One of the most bizarre and macabre websites I’ve seen recently is GHOST TOWN, the story of Elena, a young woman who rides her Kawasaki Ninja in through the surrounding countryside of Chernobyl. While other sites may contain more information, the pictures snapped by Elena are eerie and compelling. The events of April 25th and 26th, 1986 uprooted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who were forced to evacuate.

Looking at the pictures and reading Elena’s broken English makes it seem somehow more real.

Are you troubled by frequent alien abductions and their tricksy mind control? Well, it is good to see that amateur scientists are hard at work to make alien abductions a think of the past. Check out the Stop Alien Abductions website for information of we can shrug off the hypnotic suggestions of our alien slave masters.

Thanks to Stephan for passing this one along.

Yahoo! News – Decomposing Whale Explodes on Street

The decomposing remains of a 60-tonsperm whale exploded on a busy Taiwan street, showering nearby cars and shops with blood and organs and stopping traffic for hours, local newspapers said.

I’m kind of fascinated by the whole “balancing robot” thing so I found Dan Piponi’s Equibot to be pretty interesting. It uses a single Sharp infrared distance sensor to measure the distance to the ground, and tries to maintain that distance via by driving a pair of modified servo motors with an Atmel ATMEGA chip.

Nifty stuff. I hope to see Dan at a future Hacker’s Conference.

Satire? Or not? Check out
Tornado Fighters and try to decide. The demo is AWESOME!

Today NASA is reporting that their Stardust probe, designed for capturing a sample of matter from the tail of comet Wild 2 successfully photographed and obtained the desired sample. Unfortunately, it won’t return this sample until 2006, when it will drop it’s load somewhere in Utah. Nifty picture of the comet, which looks like pretty much every other chunk of rock hurtling through the universe: a big cratered potato.

I’ve long known about Nomic, a game where the players make up the rules as the game is played. Dvorak – A Nomic Card Game is a similar interesting idea, modified to be a card game. All cards start out blank, and the players make up and add cards as the game is played. Cool!

Bill Cutler, a rather famous puzzle guy has finally found all unique solutions to The Loculus of Archimedes. I rather like puzzles of all sorts, but through some freak of nature had not heard of this particular one. Kudos to Bill!

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve discovered two projects which both boot from CD, don’t install anything on the PC, and provide interesting functionality.

The first of these ix GeeXbox, which you can get from theGeeXboX HomePage
When booted, GeeXbox turns your PC into a dedicated media player. It boots a version of the Linux kernel, and then uses the popular mplayer to allow you to play DVDs, VCDs, or regular audio CDs. It also allows you to play pretty much any multimedia file from your hard drive, and is supposed to mount Samba shares as well (as yet untried). Best of all, the ISO is a mere 4.3 megabytes, so it is quick to download and burn.
Nifty!

The second of this is KNOPPIX, which is a bootable version of Linux. It runs Linux live off the CDROM, and includes mp3 players, web browsers and all sorts of goodies. I keep one around as a repair disk, since it can mount most filesystems and autodetects networking setups.
I

Both are highly recommended.

Occasionally I’m struck by the apparent oddness of people’s behavior. High on my list of pet peeves are people who go out of their way to destroy the works of other. Case in point: this story coming in from Mainichi, Japan. As many people know, the origami crane has become a symbol of world piece, thanks to the rather sad example of Sadako Sasaki: a young Japanese girl who believed that if she folded a thousand cranes, she would be cured of her leukemia, caused by the radiation of the Hiroshima bombing in 1945.

She died after folding 644. Her friends and classmates later completed her 1000 cranes, and built a statue to honor her and all children affected by the bombing. Now the origami crane has become a symbol of peace, and millions of cranes are offered at this monument each year.

All in all, I find it a pretty powerful symbol.

Back to our story. Some yutz decides he’s frustrated with having failed to graduate, and sets
fire to 140,000 of the paper cranes. The hopes and best wishes of thousands, reduced to ashes in seconds by just one person.

This should serve as reminder: in many situations, one person can make a difference, and not always a good one. It’s much easier to destroy than to build, and much easier to fight than to have peace.

As I think about it more, I know that the cranes are just a symbol, just paper. But each represents a person stopping in their concerns, and thinking about a small girl and how nations can brutalize children. In that sense, the
symbol has done its work, so perhaps nothing important has been lost afterall.

Okay, enough pontificating. If you’d like to learn how to fold a crane, try

here.

Nikon 4500 Manual Focus Calibration Chart & Depth of Field
is a link to a very nice chart to help with manual focussing on the Nikon 4500. It’s hard to do normally because there isn’t a numerical distance displayed on the screen while focussing. This should definitely help, as sometimes the auto focussing of the camera seems quite quirky.

CK’s Digital Camera Page has a really nice set of manuals for certain Nikon cameras, including my new Nikon 4500.

SuperDeluxo4 wgets and curls is a nifty site which logs interesting things that you can do with the command line tools wget and curl. Nifty.

Low light CCD Camera Data
is just an awesome collection of links. I modified a supercircuits camera to have manual gain control, but now some better cameras seem to be widely available. I’ll have to look at this some more later.

Kasparov fights to a draw in a six game match against Deep Junior. I’m not a very good chess player myself, but I spent a fair amount of time as an undergraduate studying heuristic search, so I am always interested when matches such as this occurs.

Whenever such matches occur, there is a flood of activity on newsgroups and weblogs. Invariably these fall into a couple of simple categories:

• It’s not really AI, the chess program just used brute force. I once heard that AI research was just research into writing programs for which we don’t as yet have good solutions: once we have a solution, it’s just software engineering. I find this comment kind of interesting though, because you don’t see people arguing about cars being able to go faster than humans can run being somehow “unfair”. Humans seem awfully testy when confronted with the idea that something could be smarter than them, although we’ve grown accustomed to the idea of stuff being stronger or faster than we are.

• Chess programs aren’t interesting. It’s all a solved problem.
  I recently became interested in computer chess about a decade of lassitude, and was shocked to find that a number of rather interesting improvements in chess implementation have occurred. They are very interesting programs that require a great deal of finesse and skill to create.

• 
  Chess is simply too easy. They’ll never beat humans at go!
  Go is usually used as the last stand for humans because
  • There are humans who are very good at it.
  • The large branching factor makes minimax and variations intractable.

  I think that this could be mistaken on a couple of levels. Perhaps even the top humans aren’t very good at go. It may be that they are only better than other humans. It seems odd to me to suggest that adding a machine capable of flawlessly examining millions of board combinations per second could in no way increase the quality of play of go players, perhaps at all levels.

Anyway, just some rambling thoughts. Some links:
the Computer Go Ladder, GNU go, and Computer Chess Programming references.