William Gurstelle, author of a couple of my favorite books, Backyard Ballistics and The Art of the Catapult, has a new book, Adventures from the Technology Underground and a blog, Notes from the Technology Underground. I ordered the new book via Amazon, and the blog is now in my Daily Read list.
Category Archives: Link of the Day
Use Google Earth to Track Santa
He’s hopping around the Middle East as I type this. Google Earth is pretty cool for a free download too, so check it out.
Ho ho ho.
DIY Laser Engraved Toast
Over the last few years, I’ve seen a number of eBay auctions for religious figures which appear spontaneously in grilled bread items. It seems to me that the budding young entrepaneur could make a killing with the right laser engraving equipment. Courtesy of the Make Blog.
iLog
You know what’s more useless than those tapes and DVDs of a fire burning in the fireplace? How ’bout the same thing, but formatted for your video iPod. Courtesy of those fine gents at WGN.
It’s a Colorful Life!
Okay, I know this is an atrocity, but you might still find Recolored to be an interesting program for adding color to black and white images. You basically scribble hints into the image, and it propagates the color to nearby pixels that it determines should be the same color. At right, you can click and get my version of It’s a Wonderful Life, appropriate for the holiday season, if somewhat garish overall.
Okay, I’ve goofed around enough this morning. Off to Christmas shop.
Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover School District
The 137 page decision in the Kitzmiller case in Dover Pennsylvania has been handed down:
Kitzmiller Decision: Plaintiffs Prevail
The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board’s ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.
Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.
To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.
The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.
Read the entire decision.
The CDROM Crystal Radio
I’ve had this project in a pile of bookmarks that I was sorting through, and am linking it here so that I can find it again sometime later: H. P. Friedrich has nice design for a crystal radio build from stuff a computer person might have around the house. Interestingly, he even makes the variable capacitor that forms the heart of crystal radios. Good stuff.
Make Your Own Copy-Protected CD with Passive Protection
While not as openly hostile as the kind of stuff that Sony was doing with their active-rootkitting stuff, it’s actually not that hard to create a CD which many applications find unrippable: wander over to Ed Felton’s Freedom to Tinker blog for instructions on how to Make Your Own Copy-Protected CD with Passive Protection.
Note: this really only works for Windows. You can rip these CDs using Macs or Linux just fine. Way to go Microsoft!
Documentary On Japanese Sushi
This Documentary On Japanese Sushi on Google Video is just too strange for words. Check it out.
Remember Girls!
The Free Information Society has links to a bunch of WWII era propaganda posters, including this rather amusing one linking promiscuity with dating Hitler. Holy crap. You can’t make stuff like this up.
I just don’t get fashion
The world is just not fair. I mean really, if I wore this pink and black striped tie, people would laugh at me. But if Jessica Alba wears it, she’s “edgy” or “trendy” or “hip”, or whatever it is that the young people are saying now.
You know, that very well might be one of my old ties.
You might be asking yourself, how did Mark find this stuff? After all, as popular as Ms. Alba might be in the geek crowd, you don’t see many references to her on slashdot or digg. Unfortunately, my wife’s love of E! and Hollywood Gossip has rubbed off on me, and The Superficial has made it into my daily bloglines reading list.
I’m pathetic.
Santastic: Holiday Boots 4 Your Stockings
Need some fun holiday mashups? Try Santastic: Holiday Boots 4 Your Stockings on for size.
Visualizing the code of Atari 2600 games
Ben Fry has some cool graphics which visualize the code in several old Atari 2600 video games. Basically, he disassembles code and marks all possible branches with arcs between the lines of code, and changes all data tables to graphical representations of the bit patterns, revealing many sprites and other data tables. I dunno how useful it is, but it’s kind of neat.
Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project
well, despite having been linked on Slashdot, I think that the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project is pretty cool. They digitized thousands of old Edison wax cylinders, cleaned up their audio using digital tools, and made the audio and the original 24 bit wav files available for download. Too cool.
Problems with the $100 laptop
Lee Felsentstein writes about what he thinks are the Problems with the $100 laptop, and I think many of the issues he raises are good ones, worthy of serious discussion. The question shouldn’t really be “should we give a laptop to every child or not”, but rather “if we are going to invest millions of dollars to attempt to raise the economic level of the developing world, is this the most appropriate use of our money?” I think that Lee posts some excellent points to indicate that it will not be.