This is a good example of the kind of reference-of-references that you can only find on the web. Very meta. Very cool. An online museum of online museums. [from BoingBoing]
Month: February 2002
Salman Rushdie tells it like
Salman Rushdie tells it like it is. This is from the Feb. 4th New York Times. America and Anti-Americans: “Those elements in the Arab and Muslim world who blame America for their own feelings of political impotence are feeling more impotent than ever…. What America is accused of — closed- mindedness, stereotyping, ignorance — is also what its accusers would see if they looked into a mirror.” Ouch.
The Coffee Czar is back
The Coffee Czar is back in business, and his weblog is humming with activity again. Check it out.
Fun with robots: IEEE Spectrum
Fun with robots: IEEE Spectrum is featuring an article about modular robots. The Rambles news staff spotted this one a year ago, but apparently they’ve invested some real money in a robot that can pull itself together like a slime mold out of lots of tiny other robots and move one of four completely different ways. Take this very far, and it can become creepy pretty fast… robot bugs that crawl under the door, up the walls, through the sewers, and then they assemble into one giant kickass monster robot. I smell a bad movie.
Any fan of Terry Gross
Any fan of Terry Gross and Fresh Air needs to drop whatever they’re doing and read about her interview with KISS leadman Gene Simmons. What a pathetic wanker. Maybe he’s playing some kind of Andy Kaufman head game for art’s sake, but I seriously doubt it. Best bet is that he’s just a pathetic wanker.
Now I’m sending you this
Now I’m sending you this message through the courtesy of Blogger Pro ™, a steal at $35 a year. It’s finally got a feature that I’ve been waiting a long time for… using the “draft” option, you don’t have to publish everything that you’ve posted if you don’t want to. You can even post into the future. Love it! I’m happy to pay and hope that Evan Williams gets a nice business going with Blogger. It’s a great service.
Steve Grand wants to be
Steve Grand wants to be a “latter-day Baron Frankenstein” according to this New York Times article on artificial life: Man Who Would Be God: Giving Robots Life. He comes across in the article as a genuine latter-day eccentric Englishman, the clever kind, not the unbalanced kind. He’s written a book about his adventures creating artificial life (Creation : Life and How to Make It). The thing that sets him apart from other a-life hobbyists is that he’s written a bone-fide game bestseller that’s based on a-life. Called Creatures, it’s popular enough to give him the money he needs to fund more ambitious research. It’s exciting to think that a-life is now self-sustaining in terms of revenue, even if it’s not very advanced yet.
Google is running a programming
Google is running a programming contest. Not much like the programming contest we ran with MATLAB… it looks like they’re willing to pay big bucks to people who can help them do a better job with their search algorithms.
Learn how to do astronomy
Learn how to do astronomy from the privacy and comfort of your personal computer. Virtual Astronomy: Now Anyone Can Make a Discovery
Use Marketleap to see how
Use Marketleap to see how popular (in terms of links) your site is. Link Popularity – Marketleap Visibility Index – Measure your link popularity
From Marketleap, I tracked down AllTheWeb.com, which let me construct this search that shows all the non-Star Chamber documents that link to this site. AllTheWeb.com: Web pages results for `link.all:www.starchamber.com’