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31 May 2001
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Weird Things I Know About Where I Grew Up #183: Norristown is the fictional birthplace of
Marvel Comics villain
Basilisk.
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This is a cool illusion.
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30 May 2001
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The chief scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program has created
a hiking map for
the "Face" on Mars. Bring plenty of water and oxygen if you decide to make the
trip.
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Jan Vermeer was one of the
greatest painters who ever lived, in my opinion. His work was
human and
serene and
amazingly technically
adept. You may think you've never seen anything by Vermeer before.
You have.
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In Britain, Big Brother is watching you.
The telescreen received
and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low
whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of
vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of
course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often,
or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.
It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.
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25 May 2001
through
29 May 2001
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There will be no updates these days.
Vacation! Woo!
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24 May 2001
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My mother probably won't understand why I almost snorted cola up my nose laughing at
this. The rest of you guys,
dive in.
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I remember, when I had just started driving, that the common wisdom said that using
unleaded gasoline would damage your engine's valve seats. It turns out that was
a
lie promulgated by the makers of tetraethyl lead additives to keep me buying deadly
lead. Huzzah for the robber barons.
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The world's astronomers have been discussing for about a decade whether or not Pluto is
a planet. The measurement of the diameter of an object out in the Kuiper Belt has
re-ignited the debate. "Where are we going?
Planet Ten.
When? Real soon."
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The Silophone is Silo #5B-1, which used to store grain
in the port of Montreal. "Due to changes in the global grain market the elevator became
obsolete and was closed in 1996. The structure, constructed entirely of reinforced concrete,
is 200 metres long, 16 metres wide and approximately 45 metres at its highest point. The
main section of the building is formed of approximately 115 vertical chambers, all 30 metres
high and up to 8 metres in diameter. These tall parallel cylinders, whose form evokes the
structure of an enormous organ, have exceptional acoustic properties: a stunning
reverberation time of over 20 seconds. Anything played inside the Silo is euphonized,
made beautiful, by the acoustics of the structure. All those who have entered have found
it an overwhelming and unforgettable experience."
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23 May 2001
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This history of the last of the
Bonaparte line is badly written but fascinating.
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Sonoluminescence explained.
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There are exactly a dozen prototypical jokes about engineers.
Here they are.
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22 May 2001
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Jimmy Carter is a great ex-president. He has
a lot of cogent
things to say about Bush's so-called energy policy.
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A little cosmology for
your reading pleasure. This article contains a little more on the ekpyrotic universe theory.
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The truth about Mars, revealed!
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Bruce
Sterling speaks about libraries. "Maybe we're about to radically change the operating
system of the human condition. If so, then this would be a really good time to make backups
of our civilization."
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Call it the new version of the "Powers of Ten" book we had when we were kids. It's the
Atlas of the Universe.
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21 May 2001
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Sometimes it was done to remove racism. Sometimes it was done for the less-lofty goal
of making more time available for commercials. No matter the reason,
there are a lot of scenes missing
from cartoons on TV these days.
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Noel Tominack
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Mike Ryan will like this one. Smithsonian Magazine did
an
article on wargaming. It focuses on the historical aspects of the games.
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You need to know your local siderial
time. We all do.
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I believe that math should be kept out of the hands of
whackos who "study" the Great
Pyramid. It's like giving a child matches.
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18 May 2001
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Bob the Angry Flower (via the link in "The Side of
the Angels," to the left) is very cathartic
today.
"Smackety smackety smackety!!!"
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Perhaps you think President Bush's plan to give religious organizations federal money for
social services is a good thing. Well, if you look at
the disaster
caused by the intermingling of religion and government in Utah, you might change your
mind.
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A Las Vegas not-quite-pimp named Eddie Munoz claims that
the phone network in Las
Vegas has been compromised by hackers, and he's managed to get the Nevada PUC to
open an investigation into it. The Mob, sleazy business, and Kevin Mitnick, all in one
article.
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Although he didn't live to see it, Douglas Adams has been honored by
the naming of
asteroid 18610 Arthurdent.
