The Graphing Calculator Story

A really admirable work ethic...

Marriage law reform

Eric Meyer has some really good points on why the recent votes in the US against gay marriages are (obviously) misguided.

The New York Times > Technology > A Toy With a Story

Really Hi-res camera

An article on a really hi-res camera. The photo mentioned is here. Other photos by the artist, such as this one, are also very cool.

Wired 12.12: Roads Gone Wild

This is really cool.

"Monderman is one of the leaders of a new breed of traffic engineer - equal parts urban designer, social scientist, civil engineer, and psychologist. The approach is radically counterintuitive: Build roads that seem dangerous, and they'll be safer."

And one part usability engineer or user interface designer...

"In Denmark, the town of Christianfield stripped the traffic signs and signals from its major intersection and cut the number of serious or fatal accidents a year from three to zero."

"A study of center-line removal in Wiltshire ... found that drivers with no center line to guide them drove more safely and had a 35 percent decrease in the number of accidents."

Wired News: Florida E-Vote Study Debunked

Wired News: Second Career for Old Robot: Art

Writing betterer emails...

What corporate America can't build: a sentence | CNET News.com

"People think that throwing multiple exclamation points into a business letter will make their point forcefully," Andrews said. "I tell them they're allowed two exclamation points in their whole life."

Joel on Software

These two posts are interesting: Saturday, December 04, 2004 and Monday, December 6, 2004.

Undoing the Industrial Revolution (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Christmas Price Index

An amusing alternative to the traditional CPI, based on the gifts in the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas". Though, I can think of much better ways to spend US$66,334...

A really nifty digital sundial!

Everyone is a potential torturer

Fab labs

"His success suggests that manufacturing - like publishing, coding, music and film distribution, and communications before it - is about to bust out of its industrial confines."

Nintendo DS Review

This thing is pretty cool...

Call of India lures European workers

"although the employees are paid local salaries, they receive other compensation in the form of free housing, a furnishing allowance and subsidised meals."

Wired News: Shhh ... Do You Hear Gunfire?

Wired News: So Far, Recount Shows No Problem

Dilbert on camera phones

Shape-shifting robot shows off its moves (New Scientist)

The Faith-Based Encyclopedia

An interesting piece on the Wikipedia from a former editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Weird

An intriguing story in Wired on mysterious radio transmitters.

Wal-Mart Data Warehouse

The New York Times has a story on Walmart's insanely big (and a little scary) sales database.

US Election Results

• A really cool set of The maps showing the US election results distorted by voting population (i.e. a cartogram). More typical maps.
• Some more on the conspiracy theories from jwz and Wired.
• An even worse election result?

Conspiracy Theories?

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked with more stuff on www.blackboxvoting.org.

Delicious Library

ArsTechnica has quite an interesting software review for Delicious Library, a piece of Mac software, that talks quite a bit about what drives Mac culture and software:

"There is simply a "climate of excellence" on the Mac platform. Any developer that does not live up to community standards is looked down upon, or even shunned. Commercial, open source, freeware, shareware, it doesn't matter: pay attention to detail, or else."

(I think the application itself is pretty cool too, and it looks delicious!)

The Infinite Cat Project

The New York Times > Warplane Strafes a School in New Jersey

"...custodians arriving at the school found 13 cannon slugs - 5 in a parking lot and 8 inside the school in various classrooms and offices..."

China vs The West

From cells to bells, 10 things the Chinese do far better than we do A comparative list compiled by JAN WONG @ workopolis.com

format c:? sure...

It seems amazing that this bit of computer lore hasn't been tested before (well, not to my knowledge at least):

"So there you have it. Stop telling people they should run 'format c:' because it won't get you or them anywhere. Same goes for 'rm -Rf /'"

Star Wars: The Changes

An interesting (well, pedantic and nerdy) series of articles on DVDAnswers.com:

"this is perhaps the single most objectionable change in the entire trilogy. Putting aside the fact that it transforms Han Solo from the aforementioned ice-cold space pirate to a lucky son of a bitch, the effects used to bring the new scene to life are simply atrocious."

"One of the little-known edits to the film included the trimming of a few frames to remove the flashes when the bolts hit the human officers ... What makes matters worse is that this censorship isn’t even consistent..."

