Rambles Blog at Star Chamber

From the Playboy site comes “real or fake?”, an actual online test. If you’re easily offended, you can take my word for it that it is mildly interesting. Of course, as long as we’re on the subject of plastic surgery, here is a revolutionary idea about nipple addition surgery can improve your life.

Here’s something I should have seen coming: an O’Reilly book on bioinformatics. Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills

View the news that everybody uses on the Yahoo! News – Most-viewed content page. The more people look at it, the higher up it moves in the ratings. Speedle is attempting to do a similar thing. Just click one button to send a fun page to a friend. Speedle finds out and puts together stats to show what the most-forwarded web pages are. In the future fads will last no more than ten minutes. Who gives a damn about “all your base are belong to us” now?

Want to know all about blood wetted devices and biomaterials? Edward Leonard is your man. Buy yourself an expert at Biospace.com. This kind of expertise on demand (consulting for dummies) strikes me as one of the boons of the Internet age.

Artificial intelligence in games Gamasutra. I’m fascinated by how games are on the leading edge of a lot of interesting stuff in computing, from user interface innovations to virtual reality to artificial intelligence. For instance, the cloying cutesy game Creatures doesn’t interest me much as a game, but it does interest me as a massive experiment in genetic programming. The company takes its genetic programming very seriously and is purposefully expanding the state of the art while making a best-selling game.

James Gleick has a personal site called around.com. Go there and read what he has to say about being constantly online. Connected: Life in the Wireless Age.

Storytelling in business,storytelling in organizations,organizational storytelling

some fun phrases: thoughtwander, research flurry, idea sparker

Good piece about the technical goings-on behind Google. Internet Week > Infrastructure > Google Defies Dotcom Downturn > April 27, 2001 (via BoingBoing)

I’m hooked on the APOD site now. It’s a real wonder. First I went to gawk at the pictures, then I discovered that the prose and links at the bottom are also very good. For instance, I found this cool Soviet propaganda booklet about Yuri Gagarin. Ever wonder why stars in astronomical photographs look like they have four spikes sticking out of them? Find out why: APOD: 2001 April 15 – Diffraction Spikes: When Stars Look Like Crosses. The spikes article led me to the Nobel Prize site, which has some tasty articles about physics: Nobel e-Museum.

WikiWiki site about Artificial Life. Have a wander.