brainwagon

Good thing this isn’t my tax dollars at work: After two years of work, with a purpose-built steel machine wired up to high-speed cameras, microphones and electronic sensors, a team of Japanese researchers has finally proved that a hard-boiled egg can jump. All it takes, according to Yutaka Shimomura and colleagues of Keio University, is […]

Sometimes you find a book that seems uniquely written for your interests: such is Baseball Hacks, the latest O’Reilly book in their illustrious “Hacks” series. It is basically a manual on how to use computers to fuel your obsession for baseball statistics, and includes a wide vareity of cool things you can do with a […]

A while back, I did some research on the early days of television, and provide some links that might help you create your own replica. The make blog linked to a nice scan that shows some plans from 1928 for building your own “Baird Televisor” which I thought were really cool. MAKE: Blog: HOW TO […]

It’s been some time since I posted anything of interest to the musicians in my target demographic, or those who are interested in field recording.  Check out this link on Instructables for a CD quality field recording rig which is entirely battery powered and cost < $1000.   The most interesting choice is to use the […]

After a shaky opening day performance, Barry Zito came back and pitched six innings, giving up only one hit against the Mariners. Relievers Calero, Kennedy and Street shut the Mariners down the rest of the way, giving up no further hits and giving the Athletics their first shutout of the season. This follows a 2 […]

This blog article reminded me of a part of my life that is long past: the times of the all nighter.   Back in my undergrad days, I would fairly regularly pull all-nighters, usually working on some kind of computer programming assignment.   I think this culminated in a massive 72 hour awake-athon, where I consumed over […]

On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. [tags]Moments in Time[/tags]

I don’t know why Wesley Elberry’s weblog hasn’t gotten onto my reading list before, but today I found an interesting article detailing how ID luminary William Dembski decided to call the Department of Homeland Security on a scientists solely on the basis of the rather curious assertion of Forrest Mimms (yeah, the guy who wrote […]

Let’s face it, finding a Good April Fool’s Day gag is pretty much like trying to find diamonds: you process tons of ore in a gritty, tedious, mind-numbingly boring search for that one gleaming nugget which stands as the epitome of comic genius. I submit that search engines are very bad at finding comedy, so […]

A couple of week’s ago, my old boss from my days in the RenderMan group, Tony Apodaca stopped into my office with a bit of memorabilia from our shared past: a caricature of me drawn by Pixar artist Jeff Pidgeon that was used in the credits section of Pixar’s Typestry product that I worked on […]

I’ve decided to pack up one of my geekiest projects, my Atari 2600 Enigma Machine and bring it to the Maker’s Faire in San Mateo in three weeks. If anyone has read my blog and would like to stop in and meet the lunatic behind these pages, I’d be happy to say “Hi” and discuss […]

You can view the entire Nova episode The Great Robot Race on the PBS website. It is all about the 2nd DARPA Grand Challenge Race, where autonomous vehicles race across the desert outside Las Vegas. Cool stuff! [tags]Robots,DARPA Grand Challenge[/tags]

I am not alone in my assertion that the good old days weren’t that good. “The idle chatterer is the sort who says that people nowadays are much more wicked than they used to be.”— Theophrastus

USA Today is running an article announcing the publication of The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You can order your own copy from amazon.com. What’s really amazing to me is some of the responses: you can read some of the entertaining hate mail he’s received here. Perhaps it isn’t really very funny though: the […]

It was announced today that Microsoft was facing a software crisis: their short sighted engineers only allocated space for a two digit total for the number of months late that Windows Vista will slip, and it is now feared that when they finally do ship Vista 119 months late, it will cause… Okay, okay, it’s […]