Mini-me!

New Scientist and Wired have articles on a tiny new species of human unearthed in Indonesia. Slashdot has some great comments. Except for the isolation the tie-ins with faery tales and folklore are intriguing...

Running MacOS X Panther on a 25MHz Centris

Something to do with an old computer and a hell of a lot of spare time...

New Scientist: New display 'as clear as a glossy magazine'

The New York Times: What Makes an Equation Beautiful

FireFox

An promising article (Business 2.0 :: Microsoft's Worst Nightmare) on FireFox.

marcus132: Bite: The World's Best Topless Vampire Musical

Essentially the entire show is one continuous, hour long, tightly choreographed topless dance punctuated with trapeze acrobatics, pyrotechnic stage effects, and crappy magic tricks. To put it another way, it's Spiderman Rocks if you took out the Green Goblin and replaced him with undead girl on girl simulated sex acts. Or to put it another way, it was the most awesome thing I've ever seen, ever.

New Scientist: Miniature jet engines could power cellphones

Slashdot | Interview with Neal Stephenson

Car Alarms Are Useless, So Ban Them

newLISP

Wired News: Inventor Rejoices as TVs Go Dark

In the Beginning was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson

This is an excellent essay/short book on the history, philosophy and future directions of computing. There is a HTML version too.

Counting Source Lines of Code (SLOC)

An interesting analysis of Red Had Linux that estimates that it would cost $1,000,000,000 and 8,000 person-years to develop it from scratch!

Wired News: Now, for Your PC: Mac OS X

A lighter approach to computer contro - New Scientist

“Instead of having mechanical mouse, you could just take light beam and communicate with the computer because the screen would know where it was being hit.”

Wired News: New Tack Wins Prisoner's Dilemma

"[The Southampton players] were designed to execute a known series of five to 10 moves by which they could recognize each other. Once two Southampton players recognized each other, they were designed to immediately assume "master and slave" roles -- one would sacrifice itself so the other could win repeatedly.
If the program recognized that another player was not a Southampton entry, it would immediately defect to act as a spoiler for the non-Southampton player."

Ladies Village Improvement Society - Crazy Train or Emotional Subway Attack

The Guardian: Things get worse with Coke

"So now the full scale of Coke's PR disaster is clear. It goes something like this: take Thames Water from the tap in your factory in Sidcup, Kent; put it through a purification process, call it "pure" and give it a mark-up from 0.03p to 95p per half litre; in the process, add a batch of calcium chloride, containing bromide, for "taste profile"; then pump ozone through it, oxidising the bromide - which is not a problem - into bromate - which is. Finally, dispatch to the shops bottles of water containing up to twice the legal limit for bromate (10 micrograms per litre)."

Wired 12.10: Hot Wheels

Wired looks at the Smart car.

"As a startup, Smart was defiantly independent from its owner. Even uttering 'Mercedes' at the office cost employees a 5-mark fine"

Not quite a fully-fledged hypercar, but getting there.

The Persuaders: The Hidden Machine of Political Advertising

This sounds like a great book, unfortunately I probably found it too late for our election:

Sally Young, "The Persuaders: The Hidden Machine of Political Advertising"

There is a good interview with the author on hack (realaudio).

Wired News: Genome Model Applied to Software

Engadget HOW-TO: Upgrade your organic dog

"Over the course of a day or so, we had the dog take photos. Most of them were pretty good, for a dog."

Cures before cash

New Scientist has a very interesting interview with Victoria Hale, who has set up a non-profit pharmaceutical company to address diseases the big companies are ignoring:

"The problem is the [pharmaceutical] industry is so profitable, so these diseases don't make it onto the radar"

Eric's Archived Thoughts: They Got It Fixed Right On

Interesting comments on an "age of innocence" (pop songs in this case) that certainly never existed.

How to handle media attention...

...According to the West Coast Brownlow medal winner, Chris Judd:

"If there is a microphone, I try and talk, and if there is a camera, I'll try and look pretty"

New Scientist: Traffic deaths rise after terror attacks

I knew that you're more likely to die in a car accident than a terrorist attack, but terrorist attacks causing car accidents makes the whole thing a lot more complicated!

Where'd I leave my boat?

The NASA Earth observatory has an amazing before and after photo of Pensacola, Florida, after Hurricane Ivan hit.

