Category: Uncategorized

What’s the weather like on Mars? It’s frosty on the dunes. Check out these pictures from the Mars Global Surveyor. The Mars orbiter continues to astound. It’s sad to think how much money the International Space Station is siphoning off of projects like this. I prefer to think of the space station as a kind of Depression make-work project for sad post-Cold War engineers and man-in-space jocks who long for the days of Apollo. The Civilian Conservation Corps in Space.

Speaking of weather in space, you can also visit the Space Weather Now page. Keep your jacket on: the solar wind is screaming at around 600 km/sec.

I posted a new piece to the Star Chamber front door. It’s about my son and his recent diagnosis with a strange syndrome called PDD. I also simplified the Star Chamber main page rather drastically, since there has been so little activity there recently.

Just how weird is quantum theory, really? TBTF pointed me toward this brief and interesting discussion: Directing the strokes of Ockham’s razor.

Some good stuff from Google: the Google Zeitgeist. See who the pop culture rising and falling stars are this week. Top gaining entry last week: the Tour de France. Paula Poundstone will be glad to know that she’s falling out of the news.

Put your face on an action figure: Toy Builders will take your 3-d computer models and turn them into solid objects. This is the beginning of 3-d printing at the local Kinko’s. Company’s like GM and Disney are using solid printing like mad, but this is the first place I’ve seen that caters to the mass market. It’s particularly interesting that their main focus is toys.

Eric Snowdeal has a cool site/blog called snowdeal.org. It’s very good. Not to mention the cool stuff he’s got on bioinformatics, I also found this nifty link to a talk by the Google director of research. Clever, clever. Discoveries like this really make web surfing pleasant.

Lots of pretty 3-d pictures of proteins. Kinemage Home Page

NCBI has some very readable accounts of how you might use their database tools to do real bioinformatics work: NCBI Coffee Break

An online game that gets smarter the more you play it: Guess The Dictator/Sit-Com Character. Think of a person (any old dictator or sitcom character will do, apparently), and you will be asked yes-no questions, twenty questions style, until the computer guesses who you’re thinking of. If it’s wrong, you add a new question to the database so it’ll win next time. It’s an intriguing concept that sadly doesn’t turn out to be that much fun.

Scott McCloud has re-worked his online presence at scottmccloud.com.