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