My New Favourite Language

I think I've jumped on the Python bandwagon after reading Dive into Python

Update: I'm a bit slow off the mark though.

New Scientist: Google's Gmail inspires imaginative 'hacks'

Sun ZFS

The weirdness of crowds

This is a very interesting idea. Would make a really good high-school maths class project. Also see the follow-up.

Space

• Space probes feel cosmic tug of bizarre forces
• Crashed capsule may still reveal solar secrets and Lots of Science Intact in Smashed-Up Genesis Capsule. Makes you wonder why they bothered trying t catch it in the first place...

Dear diary, you make me sick | New Scientist

"We decided to test the idea that writing is cathartic"

Kite Aerial Photography

projectcensored.org

The Age of the Essay

Yet another excellent Paul Graham essay, this time on essays!

Hey, Hold my Beer and Watch this...

Toxic tatties | New Scientist Lastword

This is a bit scary. May have to think again about how I prepare potatoes!

perl.com: Hacking Perl in Nightclubs

Creating music using a little "band" of programs all edited and controlled in real-time.

Changing the System

From The Big Issue. Interesting point that there is nothing in the Australian Constitution to prevent our Government going to war against our wishes.

Tonight on ABC TV: Soundtrack to War

GMail invites...

Somehow, I've got more gmail invites than I know what to do with. Any ideas? These look interesting:

• gmail swap. My favourite is "you can pick a name for my puppy :)".
• gmail for troops.
• GmailFS — use the accounts as network drive (built using libgmail which is also pretty neat).

Peer-to-Peer politics.

Wired reports on a website that's helping people make a difference. Still, not all is going well, despite raising millions to show political ads and a nifty distributed telephone poll/information system.

Top 10 Sci-Fi films of all time?

...it is a perfect piece of film-making in its genre, which I would call 'action movie' rather than 'sci-fi movie' if it were not for the fact that there are very few, if any, movies that genuinely deserve to be called sci-fi.

There's also a list of top sci-fi authors.

How 8 pixels cost Microsoft millions

Banner ads

This site has a massive collection of the best kind of banner ads — ones that you can't click on.

Wired News: BugMeNot Gets Booted, Restored

Ploughshares

Hack spoke to Ciaron O'Reilly on the Ploughshares movement and the dismantling U.S. war planes as they passed through Ireland (Real stream until Thursday).

The interview covers some interesting stuff, including the point that the USA is one of the few 1st world countries that is still predominantly religous.

A new form of advertising

Wired has a story on the advertising company FreeiPod.com that has an interesting idea...

Meatless Monday

New Scientist has an interview with Robert Lawrence where he discusses the true cost of meat, and why we should eat less.

French author urges slacking

Slashdot | SHA-0 Broken, MD5 Rumored Broken

This /. story has some interesting comments. Particularly the one in regards to the strength of 256-bit encryption.

Wired News: Flight ID Fight Revived

I hope this guy wins, and I wonder what the equivalent Australian situation is?

Combat robots

New Scientist reports on a robot gladiatorial contest in Japan. The videos are quite neat — but for some reason I'd imagined the robots would be bigger...

Wired News: Let the Web Games Begin

CRAIGSLIST / On the record: Craig Newmark

Smart phone virus

New Scientist has an article on a smart phone virus (well, trojan really) hidden in a game that sends rogue texts. This kind of thing could be really annoying...

Shifty tiles bring walking to VR

Wouldn't want to try running on them though...

What are you looking at?

The New York Times (see BugMeNot! in post below) has an article on a funky system for capturing what you're looking at by photographing it's reflection on your eyeball.

Pass the salt?

An article with phenomanal photos of a huge crystal cave found in Spain.

Wired News: Bike Writer Pedals for Protests

A nifty computer-controlled graffiti-sprayer on the back of a bike that lets you sms messages to be written on to the street.

Dear John...

Letters from Richard Berry syndicated in TNT magazine to John Howard have been published in a book. Also an article in the SMH (requires registration, try BugMeNot!)

"I suggest, to save you time and money, that you stop writing to the Australian Prime Minister as it is not possible for him to be your pen pal."

Software patents are stupid...

