Common Paradox Tech Blog

No one likes getting stuck in traffic, but some roadblocks are better than others. A few of the best: an exceptionally cute string of ducklings; an ice cream truck with a flat tire; a stunning spread of 800 LED-equipped books.

Earlier this week, the books blocked traffic on Water Street in Brooklyn, New York. They were installed by the Spanish design team Luzinterruptus to promote reading, though I’d imagine in reality they just promoted a lot of confused gawking.

The designers explained:

we want literature to seize the streets and become the conqueror of public spaces, freely offering to those who walk by a space free of traffic which for a few hours of the night will succumb to the modest power of the written word.

The line between enticing people to read and forcing them to do so by physically impeding their travel is pretty thin here, but the idea is pretty spectacular nonetheless. [Designboom]

A synonym for “nerd” used to be “bookworm,” but it’s lost in today’s broadband ADHD society. We still read, though. Voraciously. Here we present a collection of books, new and old, that we’ve enjoyed over the course of this year.

The Dark Pasts of Our Geekiest Treasures

There’s that old expression about those who forget their history being doomed to repeat it. So it’s good that there are so many chroniclers of the great achievements in tech, and in geek culture. [History Books]

Back to the Drawing Board

Why are we so enamored with certain images or objects? Though an explanation on the inner workings of the soul is always just out of reach, there are books that help us understand our art and design fetishes, what informs our gear lust as well as our definition of beauty. [Art & Design Books]

Tales of Science and Technology, Told With Feeling

Science is about a passionate, single-minded pursuit of an uncertain goal, but you wouldn’t know it from reading most news coverage of great discoveries. Each year, though, a few brilliant writers dip into the details, and string together a story that is as beautiful as it is mind-blowing. [Science & Tech Lit Books]

What’s Cookin’, Good Lookin’?

We certainly try to hone our culinary skills on occasion, so it’s a given that we’ve been reading up on tasty treats and crazy concoctions. Naturally we’ve got some cookbooks that we can’t stop raving about, but since we’re dedicated nerds about food, there’s a lot more going on here, too. [Food & Cooking Books]

Doing It For Ourselves

Maybe we’re not quite as prone to making nearly everything ourselves like our counterparts at Lifehacker, but we certainly love to tinker and enjoy DIY projects. Albeit it’s the ones that could cause major damage which we seem to go particularly crazy for, but I promise that there are innocent projects lurking in these books, too. [DIY Books]

The Art of Escape: Our Favorite Fiction

Even the craziest DIYer, chef, historian, gadget lover or designer needs a break at some point. Here are the departures from reality that kept us sane, especially after long, busy weeks of telling the truth. [Novels and Other Fiction]

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a series of hacked emails and documents that were recently posted on Wikileaks are causing quite a stir in the scientific community. All told, more than 1,000 emails and 2,000 documents were stolen from the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia University in the U.K. “The emails include discussions of apparent efforts to make sure that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that monitors climate science, include their own views and exclude others. In addition, emails show that climate scientists declined to make their data available to scientists whose views they disagreed with. [] Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University that skeptics’ research was unwelcome: We ‘will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!’ Neither man could be reached for comment Sunday.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Every few weeks Internet dating site OkCupid uses the power of anonymized data to share a few truths about the online dating scene and human nature in general. To be sure, these reports are often highly controversial and aren’t going to be showing up in scientific literature any time soon, but they’re generally interesting (and often amusing) reads. The latest report to come out addresses ‘Your Looks And Your Inbox’, charting the number of messages users receive in relation to how attractive other members rate them.

Some of the conclusions aren’t surprising. The “most attractive” women receive five times as many messages as the average female does, with 2/3 of all male messages going to the top 1/3 of women. And women tend to favor the most attractive men, though the ratio is less extreme. But there are a few interesting phenomena.

Zaurus writes “Apple has replaced its ZFS project page with a notice that ‘The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.’ Apple originally touted ZFS as a feature that would be available in Snow Leopard Server. A few months before release, all mention of ZFS was removed from the Apple web site and literature, and ZFS was notably absent from Snow Leopard Server at launch. Despite repeated attempts to get clarification about their plans from ZFS, Apple has not made any official statement regarding the matter. A zfs-macos Google group has been set up for members of Apple’s zfs-discuss mailing list to migrate to, as many people had started using the unfinished ZFS port already. The call is out for developers who can continue the forked project.” Daring Fireball suggests that Apple’s decision could have been motivated by NetApp’s patent lawsuit over ZFS.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I’m an avid reader, studied literature in school, and nerd out over tech, yet past ebook readers have left me cold. The Nook is the first reader I really want, and I won’t be alone. Here’s why.

It’s cost-effective. Yeah, at $260 it’s the same price as the Kindle 2, but you’re getting so much more for your money: Wi-Fi, native PDF support, an SD slot and that crazy second screen makes it seem out of the Kindle’s league. It makes the Sony Reader and iRex look absurdly overpriced and the Plastic Logic Que look like a shot in the dark.

