See ya Wikipedia
Knol, Google’s online encyclopedia with articles written by verified users, is now publicly accessible. It looks great and already has lots of good content. Hopefully it won’t devolve into the deletion bickering of Wikipedia.
Articles in quicklinks
Edit the text of any website
From Cut and paste one line of code to make any website editable:
javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true';
document.designMode='on'; void 0- Copy the code to the clipboard
- Browse to the site you want to edit
- Paste the code into the address bar and press return
- Edit the site’s text however you like
Let the pranking begin.
Like Twitter, but fast and open
Dave’s article How to think about identi.ca on his excellent blog Scripting News pointed me to the nice new twitter replacement, identi.ca. I’m now on it as xyzzyb. Currently the service is really snappy, we’ll just have to see how it scales as more users load it up. One nifty feature (although I probably won’t use it) is that it can slurp your IM away messages as status updates. Now I just need an iPhone/iPod touch API.
Mars has water ice!
Either Mars has water ice or Doctor Manhattan is messing with our heads.
BMW Gina
The BMW Gina concept car with a fabric, instead of metal, skin looks amazing.
Javascript Video Lectures
The videos are extremely well done. I rank them right up there with the videos of Knuth lecturing about TeX for clarity and flow.
Teaching Computer Science without a Computer
I am so going to be all over this in a few years: teach children Computer Science without a computer
Caffeine protects brain
Woo! Daily caffeine may protect the brain from the damaging effects of cholesterol They say that this may explain why caffeine drinkers have a lower risk of alzheimer’s. Bacon, eggs, coffee. Eat it up.
World War Z movie
How awesome is it that the World War Z movie script is written by J. Michael Straczynski (writer of Babylon 5)? I’ll tell you: so awesome.
Basis of life found on an extrasolar planet
More support for panspermia, Molecular Basis of Life Discovered on Extrasolar Planet.
Mario's Jumping Calculus
Mario’s jump moves are derived from basic physics of motion, and the calculus-based equations are in the source, nicely formatted
The progression of cool
The progression of cool (images preserved locally for posterity):
and, for sake of completeness:
But “coolest-est” is clearly the apex of the meme.
Iraq War is more expensive than you think
And the borrowed trillions have to come from somewhere. Because “the saving rate [in America] is zero,” says Stiglitz, “that means that you have to finance [the war] by borrowing abroad. So China is financing America’s war.” The US is now operating at such a deficit, in fact, that it doesn’t have the money to bail out its own banks. “When Merrill Lynch and Citibank had a problem, it was sovereign funds from abroad that bailed them out. And we had to give up a lot of shares of our ownership. So the largest shareowners in Citibank now are in the Middle East. It should be called the MidEast bank, not the Citibank.” This creates a precedent of dependence, “and whether we become dependent on Middle East oil money, or Chinese reserves – it’s that dependency that people ought to worry about. That is a big change. The amount of borrowing in the last eight years, on top of the borrowing that began with Reagan – that has all changed the US’s economic position in the world.”
- The War in Iraq is even more expensive than you think it is
ancient bacteria are reclaiming the ocean
Ancient Bacteria + Human Pollution vs. Modern Ocean Ecosystem- thanks to pollution ancient species of bacteria are reclaiming the oceans
- toxic algae attacking marine mammals
- toxic algae invading coastal waters
- tide of plastic debris spreads through the oceans
- increasing seawater acidity threatening coral, fish, and other aquatic species
- massive island of floating trash in the Pacific is twice the size of the continental United States
The Martin Luther King you don't see on TV
Martin Luther King, Jr.New blackest material created
New blackest material created – check out that picture, the material looks like a hole in the table.
6 Megapixels is the ideal digital camera resolution
It turns out that six megapixels is the ideal digital camera resolution. Less than six and there is too little resolution, greater than six without significantly increasing the size of the camera and there is too much noise
Hacked version of Super Mario Bros.
video of a hacked version of Super Mario Bros. — hilarious if you’ve ever played the original
Mathematics of Traffic Jams
Even geeks go to a crazy place when the discussion turns to the mathematics of traffic jams. Here’s a nicely animated explanation of how traffic patterns should work
Desktop Tower Defense
Desktop Tower Defense – a highly addictive flash game wherein you design a layout of towers to stop creeps from crossing your desktop. The creeps (except flying creeps) can’t move through or destroy your towers so they have no choice but to wind through the maze of towers you construct. The game prevents you from sealing the creeps into an unsolvable maze. Seeing a stubborn creep manage to wind its way through your maze only to be done in by your last killzone? Priceless.
