brainwagon

One of the cooler things I’ve seen in a while is this remake of The Planet of the Apes as a Twilight Zone Episode. An interesting bit of trivia was that Rod Serling was the writer of both. The production notes are actually quite illuminating: the editor read the introductions and closing narrations for every […]

Today’s link of the day routes you to ChangeThis, a website with an interesting idea: if you distribute good ideas, people will adopt, adapt and use them to make the world a better place. Ah, optimism. Personally, I often tend toward pessimism, but even though I know it will fail, I’ll try to entertain optimistic […]

For some reason, I found a reference to an early patent on Ouija boards, and with a bit of digging, came up with this page of Talking Boards Patents and Trademarks. Most of these early patents declare it a game, rather than a legitimate way to contact the dead. Using pat2pdf, I extracted a few […]

Bob Colwell gave an interesting talk at Stanford about his experiences as Chief Architect of Intel’s IA32 processors from 1992-2000. I spent an hour and a half watching the video download, and thought it was an interesting look into where CPU design is going, not going, and what that means for products. I’m not a […]

For publicity, the University of New South Wales commissioned orchestral variations on the classic Led Zepplin tune, Stairway to Heaven. Each segment is done in the style of a different composer. The Holst’s Mars, Bringer of War was funny enough that it made me laugh. The segments in the style of Bizet and Glenn Miller […]

Today, those crazy Canucks of the Human Powered Helicopter group at the University of British Columbia tried unsuccessfully to be the first to fly a human powered helicopter. Unfortunately, they failed. As the twin rotors swayed from side to side, the chain kept slipping off, and they never made it off the ground. Too bad, […]

Congressman Rich Boucher is guest blogging on Lawrence Lessig’s blog this week. Congressman Boucher is fairly rare amongst politicians in that he actually seems to understand many of the issues related to intellectual property rights. He is working to amend the DMCA to restore fair use rights to digital media, and is the author of […]

Ivan Sutherland’s thesis on Sketchpad may be one of the most famous and innovative papers in the history of computer graphics. LtU reports that there is a new electronic version made available as a PDF file. It’s great to see papers like this made more widely available.

Gave me a chuckle. Thanks to td and tdl for pointing me at it. danny bot: the film

Metafilter ran an article about the winners of the Canadian Awards for Excellence in Book Design. Louigi mentioned that he really liked The Gryphons of Paris, and I was amazed to see that this picture looked awfully similar to the one I took while visiting the D’ Orsay last year. Click here for the full […]

Dan Lyke noted that the Exploratorium has new exhibit of hand-cranked automata called the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre. I love this stuff. Perhaps a trip to SF will be forthcoming. If you’re inspired, you could always pick up some craft books or read up on mechanisms that could be useful.

Normally I steer this website away from overtly sexual topics, but I’ll make an exception here. Jenny18 is a version of the classic Eliza program which has been tailored to imitate a sort of dumb-blond cyber sex slave. It relies on the fact that many people talk like complete idiots online, which means that even […]

Just click here for one of the cleverest uses of animated gifs I’ve seen in a while.

Metafilter had a link to Bob Metcalfe’s 1995 article Predicting the Internet’s catastrophic collapse and ghost sites galore in 1996 (InfoWorld). It’s always incredible to look back on historical predictions and see how they panned out. For those of you who don’t know who Bob Metcalfe is, he is the inventor of Ethernet and founder […]

Before I discovered Python, I enjoyed a brief period of experimentation with Lua. I even went so far as to use Lua to add a simple shading language to my old MTV raytracer. You could write Lua functions that would compute the results of certain shading operations. It was pretty slow, but was really quite […]