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31 August 2001
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Allow me to state, unequivocally, that the
idiots who are attempting to
build a
police state in
my country
can go
bleep
off.
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The parking authorities in London
picked up a man's car,
painted a no-parking space under it, and ticketed him.
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Beautiful, eerie, and awful:
photographs of
nuclear test blasts. Includes an explanation of the rings one sees around
movie explosions--those are supposed to be Mach stems.
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I may have to buy
this
Cheapass game just so I can make "Accelerated Chickens."
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30 August 2001
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Glenn Juskiewicz has come up with what he considers the Geek Personality Test. What would
you take along if you were told that tomorrow you were going to a standard-fantasy
medieval world and could take anything you could personally scrounge or buy?
Comment in the Discussion area.
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Glenn Juskiewicz
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The globally-recognized Lego
company is still privately held, and still hews to the values of its Danish toymaker
founder.
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The supervisor in charge of
Miami's
school cafeterias was ousted from her job as school principal because of abuses of power. She
was immediately promoted to the school district's management team, where she managed
to cost the district tens of thousands of dollars due to spoiled food, advanced the career
of a personal favorite who was a screw-up, and redecorated one cafeteria (including a $5000
mechanical talking parrot) against the direct orders of the assistant superintendent.
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29 August 2001
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If you've gone backwards in time, there are a number of ways to know
what the date is.
You can change a society's accent through a
push
chain or a pull chain.
Browse The Last Word for
more such silly (yet true) science.
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The BBC is going to broadcast a program I would love to hear,
The Routes of English. Linguistic
history for the masses.
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28 August 2001
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Wow. This is how all
television critics should write.
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Welcome to the Future: The federal government's official nanotechnology Web site
exists at www.nano.gov.
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27 August 2001
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Noel pointed me at this
article
on Disney's relationship with Hayao Miyazaki. I want to know why the article's author
thinks we'll believe that Disney hadn't noticed Princess Mononoke was violent before
translating it, rescripting it, casting it, re-recording it, and--most importantly--preparing
to market it.
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Noel Tominack
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Ever wonder how astronauts keep sane on the ISS when they can't open a window to let in some
fresh air? NASA is on
the job!
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This was a
novel
meteorite in many ways. It contains pre-solar material, it hit the ground softly enough to
retain much of its volatile gas, and it exploded with the force of tons of TNT.
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Ben Loukota
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24 August 2001
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I've seen the brassy-gold storm light that comes with breaks in thunderstorms, but I've
never seen a green sky.
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The epitaph of nuclear power in the United
States, 22 years ago.
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What would be the minimum number of sounds required to make a language?
Hawaiian
has eight consonants and ten vowels. The smallest segmental inventory, however,
belongs to the
Piraha~ launguage of
South America, which has only 7 consonants and 3 vowels.
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23 August 2001
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Satellite photos.
Hundreds of them. Particularly interesting are the
pictures
of the
Moon
taken by Earth-orbiting satellites and the images of the
tracks of
tornado
damage.
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View the Earth from the point of view of a
satellite. Or plug in your
own coordinates to see the Earth from anywhere in orbit.
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Galileo images
Callisto
and finds there appears to be erosion going on.
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Ben Loukota
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The story of Air Force flight
SAM 27000.
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A rolling, inflated sphere trundling across a red-dust desert can mean only one thing:
wind-powered transport has come to
Mars.
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How do you identify an American? By our shibboleth:
"like."
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22 August 2001
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Oh, sure, a
robotic
teddy bear seems harmless enough...until it comes alive in the middle of the night
and murders you! (Criswell predicts! - It will be less than ten years until someone is
killed by a remote-controlled household robot.)
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Only two things come outta North Carolina, son!
Racist
politicians and, well,
more racist politicians.
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North
America shines by night in this composite picture from August 10, 2001.
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You need a computer-generated video of
the impact which created the Moon.
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Be a NASA space explorer. I signed up, so
you can find me in the
database.
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21 August 2001
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The ore called
coltan
is as heavy as gold, mined by hand, and fuels a war in the disintegrating People's Republic
of Congo. You're using coltan right now--in the form of the tantalum in your computer's
capacitors.
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New science toy! Fun with levers.
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This little floating
robot can harmlessly chase birds away from fish farms, increasing the farms' yields while
leaving the birds unharmed.
