brainwagon

Mark Chu Carroll over at the Good Math, Bad Math blogs has a fascination with bizarre bits of math as I do. Today, he had a post about something which I investigated quite a bit a number of years ago: so-called Egyptian Fractions. The ancient Egyptians had a peculiar way of representing fractional numbers. They […]

ESPN is reporting that Athletic slugger Frank Thomas could be about to sign an agreement with the Toronto Blue Jays. Sniff. I really hoped that the A’s might cough up the big bucks to resign Thomas, who was really the only bat in the lineup for the Athletics that any team took seriously. But the […]

Apparently Engadget wasn’t overwhelmed with the out of the box experience. To be honest, I pretty much hate iTunes too, but it wasn’t as grossly annoying as this appeared to be. Apparently Apple has little to fear from Microsoft’s foray into mp3 players.

Lycos News Computer server and software maker Sun Microsystems Inc. said Monday that it had begun to make its Java technology an open-source software project available for free on the Internet.

Brainwagon quotes from the Movie Quote Generator Gort! Klaatu barada brainwagon! Too cool.

Apparently the weather was pretty bad up in Hillsboro, Oregon. Josh had just got a nifty little UMPC, and despite having his power go out, managed to get an update to his blog. Pretty cool! Power out. Still online. » TinyScreenfuls.com Neat!

Check out Kumoon, a first person shooter starring a chick with a grenade launcher. It has versions for both Windows and the Mac. Click here to get the joke. Gameplay could use some refinement, but the physics engine is pretty snazzy. Thanks to Dan for the pointer.

YouTube – Flying Spaghetti Monster spotted in Germany

As an individual with varying degrees of inner security, I can’t help but consider the idea from time to time that I’m frightfully boring. I suppose that most people with an ounce of introspection consider this possibility from time to time, but as a blogger you have quantitative evidence about just how interesting you are. […]

Check out the NIH’s Historical Anatomies on the Web for lots of, well, admittedly gruesome art from important historical works on anatomy. [tags]Public Domain,Anatomy[/tags] Addendum: Apologies for linking to a huge version of the above image.

Well, today was the transit of Mercury (actually, it’s still going on at the moment, but I have work to do, so I’ve folded my tents.) I took my new solar filter and my Meade ETX 90, and brought it to work to show off this relatively infrequent solar event. Lots of people took a […]

Work has been picking up a bit. [tags]Pixar,Ratatouille,Movies[/tags]

I spent a good chunk of my Saturday at the Vintage Computer Festival, which was an opportunity to see some of the old eye-burning blocky graphics, listen to barely filtered square waves, and muse about my humble beginnings as a programmer. We also caught the tour of the Computer History Museum’s Visible Storage, and caught […]

Mercury will transit in front of the disk of the sun on Wednesday. It’s kind of a cool thing to witness (only happens about 12 times a century) if you have the right equipment. Back in 1999, I captured about an hour of video of the transit that that year and created the animated GIF […]

The 11th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was published in 1911, and is the last edition of that work which is currently in the public domain. I noticed that the Distributed Proofreaders released the first bit of this for download. I’m looking forward to the rest. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 by […]