Microsoft has been granted a patent for organising digital photos by the time they were taken. Duh! Sounds suspiciously like how I organise my photos...

Great Hackers

Some comments from Paul Graham on the responses to Hackers and Painters.

MailFrontier Phishing IQ Test

This is an interesting little test to see if you can spot legitimate emails from fakes trying to get your password/credit card details (eg from banking sites).

Digital manipulation of photos

Some nice before and after shots of digitally manipulated photos used in advertising: 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Don't believe anything you see...

Dutch auctions

The Degree Confluence Project

Load Testing Gmail

I doubt anyone ever did this kind of thing to Hotmail...

Terrorism Laws: ASIO, the Police and You

The booklet from the Australian Muslim Civil Rights Advocacy Network on your rights and responsibilities under Australian anti-terrorism laws.

CD settlement delivers duds

To prevent the companies from dumping unwanted inventory, lawyers for the states came up with a formula based on how much time artists spent on the Billboard charts, ... But he conceded, "it may be hard to believe looking at the selections."

JWZ - CensorZilla

The programmers look like they were as pissed-off with Netscape as the users!

The Project Apollo Image Gallery

Lots of very nice photos from the Apollo 11 missions, which were 35 years ago, as of a few days back.

Army rations rehydrated by urine | New Scientist

An excellent idea that combines a filter with the dehydrated rations, allowing any source of water (not just urine, it can be clean or potentially contaminated with bacteria) to be filtered by osmosis before it re-hydrates the food.

European Copyright Clock Ticking on Elvis Hits

Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game

This is good, trawling Amazon for bad reviews (ie negative) of what are generally considered the best books, albums and films. I like this one of the King James Bible:

"This was the worst piece of fiction I've ever read. The characters were cliched and their actions were just unbelievable. A total piece of trash."

And, of William Gibson's Neuromancer:

"Read 2 chapters and call me in the morning. Zzzzz..."

Using Mobile Phones on Aeroplanes

New Scientist has a story on a "base station" that can be installed in a plane to relay mobile phone calls to a satellite.

I had been wondering for a while why mobile phones can't be used on planes, the usual explanation of interfering with navigation equipment seemed a bit lame (and this article refutes it).

One possibility I'd heard was that the phone could "see" too many base stations and therefore overloaded the system by communicating with 100s of them rather than the usual 3 or 4, but being out of range of the base stations seems a more likely reason.

Wired News: P2P Company Not Going Anywhere

Please take notice: EarthstationV Ltd., a Palestinian corporation, does not accept any legal process via e-mail, nor will we accept any attachments via e-mail. For service of process, you must serve our legal department located at our offices in the Jenin refugee camp, Jenin, Palestine.

Software That Lasts 200 Years

This article looks at what is required (and not going to work) when we look at computers as part of our societies infrastructure, just like roads, power grids and so on. It looks like open source will be the only option, and also that software engineering may actually have to be engineering.

Wired News: Searching for The New York Times

It's not just annoying to have to sign in to view NYTimes articles, they could be shooting themselves in the foot too...

Video-conferencing that may just work...

Facetop is a video conferencing system that uses a very neat idea: It makes your screen into a semi-transparent window out of the other persons computer. You share a desktop that you can both point at and discuss, and can still see each other through it. Very nice.

Successlessness

"One day we'll be poor no more
I'm almost sure enough
Before then let's not let successlessness
Get the best of us, my love" — The Lucksmiths

The Wikipedia has everything...

Including: Crushing by elephant.

Big Displays

Apple released a big 30" screen the other day, and ViewSonic have topped them with a 22" screen, but with 4× the pixel density — making it ideal for editing photos (pretty much at the same resolution as prints!

You Car's Crashed: Just reboot...

Wired News: Teched-Out Cars Bug Drivers talks about some slightly worrying glitches as cars become more computerised.

3D Desktops

Some interesting 3D X window managers: Metisse and Project Looking Glass. The possibilities are intriguing.

War is Heavy Metal

Hack on Tuesday night was a special on "Music in war", which used audio interviews with soldiers and civilians by George Gittoes in Iraq. There will be a related documentary, "The Soundtrack to War", shown on ABC TV in September.

It's a pretty amazing look at what part music plays in daily life for the soldiers, and comforting to know that a $4.3 million tank has an audio input so you can plug your discman in!

