brainwagon

I recently joined orkut.com, and find it pretty interesting to participate in a community based soley upon invitations/trust. One of the first interesting things I discovered was a link to a cute toy apparently sold in the Bletchley Park Museum: a single rotor Enigma machine. Nifty! You can read more about it Stuart Savory’s Pocket [...]

When I was in at Princeton in the late 80′s, I remember Pat Hanrahan talking about the Visible Human Project, a project to produce detailed 3-D models of both a normal male and female, using CT, NMRI and anatomical images. Yes, anatomical images. They sliced the male up in 1mm intervals to match the imaging [...]

Today, Alex Rodriguez was traded to the Yankees for Alfonso Soriano. Apparently A-Rod will play third base for the Yankees. I bet the Red Sox are wishing they’d have ponied up a bit more cash and done the deal now. While the Yankees will field quite possibly the greatest offensive team of my lifetime, it [...]

Charles Darwin was born February 12, 1809 in Shrewsbury England. In addition to being the world’s greatest barnacle expert of his time, he also took time out to write the rather famous On the Origin of Species, which laid out his theory of evolution. I think strong arguments can be made is history’s single most [...]

This weekend I had the pleasure of driving out to visit “Steamboat Ed” Haas. Ed is a heck of an amazing guy who (among other things) has his own steam powered launch and has worked on Battlebots. He nicely had a bunch of people out to his newly completed 2-story shop, and we had a [...]

Over the years I’ve been interested in complex and chaotic phenomena. Anyone looking at my desk would confirm this to be true. Sometimes I think scientists have all the fun though, like when they use half a million ping pong balls to study the motion of avalanches in snow. There are many unanswered questions, such [...]

One year ago today, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on reentry. All hands aboard perished. In honor of the sacrifice these men and women made in the pursuit of mankind’s dream of spaceflight, NASA has designated the Mars rover Spirit’s landing place The Columbia Memorial Station. To remember the crew of the Challenger, Opportunity’s [...]