brainwagon

For quite some time, I’ve been meaning to read Simon Winchester’s book Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883, but haven’t had the time. Now that I finally got a CD player instlled in my Expedition though, I decided to purchase it as an audiobook, and have been enjoying it during the hour […]

One of the somewhat interesting features of Google Video is now that you can put video from Google into your webpage. Here’s a Snowman video from WGBH Boston, and below you can see the player embedded in a web posting. Deleted the video player Something about WordPress insists on rewriting the contents of my post […]

MacDailyNews will present the MacWorld 2006 keynote here, beginning at 9:00AM PST on January 10th. [tags]Apple,MacWorld,Steve Jobs[/tags]

Dan Lyke’s Flutterby! has an interesting article on cooking with sugar. I haven’t looked into this as closely as Dan apparently has, but I am aware that the addition of some corn syrup into sugar recipes can prevent crystallization as you heat sugar mixtures. I recently had some fun making my first real caramel for […]

I’m a bit of a nut about ancient writing (probably as an outgrowth of my interest in codes and cryptography) and one of my interests have always been with the Maya (after all, astronomers and writers, okay, the human sacrifice thing was not so good, but still…). Scientific American has just published this link about […]

Courtesy of Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy Blog, here’s a link to a book entitled What’s Up 2006, a collection of astronomy related “projects” that you can do, one for each day of the year. It’s a 13.7 megabyte download, but is over 400 pages. Enjoy! [tags]Astronomy,Amateur Astronomy,Telescope[/tags]

Well, it’s time for MacWorld San Francisco.   I’ve used the Democracy plugin to create a poll in my sidebar on the right.  Any ideas on what Apple will announce?   Everyone’s expecting some kind of dual core laptop, but what else do people think might be announced?   Feel free to add any ideas that you want.

I’ve been reviewing some papers and math regarding the use of the Kelly Criterion in gambling, and found this link to Ed Thorp’s paper on the subject. It’s in PDF format, but looks very interesting. [tags]Gambling,Mathematics,Information Theory[/tags]

Courtesy of hack-a-day, a student did something which I thought was rather clever, he disassembled an optical mouse, and hooked the tiny image sensor (18×18 pixels) directly to the parallel port of his computer, and wrote a program to read out the results. I can’t immediately think of what use this would be, but I […]

Wow, now that’s what I call a waste of time!  The HP ScanJet apparently supports an unofficial command (documented in one of their old journal articles) which allows you to play musical notes by varying the stepper motor drive frequencies.  That’s, just…. I’m speechless.  Maybe you could rig your monitor to sing harmony with your […]

Courtesy of the make blog, and saved for future reference.

Wow.  You find some interesting things on the web when you look.  Here’s dozen years of internal email for Atari, providing a fascinating glimpse into one of the companies which helped fuel innovation in the Silicon Valley.   Some amazingly candid emails, fascinating to read, even though I only skimmed ’em.

I think Pat Robertson deserves a Dumbass Lifetime Achievement Award. Robertson Links Sharon Stroke, God’s Wrath I can’t imagine any God worth worshipping has Robertson as a spokesman.

Om Malik writes about what he sees as an inevitable collision of industry juggernauts, Microsoft vs. Apple, Gates vs. Jobs in a battle for downloadable music supremacy. But I’m confused by one of his comments: The MTV’s Microsoft-powered Urge online music service will be selling to the ultimate demographic: the teen set. I’m left wondering […]

Engadget blogged with Live coverage of Bill Gates CES keynote, and I’m left with a couple of questions/remarks: Is this really what a keynote is supposed to be? It seemed like little more than a presentation of a particular company’s product plans. That is normally not what I think a keynote is for: even at […]