Reminds me of a Spearhead lyric (Crime To Be Broke In America):

They say they blame it on a song
when someone kills a cop
what music did they listen to
when they bombed Iraq?

Mona Lisa's Smile

New Scientist is reporting on what looks like a plausible theory on why the Mona Lisa's smile has caused people such confusion over the ages...

Metric conversions going wrong again...

There's an incredible amount of variation in people's ideas of how many inches there are in a meter. Pretty scary really...

New Projector Screen Technology

This diagram doesn't really explain how the new projector screen developed by Sony will work, but it seems like a good idea none the less. Except for the cost, US$1,700...

Sparrow Electric Car

Boy is it ugly! Nice try though, I like that it's classed as a motorcycle though, no doubt makes it very cheap to run.

Thirsty?

An interesting question and resulting answers from New Scientist's The Last Word: If you're lost in the desert should you save your water or drink it? To be honest, I didn't think there was a choice, and would have probably saved it, good thing I read this in time.

Aqua Alta

The NASA Earth Observatory has a nice photo of Venice. Something that didn't occur to me: Obviously it's a big hassle for people during high tides when the city often floods, but it's also problematic for boats which can't fit under the bridges over the canals. Boats being made useless by too much water... Who would have thought?

T minus 3 days

Wired has a piece on the upcoming SpaceShipOne flight. The second picture attached to the article shows that it really is going high!

Update: Well, they made it! (info in New Scientist and Wired)

"I went to the backup, and the backup saved the day," he said. He hesitated before adding, "But that was planned — it was planned to have a backup that saved the day."

History of Programming Languages

A nice PDF chart of the evolutionary tree of programming languages (part of an advertising campaign by O'Reilly publishers.)

Work Clubs

Arstechnica has a reports on the interesting concept of "work clubs", where you telecommute from a "third place" rather than home. Nice idea, I especially like the possibility of working with friends, without requiring the unlikely possibility of all being in the same company and avoiding the nasty politics that that may cause.

Hackers and Painters

Re-reading Paul Graham's essay "Hackers and Painters" (in book form), the following passage stood out. I'd like to go back to university, but always suspected that there's no research topics that I'd like to do. This gives some kind of justification:

In the best case, the papers are just a formality. Hackers write cool software, and then write a paper about it, and the paper becomes a proxy for the achievement represented by the software. But often this mismatch causes problems. It's easy to drift away from building beautiful things toward building ugly things that make more suitable subjects for research papers.

Unfortunately, beautiful things don't always make the best subjects for papers. Number one, research must be original — and as anyone who has written a PhD dissertation knows, the way to be sure that you're exploring virgin territory is to to stake out a piece of ground that no one wants. Number two, research must be substantial ‐ and awkward systems yield meatier papers, because you can write about the obstacles you have to overcome in order to get things done. Nothing yields meaty problems like starting with the wrong assumptions. Most of AI is an example of this rule; if you assume that knowledge can be represented as a list of predicate logic expressions whose arguments represent abstract concepts, you'll have a lot of papers to write about how to make this work. ...

The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.

Why Nerds are Unpopular

I'm reading Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters. The first chapter, "Why Nerds are Unpopular" is a must read. There is an earlier version of it on his site. It will be pretty hard to send a kid through a normal high school after reading this.

OpenTextBook

These guys are creating an open source textbook by collaborating on-line using techniques borrowed from open source software design. The textbook(s) can be freely downloaded & printed out, this is an excellent idea as textbooks are way too expensive and often out of date by the time they're printed. Unlike the wikipedia, they're aiming for a real book, not an online resource (though, they can do that easily too.)

Wireless Access in London

This review is quite detailed and contains some interesting data about wireless networks in the Greater London area. It looks like there is a lot of wireless going on, with an estimated 19,451 nodes found by flying over london in a plane. People generally seem to be leaving them "open" by accident, but some are naming their nodes with "hobo" style codes used in war-chalking such as ")(" to signify a freenetwork, and "Fuck Off and use your own" to signify, well...

The Undead Zone

This article on why realistic graphics make humans look creepy in computer games is quite interesting.

If something behaves in only a slightly human way, we'll fill in the blanks—we'll read humanness into it.