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17 May 2001
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A scientist named Ronald Mallett has a theory that you can create a closed, time-like
loop (a time loop, for all you Dr. Who fans) with two powerful beams of light. The slower
the light is traveling, the better this theory works. Then Mallett hears about the folks
who have slowed the speed of light down to a few meters a second. So now Mallet is
going to attempt to build
the world's first
time machine. If he's right, we get time travelers from the
50TH century buying all
our Elvis memorabilia. If he's wrong, we get to point and laugh.
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Speaking of the future, you can now build
a supercomputer with Macintosh computers you can buy in your local CompUSA.
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Mike Ryan
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You can see
the Great Wall of China from
orbit. With radar.
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Organic LEDs. Welcome to the future.
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Glenn Juskiewicz
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Whomever is
hitting the
brakes on the Pioneer probes, please stop. Thank you. Sincerely, NASA.
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Who killed Westinghouse?
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16 May 2001
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So, what was a dollar
worth when you were a kid?
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Noel Tominack
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How does a train carrying flammable, caustic chemicals
travel halfway across Ohio with nobody on board?
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The Internet Engineering Task Force (the folks who maintain a chunk of the standards that
make the Internet work sensibly) has released
RFC3098, an informational
memo regarding spam. (Mike Ryan notified me this RFC existed, but he was too
lazy to dig up a link to it. So he ain't gettin' his name into the much-coveted Right-Hand
Column. Oh, yeah, boyz, carrot-and-stick.)
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Sam Brown draws some odd and occasionally brilliant
stick figures. People send him random sentences, and he creates little sketches
based on them. It is an exploration of how much information can be crammed into a very
small amount of ink and color. Or Sam Brown is insane. It's hard to tell.
= Learn how cigarettes
can make robots cool.
= See what happens when
you misplace your head and the Universe peeks through the resulting hole.
= Discover the futility
of a curriculum displaced from the needs of the student.
= See a love poem written
in the language of pharmaceutical chemistry.
= Feel science.
= See color explain love.
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15 May 2001
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"The revolution will not be televised" was said by a fellow named
Gil Scott-Heron. I feel rather
un-hip for not having known that.
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Ancient Egyptians offered mummified animals as offerings to particular gods. "People used
to purchase animal mummies made by priests as prayers - like lighting candles in a church,"
says Dr. Ikram. (Part of
a
short article from the BBC explaining how to "adopt-a-mummy.")
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I'm all for futuristic gadgets, and wearable computers...But when I was a kid, they had
much cooler names in the sci-fi books than what this company has come up with:
the Peel-It,
the Jango, and the Flippo. It's hard to look like a die-hard cyberpunk when someone asks
what you're wearing, and you have to reply "That's my Jango 2000, drekhead."
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Glenn Juskiewicz
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14 May 2001
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Scientists claim to have
awakened extraterrestrial
bacteria from their eons-long slumber. (Glenn found this on
the MSN Pets page. I suppose a mad
scientist might consider adopting an alien microbe as a cuddly pet and naming it "Fluffy"...)
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Glenn Juskiewicz
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Douglas Adams is spending the rest of eternity
dead for tax purposes.
Now the world has gone
to bed,
Darkness won't engulf my head,
I can see by infrared,
How I hate the night.
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My mom is reading this Web page now, so we all need to be polite. :)
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11 May 2001
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On the one hand, a pogo stick that will jump
80 inches in the air is really keen. On the other hand, when a scientist says
"When you are up there, it feels like you’re in free fall from the moment you leave the
ground," you know there's something wrong with college science courses. (Physics 101: Once
you leave the ground and are into the jump, you are falling.)
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Just when we thought the world couldn't get more like a pulp SF story, we receive news that
psychiatrists
are seeking a way to measure evil. I
recommend adding a metric unit of evil, the hitler. Sadly, the hitler would be like
the farad--way too damned large to use for most real-world measurements. We'd wind up
having to use microhitlers for most calculations.
