While perusing the web, I sometimes encounter odd brain-related products. Today some random link took me to the
Soda King, a purveyor of unusual soda pops.
Brainwash Soda combines an unnatural blue color and a skull logo with a brain portruding. How cool is that?
Or perhaps you need a
brain shaped Jello mold? Or perhaps a budget brain and skull model, perhaps from brain-mart.com.
I’ve long known about Nomic, a game where the players make up the rules as the game is played. Dvorak - A Nomic Card Game is a similar interesting idea, modified to be a card game. All cards start out blank, and the players make up and add cards as the game is played. Cool!
Modern GPUs are interesting bits of silicon. They pack a huge number of relatively slow floating point processors in parallel to achieve large throughput. Because of this, GPU performance has vastly exceeded the Moore’s law style improvements for the last decade. Recently other application programmers have begun to try to use the huge amount of compute power to other applications. In perusing some Slashdot links this morning, I ran across gpgpu.org which has links to all sorts of helpful resources.
If you haven’t seen NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day
website, you should check it out. The most startling picture I’ve seen in quite some time is APOD: 2003 December 8 - An Antarctic Total Solar Eclipse.
Simply awesome.
In a bit of synchronicity, today’s llinks have a decidedly crypto
theme. Julian sent me a
link to the Enigma-E, a modern electronic equivalent to the original Enigma machine. Unfortunately, these are apparently only available in the UK and the Netherlands (so far), otherwise my credit card would be debitted already. It just seems too cool.
Bruce Schneier’s Cryptogram
coincidently arrived, and had a couple of interesting links. The first was a list of unsolved codes and ciphers. I knew of a number of the more famous ones, such as the Beale and Voynich ciphers, but didn’t realize that some of the cryptographic messages from the Zodiac killer remained unbroken.
Another good link was to a collection of papers on fooling biometric fingerprint readers. I’ve seen a lot in the news about increasing use of these sensors, and it’s interesting to see how easily they may be fooled.
Well, it finally happened. My blog was spammed by a whole bunch of comments which linked to Lolita-style porn websites. Thanks for the interest, but I’d prefer if people didn’t hyperlink this sight to all kinds of websites featuring women pretending to be underage. Call me silly, but that’s just
the kind of guy I am.
There is a recent trend I’ve noticed in TV programs. It’s the practice of recapping the show that’s currently in progress after virtually every commercial break. I first noticed this in shows on the Discovery Channel when they doing "Top Ten Countdown" where they would take the time to recap what the previous entries were. It then spread to shows like Forensic Files. Last night, this odious
practice shifted to a drama show, namely Tru Calling.
Do television writers think our attention span is so limited that we
need to be reminded what were watching after every commercial break? C’mon, we’re already watching you show. Don’t insult us by beating us with
repeating the details of your show in progress every fifteen minutes.
This concludes my daily peeve.
It’s quiz time: which of these do you find funnier:
this cartoon or this one?
Scary fact: one author actually believes his cartoon.