...we identify more deeply with simply drawn cartoon characters ... [that don't] trigger our obsession with the missing details the way a not-quite-photorealistic character does, so we project ourselves onto [them] more easily

Utilitarianism and Censorship

I haven't yet had a chance to look through Utilitarianism: past, present and future, but it seems interesting.

Taking me to that site was this experiment on censorship, which highlighted some of the problems with ISPs reactions to potential copyright violations.

Transit of Venus

I'd been rather unimpressed by the prospect of the transit of venus (see Wired News: Thousands Spy Venus' Rare Transit), but it does raise some points to ponder: No one alive had seen it before yesterday; and more people saw it yesterday than ever before in all of human history (it can't be seen with the naked eye, and only a few people had used telescopes the last few times round). I might pay a bit more attention to the next transit in 8 years.

Electric land-speed record

New scientist is reporting that an attempt on the land-speed record for an electric vehicle is soon to take place. They've just put together more or less off the shelf components (including 52 car batteries) and hope to go at least 400 km/h. Not bad. The existing record was set by a car with 6,000 AA NiMH batteries!

AirPort Express

Apple have come up with what could be the missing link for wiring your computer into your entertainment system -- without wires. This is very nifty, makes me wonder how long until someone can duplicate the functionality on a Linksys wireless router.

If you happen to have one of these lying around...

This is neat. These kids (well, they were kids) had a toy "robot car" they wanted to customize, but at the time the computer hardware wasn't really up to scratch. 18 years later and they can finish the job.

Colossus

The story of the Colossus, a British code breaking computer from WWII, is getting a bit of attention due to the D-Day anniversary. A few interesting points:

• It predates the ENIAC as the world's first electronic computer, but this wasn't widely known as it was kept secret (I can't imagine why, they even went so far as to destroy it.)
• They built ten of them! There was only one ENIAC as far as I know.
• It would supposedly break the codes at roughly the same rate as a modern computer (this is a bit hard to believe, but it was a custom built for the task and could perform many operations in parallel.)
• It wasn't switched off until the war finished, so the valves didn't burn out.
• As always, the key to breaking the German cypher was a human failure. Just goes to show that no matter how hard you try, some idiot will go and stuff it up.

Friday again...

• I've noticed some interesting spams that try to get past filtering software by including what could be legitimate text. This blog chronicles some of the more "creative" (well, they are presumably randomly generated.)
• An interview with VisiCalc's creators 25 years after it was released (it was the first spreadsheet for personnal computers.)
• Killer Robot, a machinima film, was created by a single guy entirely on the computer. It was "filmed" using computer game technology and the voices were generated by computer too. Machinima is really cool, Wired has an article on a similar concept, creating comics out of computer game graphics.
• The Mathematics of Futurama and The Simpsons.

Start your own phone company?

Cringely has written a nice rant about the Linksys WRT54G. This is a very neat bit of technology, but what is really interesting is what could be done with it. It is very cheap, runs Linux and can be upgraded with custom software so that it can do many tasks the manufacturers didn't anticipate (or choose to highlight). Cringely suggests franchises could be sold in a distributed, wireless phone company and ISP. The franchise would consist of an internet connection and a wireless router or two. The franchisee would then sign up users in their area for internet and VoIP (phone) access. The franchisees would be connected to each other in a big "mesh" that would dynamically adapt to the demand and be extremely cheap to roll-out. Bye, bye Telstra...

Update: There seems to have been quite a bit of interest in Cringely's article, and he has a followup.

More Phone Fun

The latest Nokia gadget is a clip on cover that lets you write messages in the air by waving the phone around. There used to be digital clocks that did a similar thing, displaying the time on a swinging pendulum. This addition to phone capabilities may well be another annoyance, but it does have the potential to have some kind of disruptive social effect (like SMS), time will tell. What I particularly like is that it pushes the boundaries of what a phone can be.

Hacking in the Kitchen

Wired has a nice story on Alton Brown, a chef who approaches cooking from a rather more scientific point of view than most people (and has a bigger motorbike than Jamie Oliver, as you can see on his blog.) Quite interesting, especially the disposing of myths about cooking and the focus on the "why" of cooking, rather than the "how". This pizza recipe gives you the general idea.

