brainwagon

Yesterday and today, the TechShop in Menlo Park held an open house. I had heard of this place before, but it is in Menlo Park, which is a bit more than an hour from me, so I never really seriously considered joining. I must admit, having driven down and visited the place today, I’m definitely [...]

Boing Boing: Symphony for old IBM mainframe In 1964, an Icelandic IBM 1401 mainframe engineer figured out how to get the machine to emit beautiful, bassy notes, and composed a symphony for it. Now his son is touring the symphony wiht interpretive dance thrown in. Wikipedia has a nice entry on the IBM 1401, including [...]

From Ed Felton’s Freedom to Tinker blog: Let me say right up front that I have not accepted the Jesus Phone as my personal Lord and Savior. The rest of what he has to say about the iPhone and its possible impact on the world of cellular phones is pretty good too.

Phew. I was on Ratatouille for almost two years, and today it’s finally in theaters. I wonder if all you crazy people camped out waiting for your chance to buy an iPhone are going to cut into our weekend box office. Click here to find out about all the people camping out for the iPhone. [...]

I hope that the ghost of Chief Justice Earl Warren rises from his grave to haunt the Supreme Court. Prepare to set your clocks back fifty years. Supreme Court: Schools can’t use race to assign students To be fair, I haven’t read the actual decision (PDF link). I’ll try to do so tomorrow and have [...]

Holy spy satellites Bat Man! Check out this awesome image of the ISS taken from the Clay Center Observatory in Boston with a 25″ telescope. APOD: 2007 June 28 – A Visit from Atlantis Now, imagine a telescope three times larger, aimed down at the earth from there.

I know I’ve been a bit over the map with my postings lately, but I’ve been catching up on my blogroll, and there are some pretty diverse topics. From Bruce Schneier comes an interesting article pointing at research which shows that the Census department supplied data that enabled the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII, [...]

First of all, I’d like to just say one thing: BONG HITS 4 JESUS How many of you felt that this phrase was trying to convince you to use illegal drugs? What if it were on a banner held by teenagers? The majority of Supreme Court justices thought this rather comical phrase was a sufficient [...]

Over on Eric Wolf’s blog, he writes an interesting post about the Internet boom phenomenon: Lord, let there be one more tech boom, I promise not to blow it this time… I have a slightly different take. We all like to jump on the bandwagon when something is new and exciting. I’m a lucky man: [...]

I was reminded that the deadline for cheaper prices for attending SIGGRAPH is this Friday. That reminded me that I had not gone out and discovered what papers will actually be presented at this year’s conference, so a moment’s Googling revealed: SIGGRAPH 2007 Papers Are any other brainwagon readers going to be at SIGGRAPH? Podcasters? [...]

The Hydra Consome Game Developer’s Kit is getting quite a bit of play on various blogs. It’s a little game console based upon the Propeller chip created by Parallax (more here) which is an interesting little gadget. It has eight relatively simple cores sitting on a single chip, and is relatively cheap and fast. You [...]

Slashdot had an article today marking the 25th anniversary of the release of Ridley Scott’s vision of Bladerunner, and points at Mythbuster Adam Savage’s claim that it stands at the apex of science fiction effects, created in a time before computer graphics. I think I agree. I’m tempted to add another Ridley Scott film into [...]

I’ve read quite a bit about computer chess and checkers (although my own program, Milhouse, has been fairly stagnant for over a month). I’ve read somewhat less about systems which play games like backgammon, othello, poker or mancala. But it turns out I’m almost completely ignorant of the state of the art in programs to [...]

If you wandered into my office, you’d probably be shocked by the vast amount of just raw paper I have lying around. I scribble notes, I use photocopy machines, I print stuff all the time. And I have lots of books and magazine articles I’ve clipped over the years. I’d like to do some optical [...]

I was noodling around, and found reference to a patent on an early “mirror screw” version of mechanical television. Don’t know that that is? Don’t worry, this link is more for me than for you. REFLECTING AND SCANNING APPARATUS – Google Patents Addendum: It’s amazing what you can find online. Archive.org has a scanned copy [...]