brainwagon

I’ve scanned and created another document, an article from the Gleanings for the ATM column that ran for years in the magazine Sky and Telescope. This article is by Dick Buchroeder and discusses the plans for a Catadioptric Herschelian Telescope, an interesting telescope design with tilted optics. If you aren’t interested in telescope making, you [...]

I did a bit more research on djvu, and have done some more experiments. Long ago, I rescued a huge number of old Scientific American magazines from the dumpster of our local library. I grew up reading the Amateur Scientist column conducted by C. L. Stong, and of course Martin Gardner’s superb Mathematical Games. I [...]

“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought [...]

After our day of enjoying fine art, we decided to go out and get some delicious Thai food from Thai Spice which is located just south of Golden Gate Park, and then went to the Marin Headlands for a bit of a drive near Point Bonito. The remnants of many old gun emplacements are still [...]

Carmen and I went to the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco today to get away from the war news coming out of Iraq and to get a chance to view a real DaVinci, his famous Woman with an Ermine, which is on loan from the Czartorski Museum in Krakow. There were also a [...]

Bill and Anne were nice enough to send me this spiffy postcard from Japan. Mmm. Sushi.

I have a bunch of papers that are not valuable, but are rare and hard to find. Some I have only as faded Xeroxes, such as a copy of Anton Kutter’s treatise on Schiefspiegler telescopes, and Arnold Leonard’s work on Yolo telescopes. Others are in collections which are out of print, such as Tom Duff’s [...]

I recently spotted this article on the subject of spotting bogus science. It’s enormously easy to be hoodwinked by science, and these seven rules can help you spot the quacks from real science. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or [...]

Just for kicks, I tried creating a simple shockwave animation. I generated this with ming via php. Bindings are also available for Python and Ruby. Okay, it’s pretty boring. But if it works, perhaps something better will be forthcoming.

This is just a potpourri of FPGA related items. I’m fairly interested in hardware design (although have not really done very much of it). I’ve been looking for some cheap programmable hardware, and found out about Digilent. They have boards based upon the Xilinx Spartan II FPGAs for around $100, and the Coolrunner CPLD for [...]

The new up and coming display technology is Organic Light Emitting Diodes, or OLED displays. OLEDs will be cheaper to manufacture, have a much faster response time, don’t need to be backlit, draw less power, are brighter, and can be viewed over a much larger viewing angle. In short, they are very nearly the ideal [...]

Allrighty, I know, if I am going to get irritated by the ignorance of human beings, I shouldn’t read Slashdot. A recent article detailed China’s desire to mine the moon for minerals. Never mind that it is absurd (can we name a single element so precious that it would justify the cost of rocket launches [...]

I love to watch nature documentaries and the like on PBS, but most of them go over information that has been rehashed a million times. But just when you get complacent, you realize that there are still things out there which are big and yet largely unknown. One of the most unusual is the Oarfish, [...]