Yellowstone's Grand Prismatic Spring

It was a photo of the amazing Grand Prismatic Spring that prompted me to include Yellowstone in my US itenary.

Background Briefing on Asbestos

Asbestos is pretty scary stuff, and this is a good story. I'm not a fan of the renovation craze, too many TV shows and the people upstairs are no doubt responsible for that, but now I finally have a much better reason. Renovators are at a very high risk of asbestos related illnesses due to their lack of knowledge, low budgets for safety (and hiring professionals) and tendency to get dodgy contractors in to do a quick and dirty job.

Construction workers are also obviously at a high risk, and the numbers are pretty huge -- 300 deaths per year from accidents and another 2000 or so from illnesses contracted while on the job.

What is also a bit scary is that Canada is the world's largest exporter of asbestos, sending it to third world countries. It's easy to put Canada on a pedestal, they generally compare very well with the USA, but they're hardly perfect.

Leonardo's Dream Machines

This show screened on SBS and was fairly interesting. Though I was bugged by what I think were unfair comparisons between the Da Vinci glider and the Wright brothers' flyer. The Wright flyer was a powered vehicle that managed to fly 120 feet in 12 seconds (their first flight, their best was 24.5 miles in 39 minutes). A 30 second, 100 yard hang glider flight down a hill isn't really comparable. I'm sure there were a few hang-glider/kite style unpowered flights before the Wright brothers' that would have been a better match up.

Indonesia

Background Briefing on Sunday the 30th May (RealAudio, transcipt) had an interesting look into the "Jakarta lobby" and the Lance Collins affair.

Historically Australia and the US backed Suharto (or Sukarno?) as they were worried that Indonesia would "Balkanize" and some of the resulting states may turn communist. This presumably explains why Australia was so keen to appease Indonesia at all costs -- even to the extent of angering the US by withholding intelligence information. It's been a while since communism was a threat though, so you would presume that a group of third-world islands fighting amongst themselves would be less threat to Australia than a militaristic nation with 500,000,000 citizens.

Was our universe created by design?

Michael said this better than I could:

Lightweight description of the "chaotic inflation" theory of the universe's origin, which apparently has the implication that the universe could have been created as an experiment, and with few resources, and now be so small that the experimenter has lost it...

The article mentions various ways that the creator could attempt to communicate with his creation, non of them seem to permit him decreeing that gay marriages are a sin, for example.

More reasons to stay away from antibiotics

Not only will taking too many antibiotics breed superbugs, it could give you asthma and allergies, according to this article. So eating dirt is no longer the only way to avoid getting asthma...

Maybe it wasn't just a bad movie...

New Scientist reports that "a US medical team has requested permission to perform the world's first face transplant." Supposedly the face won't look like either the person's original face or the donor's face due to the underlying skull and muscle structure (and hideous scaring I'd imagine...)

Guide to Springfield, USA

This site has lots of information about Springfield and a map, gleaned by watching The Simpsons a little too closely I suspect.

A Neat Camera Phone Application

This software lets you use a camera phone as wireless "mouse" or keyboard. Very nifty idea, the camera is used to detect the motion of the phone through the air. Must kill the batteries though...

Syntax

Lisp syntax ("lots of silly parentheses") (or more accurately, it's lack of syntax) is beginning to look good! Perl 6 is going to have a lot of operators, nicely displayed in this periodic table.

Fucking computer crashes...

My computer crashed just before posting the following links. Originally there were nice blurbs.

• Wired News: Wartime Wireless Worries Pentagon, "Ban stupidity, don't ban exposing it"
• BBC Archives to be available for pretty much any non-commercial uses.
• What are they hiding in Area 51?
• A super high-res camera.
• An Extensible Programming manifesto.
• Solar power-stations in the Mohave desert.

Toyota Personal Mobility Concept Car

This nifty little concept car has some nice ideas. It's a single person "drive by wire" electric "car" with hubless motors and variable wheel base. This gives it very good manueverability and the ability to recline during high-speed travel and "stand up" to get in and out.

The best bit though, is that they can talk to each other, so you can have one person driving a small train of these cars.

