Bruce Keener's Tumblr

"After making a mere $84 million at the U.S. box office, Star Trek Into Darkness is considered by some to be a disappointment. Perhaps the problem is that it was a touch confusing. To help our readers better understand it, we’ve complied and answered these Frequently Asked Questions about the movie."

"Netflix has more than 36 million subscribers. They watch about 4 billion hours of programs every quarter on more than 1,000 different devices. To meet this demand, the company uses specialized video servers scattered around the world. When a subscriber clicks on a movie to stream, Netflix determines within a split second which server containing that movie is closest to the user, then picks from dozens of versions of the video file, depending on the device the viewer is using."

"I flipped the switch on my new blog last night. If you’ve been here before, you might not notice anything different. The design hasn’t changed, but behind the scenes everything is new. I’ve written a CMS for the blog in Node.js and Express. It’s hosted on EC2, S3, and Cloudfront. All the content is written in Markdown and pushed to my server using Dropbox. All the code is pulled from repositories on Github and NPM. I use responsive design to adapt nicely to all screen sizes, and use feature testing with has.js and hascan to adapt nicely to all browsers."

"The pages of “The Great Gatsby” are suffused with romance and dusted with sexual implication, but perhaps the most intensely and disturbingly erotic scene — the one that distills the novel’s seductive blend of desire and sorrow — involves clothes. Showing off his mansion to Daisy Buchanan, the great love of his life, and Nick Carraway, his diffident, dazzled neighbor, Jay Gatsby opens a cabinet in which his shirts are “piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.” He throws them into a pile, and as Nick notes the wondrous textures and colors — “stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue” — Daisy bursts into tears: “ ‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.’ ” A reader might speculate about other causes of her weeping, but there is no reason not to take Daisy at her word. One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s points is that beautiful things in abundance can produce a powerful aesthetic response, akin to the sublime. And the sublimity of stuff, of shirts and cars and Champagne flutes and everything else that money can buy, is surely what drives Baz Luhrmann’s wildly extravagant adaptation of “Gatsby.” The movie has been faulted, not entirely without justice, for its headlong embrace of the materialism that the novel views with ambivalence. Mr. Luhrmann, though following the book’s plot more or less faithfully, does not offer a stable moral perspective from which the world of its characters can be judged. Rather, he immerses the viewer in a sensual swirl of almost tactile opulence. That scene with the shirts is a triumph of production design and 3-D digital cinematography. Really, you have never seen such beautiful shirts before."