brainwagon

Most of my hacking occurs in a vacuum: where I sit in my living room or in my home office and toil away silently on projects which occasionally get documented here, but which all too often are just my way of passing the time. On the way to work, I was asking myself what I […]

Carl Zimmer tweeted this ad for the USC Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute: I’d ask for a second opinion.

It was reported that an Iridium satellite and an “non-functional Russian satellite” collided yesterday. I was curious, so I did a bit of digging, and found out that NASA had reported that it was Iridium 33 and COSMOS-2251. A bit more work uncovered orbital elements for both objects, so I was able to plug in […]

Actually, you don’t need a range. This recipe has shown up in my inbox twice today, so I guess I have to blog about it. Ellen Spertus has a nice recipe for making your own Floam on her website. What is Floam you ask? (I apologize in advance to linking to the annoying Flash infomercial). […]

I have seen lots of wacky science projects before, but I hadn’t seen this one before. Basically, the idea is to project a bright image onto a geranium leaf. Where light stricks the leaf, the leaf will produce excess starch, which can be “developed” with tincture of iodine. Crazy. I may have to give it […]

Brilliant, courtesy of www.hackaday.com. First the TC2K computer (any standard PC) is connected to the phone line via a Caller ID modem or serial Caller ID device. The user creates a setup text file that declares all of the Caller ID strings he considers “annoying” and wants intercepted on the first ring. When a call […]

I had to look up the word “boffin”. Seemed timely given the release of Romero’s Land of the Dead. News.com.au reports that scientists at Piottsburgh’s Safar Center revived dogs that have had their blood replaced with very cold saline for three hours. This basically seems like a form of induced hypothermia. Their hope is that […]

A veritable primer for the up and coming mad scientist.

Bristol Centre for Applied Nonlinear Mathematics | Publications | 2004 | Abstract of preprint 2004.3 This paper explains how one can crochet the Lorenz manifold, the two-dimensional stable manifold of the origin of the Lorenz system. My grandmother taught me to crochet when I was only five or six. I wonder how long it would […]

What do you have when you put a porta-potty and a surplus Boeing jet engine together? Answer: Too much time and money on your hands, and A Jet Powered Outhouse For further lunacy, including the Jet-Powered Barstool, check out turbinegroup.com.

If you would like to wander back to the days of the Keith Partridge and Greg Brady and make a really groovy pad, you can go learn How to Make Lava Lamps at Oozing Goo. They also listed the two patents on the Lava Lamp, namely U.S. Patent 3,570,156 and U.S. Patent 3,387,396. Frankly, the […]

Project Gutenberg just released Tesla’s Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency, with illustrations and everything. If you are interested in tons of links about Tesla coils, you could do worse than starting with Bill Beaty’s collection of Tesla links.

UNIX® on the Game Boy Advance is an implementation of the 5th version of the Unix Operating System for the ARM chip inside the gameboy. To do this, it runs SIMH, a PDP-11 simulator which has been ported to a bunch of different systems. The original RK05 disk image is combined with the PDP-11 simulator […]

Another bit of clip art from the lads at Project Gutenberg. This one comes from the same issue of Punch that I mentioned earlier. Just a nutty little cartoon that I thought I’d immortalize here.

John Stewart’s Daily Show did a startling exposé on the work of Dr. Carl Baugh which shows undeniable evidence that men and dinosaurs lived simultaneously. Occasionally, I am forced to wonder if the stories done on The Daily Show are for real, but Dr. Baugh is for real, or maybe not, depending on your perspective.