Oil Producing Bacteria and Space Elevators

• Physicists at the University of New Hampshire have found bacteria capable of producing "biodiesel". This reminds me of a small town (on the way to South Australia somewhere...) where they thought they'd discovered oil only to discover it was merely a bacteria that produced an oil like sludge. It's still cheaper to not use oil though...
• JP Aerospace have developed what could be a practical "Space elevator" consisting of a large blimp at a low earth-orbit and other blimps that will carry payloads up to it.

Various Tuesday offerings

• Microsoft has payed out over anti-competitive behaviour towards Opera. The analysis of what was going on was pretty worrying.
• No, I will not fix your computer -- I could do with one of these sometimes. I wouldn't wear it though, so please don't bother.
• The Australia Institute -- I've seen/heard Clive Hamilton from this "left-leaning political thinktank" discussing a few issues lately, including Four Corners on over-consumption and Hack on corporate welfare.

Evolution and Action Figures

• New Scientist reports that Archaeopteryx (the first "bird") may have had four "wings" and glided (like a sugar-glider) rather than flown. Makes sense.
• These guys in the homebrew Atari 2600 scene are doing some pretty amazing things -- it's amazing that people were ever attracted to computer games, when that was all that was on offer.
• Need a GeekMan action-figure?

How do we perceive light?

Some simple explanations on how primary colours "combine" and light waves are perceived by our eyes. Also contains this nice point:

People sometimes speculate about extraterrestrials picking up TV signals from Earth and watching our soap operas. But what is transmitted is so finely tuned to the peculiarities of the human ocular and perceptual system that aliens would struggle to make any sense of it.

The Infant Island of Surtsey, Iceland

Interesting that plants started growing on this island before the volcano even finished erupting.

Computerised Grading, um...

Some interesting comments to this Slashdot story:

If grading is intended as a motivator to encourage each student to perform his/her best, then more effort should yield a higher grade. Likewise, if grading is intended to reflect the student's ability to perform in a real-world situation, effort should probably yield a higher grade: folks who work hard tend to do better than folks who are marginally smarter but don't work hard, in real-life situations. But if grading is intended to reflect only the quality of the work that was submitted, then sure -- effort shouldn't count at all.

And:

Cool idea. Imagine high school students re-writing their essays until the grader software gives them an A+.

This was exactly what we could do in one of my programming classes and it was excellent. We had a deadline, but could make as many submissions as we liked until we were happy with the grade. A nice subversive suggestion in there too:

it would have been my goal to make the most wrong essay I could that would still generate a good grade from the system.

Reading List

Some sites we like:

Science/Technology/Computers

NASA's Earth Observatory

Slashdot

Wired News

New Scientist

New Scientist: The Last Word

Ars Technica

Blogs

Beebo

Masterkill

JWZ

Programming/Software Engineering/Design

Squawks of the Parrot

A List Apart

Jacob Nielsen's Alertbox

Meyerweb

Zeldman's Daily Report

SimpleBits

Joel on Software

Ask Tog

Paul Graham

Humour

The Onion

The Chaser News

Next Generation Airships

This New Scientist interview with Hokan Colting talks about airships being used as telecommunication relay towers, much cheaper and easier to install than satellites (with less signal delay too) and with very large coverage areas due to their height.

Quotations on simplicity in software design

There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. -- C.A.R. Hoare

Corporate welfare

Hack had an interview with Clive Hamilton of the Australia Institute on Monday about the potential $85 million bail-out of Mitsubishi that touched on the issue of "corporate welfare" (The plant hires 3,000 employees with 14,000 in "spin-off" jobs and there was a meeting on Monday.)

Australia spends $16 bilion a year on subsidies (rent relief, tax breaks etc), which is 3% of our GDP. For example, the aluminium industry apparently receives subsidised electricity that works out to be about $40-50,000 per year per worker!

The economics of online gaming

EverQuest players have an average wage of US$3.42/hr, the game is ranked the 77th richest country in the world (with 450,000 "citizens") and it's currency is supposedly rated higher than the Yen and Lira (Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier). That is presumably if everyone "cashed in" for real money, and that probably neglects the labour "imported" from the real world.

This article includes the story of a kid who was bought a $500 level 50 character by his parents and then kept getting killed because he didn't know how play -- the time needed to gain level 50 obviously isn't entirely wasted, as you at least learn how to play the game.

A curiously unfortunate career

Thomas Midgley had the dubious honour of having invented both leaded petrol and CFCs.