brainwagon

Scobleizer – Microsoft Geek Blogger » Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs? Lots of Microsoft program managers push back and say “normal people don’t care about HTML quality.”That might be true (although we all hate it when our pages don’t display right on all browsers, or when they are slow to load) but the […]

Well, it’s kind of late, and I’m just back from my trip to the Computer History Museum, where they unveiled their restoration of a DEC PDP-1. The PDP-1 is notable for many reasons, not the least of which is that it was used to create what might possibly be the first video game: Spacewar!. I […]

Here’s a picture of the 36 inch telescope at Chabot Observatory, with an 8 second exposure and some GIMP work to bring out some of the details. The shot is illuminated mostly by the (nearly full) moonlight. The camera is actually pretty noise free in green light, and the red isn’t terrible, but blue is […]

This weekend’s activity was Marin Human Race, a 4 mile race (which we did at a walk, naturally) in the neighborhood of the Marin Civic Center. The weather was beautiful, the pace was fun, and we had a good time, although today I feel like I may have gotten a bit too much sun and […]

An as-yet unfinished draft of Bob Hearn’s MIT PhD thesis Games, Puzzles and Computation is online.   I first became aware of some of these results at a conference a couple of years ago, which showed that sliding block puzzles like Rush Hour belong to the class of PSPACE-complete problems.   What does that mean?  From the […]

John Kenneth Galbraith – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia “It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought.”

Ever do something stupid? I did. It’s my birthday. I’m finding it hard to be enthused about it. I wish I wasn’t so freakin’ retarded.

Richard Cohen thinks that algebra is highly overrated. Here’s the thing, Gabriela: You will never need to know algebra. I have never once used it and never once even rued that I could not use it. You will never need to know — never mind want to know — how many boys it will take […]

Well, I couldn’t resist. I was in a rare bookstore in Salt Lake, and saw that they had both volumes of Johnson’s Natural History: The Illustrated Animal Kingdom. Doesn’t ring any bells? It’s the book that inspired many an O’Reilly book cover with its etchings of many different animals, over 1500 of them. It was […]

While flying back from Salt Lake City this evening, the fifty something year old women sitting next to me had a RAZR phone, a video Ipod, and when I glanced over, I noticed that she was listing to the Science Friday podcast. Technology really can change the world. [tags]Podcasting[/tags]

You might have noticed that I’ve been a bit lax in updating my blogs. The reason is simple: I have been preparing for, and during the weekend attending the SIGGRAPH sketch jury. To anyone who is interested in serving on the jury: I heartily recommend it. While it is a stack of work, it is […]

Courtesy of Kevin Bjorke and a few extra minutes during our SIGGRAPH sketch committee meeting, check out Plasma Pong: a very strange pong game that uses fluid dynamics implemented entirely on the GPU. It quite simply rocks! Check it out. [tags]GPGPU,Graphics,Fluid Dynamics,Link of the Day[/tags] Addendum: It even runs on my antiquated laptop!

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Keith Devens has a nice collection of  Programming Fonts with links on his website.  I must admit to liking the new Microsoft Consolas font, but I mostly use Bistream Vera Mono, since it’s free and widely available on the systems I use.  Dina looks okay to me.   When I used Windows more, I used Andale […]

Especially when the A’s win! A terrific game against the Halos this evening. Barry Zito went 7 2/3 innings, getting 4 strikeouts, walking two, and registering a big goose egg on runs. Woohoo! He tosses some wicked looking loopy curve balls that once again gave me faith in his abilities. Well done Barry! Defensive highlights: […]