Joshua Tree in California. Just as drought and rapid development have caused a rise in encounters between […]

smarterplanet: How you and I could become nodes in the internet of things A group of French researchers believe that the sensors and transmitters we wear will route and relay data, not just collect it. We won’t just be connected to the network. We’ll be the network. Ever wonder what the network infrastructure of the […]

ikenbot: Cygnus Constellation The image depicts part of Cygnus, a northern constellation lying on the plane of the Milky Way. Cygnus is one of the most recognizable constellations of the northern summer and autumn, featuring a prominent asterism known as the Northern Cross (in contrast to the Southern Cross), dominated by Deneb (Alfa Cygni), a […]

spaceplasma: Chandra, Spitzer study suggests black holes abundant among the earliest stars The cosmic microwave background, shown at left in this illustration, is a flash of light that occurred when the young universe cooled enough for electrons and protons to form the first atoms. It contains slight temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly […]

You’re Too Cheap to Fly Faster — Lift and Drag — Medium But there’s a big difference between this hypersonic flight and the ever faster computers that have penetrated nearly every corner of society, and now travel everywhere in pockets and purses, and even on some people’s faces. We don’t get to use the really […]

Bootstrapping the Industrial Age — Editor’s Picks — Medium Let’s take a very sophisticated item: one web page. A web page relies on perhaps a hundred thousand other inventions, all needed for its birth and continued existence. There is no web page anywhere without the inventions of HTML code, without computer programming, without LEDs or […]

Nicholas Schmidle: Chris Kyle’s Tragic Quest to Help Troubled Veterans : The New Yorker A tragic story. Both in terms of Chris Kyle’s untimely death and the sad way our healthcare system fails our veterans.