brainwagon

This guy is even more crazy than me: he built a computer entirely out of surface mount transistors (well, nearly entirely, it’s got a few TTL level parts, but the CPU and ALU are entirely built from discrete surface mount transistors (3000 of them). MT15 computer [tags]Electronics,Homebrew Hardware[/tags]

Weird Al is the greatest. YouTube – White & Nerdy

Well, yesterday morning I got notification that my new Apple Macbook had shipped from Suzhou, China, and later that day, it had arrived in Anchorage, Alaska. This morning, I found that it had been through Indianapolis and then on to Emeryville, California, and was on a truck for delivery. And here it is. This one […]

Here’s a rather remarkable photograph of the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle as they passed in front of the sun. Thierry Legault – Transit of ISS and Atlantis in front of the Sun [tags]Astrophotography[/tags]

I must admit: I’m a bit of a math nut. Solving interesting mathematical problems makes me feel cool. But I must admit that I’ve suspected for a long time that one branch of mathematics is almost completely useless, and that’s trigonometry. By way of evidence, witness the following link: Per Vivere [To Live]: Trigonometry and […]

I normally only closely follow the Oakland Athletics on a day to day basis, and sometimes try to see what else is going on in the American League. But as I have often said, the cool thing about baseball is that you never know what you are gonna see when you come to the ball […]

This begins as a product announcement, but is really just a clumsy way of introducing a story. Flipping through my usual news sources, I’ve seen a couple articles about PeakStream, a company which has a set of software products for creation of high performance code for GPUS. Normally, such a thing would be of mild […]

If you get a degree in computer science, you end up taking classes on the theory of computation. Here you learn about something called a Turing Machine: an abstract computer that is very simple, yet can be shown to be able to compute anything that any other computer can compute. The Turing machine consists of: […]

It’s not just American’s who have a lamentable education in the sciences. Witness the question above. Note that this French gentlemen had to resort to a poll of the audience to get answers to the question “what revolves around the earth?” Apparently there is no word in French for “heliocentricity”. [tags]Lamentable Science Education[/tags]

Aye… Eee…Arrr… Today be International Talk Like a Pirate Day. All ye scurvy dogs, brandish your cutlasses and send yer enemies to Davy Jones’ locker! If that’s not your style, then I suggest you watch the greatest pirate movie ever made: Muppet Treasure Island. [tags]International Talk Like A Pirate Day[/tags]

We’ve learned a lot about dinosaurs since 1915, when this book was published, but heck, who can resist a book about dinosaurs? Dinosaurs, by William Diller Matthew [tags]Project Gutenberg,Public Domain[/tags]

I wrote a long rant about Scoble’s latest whine, but when I proofread it, I couldn’t imagine that anyone cares. Shortly after, I had a phonecall from my mom, and like we do when we don’t have much to talk about, we ended up talking about recipes. Apparently my sister had been making some pickles, […]

As someone might know, I’m a big fan of Nintendo. I never had the old NES, but I’ve had at least one of every game system Nintendo has shipped since then, and really like a lot of their games. It is with some interest then that I am watching the developments surrounding the Wii: Nintendo’s […]

It’s been a while since I checked in on Amy Gahran’s blog, but today I’m glad I did, because she has a thought provoking idea: Contentious » How Movie Theaters Might Thrive in an On-Demand, Long Tail World The idea? Movie theaters market directly to consumers, allowing them to rent movie theaters and have screenings […]

Checkout some of the keywords from this article on the Guardian. “…elephantine parturition… Security vulerabilities come free with all version. … interminable corporate nightmare. … only a shadow of what it was envisaged… engineers were trudging through their death march…. Ouch. Ultimately the article makes the (IMO entirely correct) point that the future lies in […]