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More people who need to go into the molecular disassemblers: Marketing idiots who send
email
accusing the recipient of illegal activities and stating the recipient will be turned
over to the police unless he or she clicks a link to the marketer's site.
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20 August 2001
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Woot. My name was mauled beyond recognition by the author of
RPG World today.
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Oh my God, Pop Tarts are
killing
people!
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The world becomes Max Headroom, Part II:
CNN airs a segment which is
basically a series of advertisements for the iBook, language software, and some pens.
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Another slow Web cam, this time a real one:
There is a science
experiment in Australia which has been ongoing since 1927. Because of this
experiment, we now know that pitch is 100 billion times more viscous than water.
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Marooned
in Realtime comes true...it's the
Continental Drift
Web Cam!
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Mike Ryan
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17 August 2001
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And then, one day,
SkyNet
woke up.
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The future is happening: You can now buy prototype
smart dust for
$1000.
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When I was in high school, I had a teacher who had what I considered an execrable taste in
poetry. (All of it was classic, beloved stuff--but I hated it.) So I corralled a group of
friends and we wrote the worst poetry we could conceive, then turned it in as a form of
criticism of poetry. (We were seventeen. For us, this was a Fight Club style
smash-the-state experiment.) Ironically, the teacher loved our work and gave us all extra
credit A's for it. Little did I know, some guys in Australia created a nonexistent poet
named Ernest Lalor Malley in
1943...and had the same thing happen to them, on a much larger scale.
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Some astronomers think the
fine structure
constant may be
a variable.
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16 August 2001
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MegaBaltimore
is about to explode!
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Amakusa Shiro and
the Battle of Shimbara. It appears that Samurai Shodown is a metaphorical tale of
enlightenment, freedom, and religious tolerance.
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Mark Sachs
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A utility which can scan a network
of Windows servers and determine which need to have patches loaded has been released.
About bloody time.
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15 August 2001
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You can get your very own
Otakon 2001
program packet on eBay! Wow!
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Noel Tominack
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Mary Ellis's last parking place.
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This is Otakudom. Featuring Matt Pyson.
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8 August 2001
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I'll be at Otakon for the next week. No updates.
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I wonder if the Spanish authorities know how ironic it is to have
a sign notifying passersby that
video surveillance is in use in George Orwell Plaza.
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7 August 2001
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Immense channels
could have filled one of Mars' periodic oceans in eight days. (That's a great phrase:
periodic oceans.)
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Ah, the good old Web Economy BS Generator!
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Mark Sachs
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Ding! First use of the phrase
"Watergate
investigation" in reference to the Bush Administration.
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6 August 2001
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To remove Code
Red II, reformat your machine and reinstall. Black-hat hackers all need to be fed into
atomic disassemblers for the good of the species.
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Mike
likes ramen wolverines.
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Run! It's the Evil Al Gore from the
Mirror
Universe
with the beard and the unkempt hair! Flee!
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Eyeglasses with
autofocus.
Error 3C75 in STAIRWAY.EXE. Autofocus function shutting down. Please stop and do not
move until your glasses are serviced by a Microsoft Certified Optical Consultant.
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Marvin the Paranoid
soccer
player.
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3 August 2001
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The latest
film from Hayao Miyazaki is raking in the yen in Japan.
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Wayne Township, PA, has made it illegal for
a corporation to operate within the township's borders if the corporation has a history of
lawbreaking, or if it has board members who have such histories.
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Red rain, falling down.
Red
rain falling down over me and the red, red sea.
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2 August 2001
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I changed the page so it uses relative-sized instead of fixed-width table cells. Tell me
how/if you like the (slightly) new look.
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Speaking of the interplanetary Internet,
Vernor Vinge
is profiled in the New York Times.
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Some day, we will have a functioning
interplanetary
Internet. Ping times to your Quake server on Venus, however, will be awful.
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Physics toys for geeks. Stuff involving matter.
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1 August 2001
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Poul
Anderson died yesterday. I've only read Flandry of Terra by him, but I
quite liked it.
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The first exoskeletally-powered superhero will probably be a
Japanese nurse.
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Mike Ryan
and
Glenn Juskiewicz
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Play Spacewar.
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Walk right in, it's around the back,
just a half a mile from the railroad tracks...
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