brainwagon

I must admit: I haven’t a clue as to how the whole Disney-acquires-Pixar thing is going to work out, but I do know one thing: it’s probably good that John Lasseter will be helping out on the whole theme park thing for Disney. The one thing that the Disney parks seem to have suffered from [...]

We don’t get much snow here, but I thought I might archive this for future reference, just because it’s cool. Save a Snowflake for Decades – Popular Science 1. Set microscope slides, coverslips and superglue outside when it’s 20°F or colder to chill them. Catch flakes on the slides or pick them up with cold [...]

I’m sorry, but this is just wrong. Terribly wrong.

Courtesy of hack-a-day comes this awesome story of a student project to make a robotic rover whose purpose is to eradicate ticks.   It basically follows a buried underground wire along the perimeter of the property, all the while releasing carbon dioxide gas.   Ticks are apparently attracted to the CO2, anc collect along the course, and [...]

Well, Carmen and I haven’t gotten out to see many first run movies lately, but tonight Pixar’s Monday Film series stumbed on an old favorite: Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981). Back when this film was made, Raimi was a mere 21 years old. In some ways, this shows: the movie has a fairly slim [...]

You might have noticed if you are a long time reader of this blog that I’m fascinated by codes and ciphers, particularly the kind that were developed before computers really came on the scene.   That’s why I’m finding the M4 Message Breaking Project interesting: they are attempting to break three two as yet unbroken code [...]

I laughed out loud. Scoble didn’t think it was funny, and just said “Ouch”. Of course all that is truly funny is true.  This is what you reap when your product development is all about filling out long checklists of features and signing partnership deals with third parties.Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Parody, You Tube

What more needs to be said? Technorati Tags: Nuclear Bomb Computer, Slide Rule

Phil Plait’s blog is the first mention I’ve read that actor Darren McGavin had passed away. Phil and I must have been watching the same TV shows as kids, because I loved Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and have recently found through the miracle of TIVO that the episodes still hold up fairly well, which can [...]

It’s a strange fact that any two words (or interests) that you might have will eventually find a webpage that illustrates them both.  Of course, every geek in the universe likes Legos, and a couple of years back I made an aborted stab at learning something about Mayan hieroglyphics.   I didn’t think I’d find a [...]

Via Ars Technica is the announcement that many films from the National Archives will be made available via Google Video.  Their pilot program had 104 videos, consisting of many newreel clips from WWII, documentaries about the formation of the national parks service, and documentaries from Nasa including the 1969 documentary The Eagle Has Landed, documenting [...]

It looks like I’ll be attending the Maker’s Faire in San Mateo coming up on April 22nd and 23rd. My proposal to show my Atari 2600 Enigma Machine was accepted, so I guess I get to setup a little table display and yack at people about writing programs for the old Atari 2600. If I [...]

Okay, a total fluff link.  How lame is it that actor Daniel Craig, poised to replace Pierce Brosnan as the latest James Bond, can’t drive a stick?   It’s bad enough that he wears a life jacket while in a boat. I’m not expecting good things.

Apparently the peakcock mantis shrimp packs a mighty wallop, which can even shatter the glass of aquariums. They also are responsible for the introduction of a new word to my vocabulary: “shrimpoluminescence”. Catch the linked video below. USATODAY.com – Shrimp spring into shattering action The speed of the strike (up to 50 mph, or 23 [...]

Juan Buhler (former SIGGRAPH sketch chair, current Pixarian, and cool street photographer) sent me a link to his cool idea for using the video ipod to store maps. He realized that the thumbnail viewer in his iPod video displays six thumbnails in each row of his video iPod, so he stitched together a map of [...]