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I never knew that Jack London,
the author of The
Call of the Wild, wrote science fiction. And it's good
science fiction. View the glorious socialist paradise a man called Goliah made in the
far-flung future year 1925:
"All will be
joy-smiths, and their task shall be to beat out laughter from the ringing anvil of life."
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10 May 2001
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Speaking of Kansas, it would appear that the state is
vanishing.
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Top Ten Things
Never Before Said By A United States Senator. "Last night Strom Thurmond and I got
absolutely wrecked at the Eminem concert"
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Pennsylvania high-schooler thinks he's speaking to the Kansas Board of
Education. Film at ll.
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9 May 2001
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Speaking of asteroids, this
plot of the major and minor planets in the inner solar system, updated regularly,
is the coolest thing I've seen in weeks. I have this urge to save the .gifs each day and
build a little orbital movie.
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The International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center maintains
the list of those asteroids
which came closest to hitting the Earth. The one which came to within
70,000 miles of Earth--nine
planetary diameters--is particularly unsettling. (This is like having a bridge fall onto the
highway only nine carlengths behind your Sentra.)
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Another fine IADL.
"Formula 409 Bathroom Cleaner: Now with Scrubbing Reapers™!"
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8 May 2001
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Aiieee! The computer is talking
to me again!
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Mike Ryan
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Think the whole JFK conspiracy theory paranoid delusion is stupid? Well, it turns out
there are people
who concoct conspiracy theories about Christopher Columbus.
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The world needs a few more
mad
scientists who work for the side of goodness and light.
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7 May 2001
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Run! Insane
console mascot with a gun!
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Ah, here we go: the Electric Monk.
"So after a hectic week of believing that war was peace, that good was bad, that the moon
was made of blue cheese, and that God needed a lot of money sent to a certain box number,
the Monk started to believe that thirty-five percent of all tables were hermaphrodites,
and then broke down."
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I did a search on "Electric Monk" and discovered that, although I had been seriously worried
about the state of the Internet, WEB14 STATUS is
OK.
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Pre-Revolution Russia, in color.
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Mark Sachs
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4 May 2001
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Have we interfaced on the quid-pro-quo regarding compartmentalizing the metrics on this
confab?
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I now understand why Terry Pratchett is so weird.
Fish fall from the sky in his
country.
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Taking the
trash out for a spin.
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Mike Ryan
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The Product Placement Bible. It's not the must-have book for people who do product
placements. It's the Bible. With product placements in it.
Thou preparest a table before
me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with Brylcream; my Super Big
Gulp runneth over. (Psalms 23:5)
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How to write unmaintainable code.
I think we need more awareness training like this for the world's programmers.
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Mike Ryan
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Matt Smith turned me on to Dennis Leary, who is one of the funniest mean people in the
world. Read a transcript of Leary's
No Cure for Cancer standup
routine. Laugh.
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3 May 2001
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Some radiators are highly
intelligent.
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One
in a thousand of the dust particles on your desk is a micrometeorite.
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2 May 2001
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This fellow has translated some
commonplace names into Tolkien Elvish.
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Erufailon
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It's a Disfunctional Life.
One of the best is:
"Nearly 15,000
Toyota Nyarlathoteps were recalled on Friday..." which is also captioned,
"On the
road of life, there are passengers, and there are
GIANT CAR-SMASHING DEMON BADASSES!!!"
(This one is for Matt Smith.)
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"Now I want you to remember that no
bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor
dumb bastard die for his country."
An online text of the famous speech from the movie "Patton."
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1 May 2001
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This time on Scrapheap Challenge your task is to build a riot-control APC!
You have the resources of this lovely scrapheap and 10 hours before
May Day riots start in
Britain.
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If you're inside when the Rapture happens,
do you smack your head on the ceiling
while rising to Heaven?
The Church of Shatnerology
believes you do!
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So, how are you celebrating
May Day? I'm going to spend the day laughing at
the people who
still think Communism is a good idea.
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A normal person wouldn't steal
pituitaries. That's reasonable.
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Mike Ryan
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