Lending and Sharing. One of my main objections to the Kindle and other readers is that most of my books come from friends, rather than bookstores. The Nook realizes that and integrates a 2-week lending period—plenty of time for a quick read. Plus, you can lend to tons of different devices: Mac, PC, iPhone, iPod Touch, PC, Mac, BlackBerry, or Windows Mobile (soon).

Sharing is also done really well: As opposed to the Kindle, which only lets you read purchased ebooks on a same-account iPhone or iPod Touch, the Nook lets you read on any device supported, the most important of which are PC and Mac. So you and your significant other could read the same book at the same time, on whatever devices you each prefer. The Kindle, in contrast, doesn’t support PC and Mac at all—but we’d be willing to bet Amazon is rethinking that decision right about now. Plus, the Nook syncs both your place in the book and any highlights or annotations you’ve made, which could be great for students.

Free in-store reading. You’ll be able to take the Nook to any of Barnes & Noble’s gajillion stores and read one ebook, for free, each time—the same way you might wander into the store, pick up a book and read it for an hour or two. Barnes & Noble is really thinking about how people actually read, which is a great sign: This kind of feature makes the Kindle feel like it’s forcing you to change your reading habits rather than adapting to them.

And potential Nook customers will be able to go into a retail store with which they’re comfortable and play around with the actual device, an advantage not shared by the Kindle. Given Matt’s impressions of the Nook, I think seeing the hardware in person will convince a lot of people to buy it.

Head-turning looks. The Kindle 1 was, um, distinctive, and the Kindle 2 is inoffensive and sleek enough, but the Nook has legitimate style. As Matt said, “it makes even the relatively benign-looking Kindle 2 seem like it was beaten with an ugly stick.” It was clear from the first leak that we were dealing with something very different.

Android. There are two things to be excited about when it comes to Android. First is the legit apps, which B&N seems open to—in today’s presentation, John wrote “They, ahem, ‘haven’t announced’ anything about app development, but they’re comfortable using the phrase “when we do,” which is veeeery promising.” My personal most-wanted app? Pandora (or Slacker, or Last.FM).

Secondly, there’s the more, well, illicit possibilities: The Nook both runs Android (which we already know is easily and enthusiastically modified) and has a microUSB jack, which should make for easy hacking. Imagine user-created skins, apps, games (in case reading gets boring)—the possibilities are just about endless. The Nook already supports PDF natively (yes!) but we could definitely see it hacked to embrace other formats like Word docs.

The second screen. Yeah, it’s weird, and we wouldn’t have believed it if it didn’t, you know, exist, but it just makes so much sense: Browsing for books on e-ink is an exercise in frustration, and touchscreen e-ink is even worse. With its capacitive touchscreen, the Nook offers a keyboard and Cover-Flow-esque browsing without the awkwardness and lethargy of e-ink, but it also opens the door for multitasking. You’ll be able to read a book and control your music at the same time, and because the music browser will be on the LCD screen, it won’t look like e-inked crap. It should also support photo browsing and the ability to set your own wallpaper.

Battery life. The Nook’s 10-day battery life may not be quite as long as the Kindle 2’s 14 days, but 10 days is still insane—especially if we think about the tablets that will vie to make ebook readers obsolete. Whenever the Apple tablet is announced, you can bet its battery life will be measured in hours, not days. Plus, the Nook’s battery is replaceable, always a welcome decision (you could have a spare battery, and when yours does eventually die, it’s easy to replace).

Both 3G and Wi-Fi. I’m not exactly sure about the benefits of Wi-Fi right now (besides international travel, where AT&T may not work), but given the possibilities of Android, it’s essential that the Nook includes it. In the future, we may want to download files bigger than ebooks—apps, games, videos, whatever—and Wi-Fi will be vital once the potential of the Nook is unlocked. Plus, there could well be Wi-Fi-only features of the kind AT&T wouldn’t support: Streaming content, web browsing, VoIP, whatever. Wi-Fi is a killer feature not for what it does right now, but for what it could allow the Nook could do in the future.

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Years ago, when developers first started to make the transition to HTML layouts without tables, one CSS property that suddenly took on a very important role was the float property. The reason that the float property became so common was that, by default, block-level elements will not line up beside one another in a column-based format. Since columns are necessary in virtually every CSS layout, this property started to get used — and even overused — prolifically.

The CSS float property allows a developer to incorporate table-like columns in an HTML layout without the use of tables. If it were not for the CSS float property, CSS layouts would not be possible except using absolute and relative positioning — which would be messy and would make the layout unmaintainable.

In this article, we’ll discuss exactly what the float property is and how it affects elements in particular contexts. We’ll also take a look at some of the differences that can occur in connection with this property in the most commonly-used browsers. Finally, we’ll showcase a few practical uses for the CSS float property. This should provide a well-rounded and thorough discussion of this property and its impact on CSS development.