Garfield without Garfield
want to make the comic strip Garfield funny, weird, and sad? take out everything Garfield says- an even better take: Realfield, where Garfield is replaced by a lifelike cat
Fear brains, not robots
Forget the robots, we should fear the disembodied brains that can fly F-22s. Does this count as artifical intelligence?
Instructional Design Resources: Museums do it Better
Instructional Design Resources- Library web design: museums do it better
Halo voice actors
the voice actors behind Halo with screenshots of their game characters. I’m surprised at how much Sergeant Reynolds looks like Nathan Fillion.
Seth MacFarlane speaking at the writers' strike
China's Underwater Museum
China is building an underwater museum to house a shipwreck from the 13th century
Pilot vs. Passenger with iPhone
hilarious smackdown from an airliner pilot to a passenger with an iPhone doubting the weather delay
City Data
Tons of graphed and google mapped data on US cities. Colorado is a hotbed of conflicting politics.
Finished: Half-Life 2
Finished: Half-Life 2
Review: 4/5
Excellent action, atmosphere, level design, characters, and story.
Car of the future
Aptera – a plugin electric hybrid car. For short distances the car will be driven off of the stored energy in its batteries and essentially get a huge number for miles per gallon (think 1000+). The further the car is driven the batteries deplete and it gradually switches over to gasoline power and eventually reaches 130 miles per gallon after 300 miles per gallon.
Prime Number Patterns
When graphed a certain way, there are remarkable patterns within the sequence of prime numbers.
Why I never hire brilliant men
A transcript of a fascinating article from February 1924:
Why I never hire brilliant men
Interesting not only for its controversial topic, but for its description of business operations in the 1910s and 20s.
Free programming tips are worth every penny
Wil Shipley shares some great tips on programming and program design
How do Chinese characters work?
What’s a good way to understand the complex system of how Chinese characters actually work? Design it from the ground up using English as a starting point.
If English was written like Chinese
This article does a fantastic job of explaining not only how written Chinese works, but describes the logic behind it. The article covers everything from pictographs to radicals to homophones to the incorporation of foreign words. Rather than going through the, admittedly esoteric, process of introducing the reader to actual Chinese characters; English is translated into a character based writing system.
Zero Punctuation Fanboy
Links to great reviews of games by Zero Punctuation, for your browsing pleasure:And, for good measure, here’s a link to Yahtzee’s blog: Fully Ramblomatic
The cake is a lie
The awesome Portal is getting some well deserved recognition:- Slashdot covers it with the importance of Portal
- Gamers with Jobs has an article, Portal
- MTV Multiplayer makes a good case for Portal having the move of the year, Never Mind Game Of The Year, “Portal” Has The MOVE Of The Year
- Of course there is the requisite Penny Arcade comic with corresponding blog post
Right or Left?
At first I could only see her spinning counter-clockwise, then she switched and I could only see her spinning clockwise. Now I can switch her spin back and forth with relative ease. What does that mean?
Same for Sarah, except she started off seeing her spin clockwise.
South Korea's Cheering Technology
We are beaten, we can never match this. Our crowd demo technology peaked with invention of two sided placards.
The cheering section of this South Korean crowd is wearing a jacket with a different color on the front and back, a third color on the inside flaps, and they do shading by sitting or standing.
Right out of Myst.
Behold! The sea organ.
The Sea Organ (morske orgulje) is located on the shores of Zadar, Croatia, and is the world’s first pipe organ that is played by the sea. Simple and elegant steps, carved in white stone, were built on the quayside. Underneath, there are 35 pipes with whistle openings on the sidewalk. The movement of the sea pushes air through, and – depending on the size and velocity of the wave – musical chords are played. The waves create random harmonic sounds.