brainwagon

On an unrelated search, I discovered that Arthur Leonard’s treatise The Yolo Reflector had been scanned and made available, including translating all the mathematical formulas into MathML. A very nice job! I have copy of the dead tree version that was mailed to me by Leonard, and it’s good to see this nifty work get […]

Dan Bricklin, one of the co-inventors of Visicalc, has posted a nice article entitled Software That Lasts 200 Years. He points out that software which helps form societal infrastructure is necessarily concerned more with the long term and total cost of maintenance, and is poorly served by the normal business models which are common in […]

Well, tonight I’m just too tired to string any coherent thoughts or good links together, so I thought I’d merely list some of the days thoughts and experiences, and perhaps work harder tomorrow to write down something truly interesting. We have a new cat. Well, sort of. For a week this cat kept showing up […]

Ever on the lookout for odd science/craft experiments, I was pleased to find instructions on how to make soap out of bacon, and poking around we see that this is part of a much larger list of idiotic things that you can do. I find the most tantalizing to be instructions on how to make […]

Look at this nifty collection of cover art for various publications of War of the Worlds that span over a century. You can, of course, get the text of H.G. Wells’ classic tale from Project Gutenberg.

While doing an unrelated search, I browsed into Publications by Wolfgang Heidrich and started reading his paper entitled The Design of an Inexpensive Very High Resolution Scan Camera System. It’s a very interesting idea: they modify an inexpensive Canon scanner to use as the back for a large format camera. Ultimately they are able to […]

World of Stuart has a nifty download: Big Songs For Little Attention Spans. It’s a 95 megabyte download of 99 (he says 100, but I think he can’t count) short songs which fit on a single 80 minute CD. It’s an eclectic mix, but somehow hangs together. Consider it music for the attention deficit crowd.

The NIST has a very nice history of radio controlled clocks which was written by Michael A. Lombardi. The National Institute of Standards and Technology runs the WWVB time service in Boulder, Colorado which broadcasts at 60khz, and allows my Skyscan Atomic clock to maintain accurate time (or would, if my office wasn’t essentially a […]

Scaled Composites released some nice video on their website, including video M&Ms scattered in zero g’s. Nicely done (even if it is in Microsoft Media 9).

At least one of my occasional readers is interested in homebrew musical instruments. Having listened to the example mp3’s, I’m not sure that these instruments qualify, but here are instructions for building a tuba and other instruments out of plywood. The overall tonal quality makes you pine for the melodic sounds of the bagpipe and […]

Neat paper: Holography without Photography, by Thad Walker. The author uses a simple C program to generate holograms which are then printed on overhead transparencies with a laser printer. I’ll have to try this.

Groklaw.net is reporting that Acacia Technologies has been filing litigation against websites for patent infringement on patents they received for a system for distributing video and audio over the Internet. I used pat2pdf to download the relevant patents: 5,132,992 5,253,275 5,550,863 6,002,720 6,144,702 The EFF have placed this patent on their list of ten most […]

For some reason, I find knots fascinating. What’s even more fascinating is how often books about knots show up on the bargain shelves at Borders, and yet every year or so a new, nicely photographed, full color book on knots makes appears to replace them. Bizarre. But if you want to learn about knots and […]

As part of my brother’s ongoing experiments with streaming video, I’ve become somewhat more interested in the world of streaming video. Interestingly enough, the BBC has released an open source video codec called Dirac which is available under the Mozilla Public License and also the GPL. It is supposed to be competative to modern codecs, […]

Pencilmation.com has some fun (if silly) flash animations, including the story of “The Monkey and the Coconut”, which perhaps people who appreciate monkeys might, in fact, appreciate. Or not.