brainwagon

This comes from the betta group on Yahoo. Fire extinguished by exploding fish bowl in Eagan

Yahoo! News – Decomposing Whale Explodes on Street The decomposing remains of a 60-tonsperm whale exploded on a busy Taiwan street, showering nearby cars and shops with blood and organs and stopping traffic for hours, local newspapers said.

Today Slashdot is running a story about hektor, a robotic graffitti artist. It is a computer controlled robot, driven by an Adobe Illustrator plugin that moves a spraycan over a wall and paints a desired pattern. The cute thing about it is that it uses a very nifty drive mechanism. Rather than using a traditional [...]

Pixar has decided to end its negotiations with Disney for a new contract after the current five movie deal expires. What does this mean to the company? Who cares, what I want to know is what does it mean for the stock price!?

SCO is apparently the target of the MyDoom e-mail virus. Infected machines are supposed to take part in a denial of service attack against SCO beginning February 1st. Toward that end, SCO has offered a $250K reward for information which leads to the conviction of the miscreant who created the virus. It’s hard not to [...]

How about a genetically modified flower that signals the presence of unexploded landmines by changing color based upon the presence of nitrogen dioxide? The plants grow quickly, and if their roots pass near buried ordnance they turn bright red. Now that’s thinking outside the box.

I’ve become my own latest project. During a recent checkup, my doctor noted my increasing weight (323 lbs) and my high cholesterol. He recommended that I join Weight Watchers, begin a regular exercise routine, and come back to see him in a few months to have my cholesterol rechecked. Well, on my own I managed [...]

I’m kind of fascinated by the whole “balancing robot” thing so I found Dan Piponi’s Equibot to be pretty interesting. It uses a single Sharp infrared distance sensor to measure the distance to the ground, and tries to maintain that distance via by driving a pair of modified servo motors with an Atmel ATMEGA chip. [...]

Over Christmas my wife and son presented me with a couple of new Siamese Fighting Fish, or bettas. Betta is actually a fish genus, with many species, the most common of which is Betta Splendens. They are called Siamese Fighting Fish because they are aggressive nasty little fighters, and you can’t keep more than a [...]

I’ve got a lot of books. I have no idea really how many. For a long time I wish I actually had a master list of all the books I own. This goes beyond mere anal retentiveness: it dawns on me that I probably have thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars worth of [...]

Satire? Or not? Check out Tornado Fighters and try to decide. The demo is AWESOME!

I ran across The case of the 500-mile email while reading Jef’s website. A great story.

Okay, it’s nothing really innovative. Jef Poskanzer was the first guy I know who did it. Then my friend Jeff Eaton did it. Now I’ve done it: write a program to loot images of of Microsoft’s TerraServer. Basically I wrote a simple Python script that when given a latitude/longitude in the US, constructs an html [...]

Along with my usual rash of bills, today’s mail call included a DVD from Project Gutenberg. This CD contains 4 gigabytes of public domain texts, about 9500 individual volumes. Nifty! A single DVD which could be the start of a serious library. I’ve got some ideas for projects that make use of some of these [...]

Craig Good gave a link to melting metals in your home microwave. Surprisingly nifty, although I might be tempted to wear a lead apron. Of course, you could always do it the old fashioned way.