Category: Uncategorized

Now here’s what I like about the web: William Langewiesche has written some great stuff for The Atlantic. I’ve read a few articles and wanted to track down more. Here they are. Read the Shipbreakers. Wow.

Amusing spoof of bad web design from Jay Boersma.

Good science news source: World Scientist.

More fun with robots. Disney is building a big dinosaur robot. They could have made an audio-animatronic piece of nonsense for a fraction of the price, but this looks like the real thing. Good for them.

I’m a sucker for HyperDiscordia and Discordianism. It’s geek humor with a core of honest philosophy, and they get the proportions about right. Not to mention the fact that there is a ton of material here. Easy to lose track of time while browsing.

Interesting/annoying article in Forbes about DNA as code. Starts off interesting, then veers into a we’re-not-so-smart meditation on the shortcomings of science and then ends with a fanfare about how maybe Stephen Wolfram has figured out the secret of the universe after all. This is the same author (Michael S. Malone) who wrote a hagiographic piece about Wolfram in Forbes a few months ago. Give me a break. Between Wolfram’s automata and Dean Kamen’s Ginger, there’s nothing left for the rest of us but sit on the couch and watch Survivor.

Cool self-reconfiguring robot: Polypod: Example Locomotion with Reconfiguration. They’ve really built a prototype of this robot, but the niftiest stuff is in the movies of what they might be able to do some day. It’s creepy to watch this robot walk like a caterpillar, then crawl like a snake, then mutate into a spider-like tetrapod. But don’t worry. It’s just a movie. For now.

Next-new-thing stories are a dime a dozen these days, but this strikes me as something worth getting excited about: spintronics and magnetic memory chips (from the New York Times).

Internetworking (3.3): Article-Designing for Information Foragers

Saw this on kottke.org. Weird Al Yankovic recently married Suzanne Krajewski. Here is their Amazon wish list. Al would sure appreciate it if you’d buy him a Viking CF128M 128 MB CompactFlash Card.