Category: Cool

“The Tinkering School”:http://www.tinkeringschool.com/blog/ sounds like the appropriate antidote for over-protective parents. *Every* kid should get to have experiences like this. And yes, it might be risking life and limb, but, you know, life’s tough, wear a helmet.

In response to someone making a comment about “the Osborne Effect”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Effect (how scary is it that you can guess URLs for Wikipedia entries with a reasonable assurance that they’ll be there?) on a photo forum, one of the people who was at Osborne at the time makes “a post to set the story straight”:http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1021&message=22319970

Basically: corporate infighting brought things to a halt in a company that _always_ had problems with cash-flow, since they were undercapitalized and in manufacturing.

“Via”:http://use.perl.org/~Matts/journal/32588?from=rss

What if “your song lyrics were a state machine?”:http://www.whatspop.com/blog/2006/11/glancing-alternative-song-structures.cfm

So what did he do? He used it to take a picture of an ant that is so detailed you can “discern the structure of the eye”:http://b9.com/archives/000079.html. Not that I needed to see an ant that closely, but damn.

I don’t think most of these colors actually appear in nature. “Check it out”:http://www.sauria.com/blog/2006/02/07#1473

So, at least “according to Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_day. *no one knows why it’s named Boxing Day*. It’s silly, but in a wonderful sort of way–it’s apparently centuries old, but no one knows why the hell it’s called Boxing Day.

“Make”:http://makezine.com/ describes itself as:

bq. The first magazine devoted to digital projects, hardware hacks, and D.I.Y. inspiration.

Sucker that I occasionally am, I suspect I shall subscribe–apparently the first issue will be subscription-only, with the second appearing on newsstands.

From the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge, “with a stop for a photo at every mile marker”:http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/onTheRoad/home/index.shtml.

It’s a big, weird country out there.

“!http://turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/ending-viz-small.jpg!”:http://turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/ending-viz-small.jpg

A shot from “a computer chess applet that shows a graphical representation of it’s analysis”:http://www.mackmo.com/nick/blog/java/?permalink=ThinkingMachine4.txt.

“Via Nick Lothian”:http://www.mackmo.com/nick/blog/

TNH (perhaps Teresa Nielsen Hayden to you) “has a link to a riveting narrative about using a hot-type Linotype printing press”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/005370.html#005370. Well, actually, it’s about progression in the printing industry, and talks about a bunch of other systems, too, but the hot-type press is the most fascinating.

I could not tell you why, but I find things like this fascinating, just about regardless of the actual subject. I guess it’s because it’s about The Way Things Work, which I always find intriguing.

After reading the description, I find it ironic to remember that (even?) after the Linotype company had moved to offset printing and such, you’d see reference to “Linotype/HELL”. Seems like it would have been a lot more pertinent when the machines involved molten lead.

A “book of Civil War photos”:http://www.quinnipiac.edu/other/ABL/etext/civilwar/civilwarmain.html. Huge, but cool.

You know, there’s not a lot of arguments for believing in some sort of overarching creator figure that I give much credence to. But I have to say, the strange and wonderful things that nature produces, well, they almost convince me, because how could cicadas be anything but “a particularly elaborate joke”:http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2647052?

Finally, someone has created the software necessary for “building panoramic images in the GIMP”:http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7295.

Well, first, derive anything you can from my pity. Then “go listen to some episodes”:http://www.npr.org/programs/waitwait/index.html.

Watching them do the show at the “Carolina Theater”:http://www.carolinatheatre.com/ in Durham was fun. Besides the usual amusement that is the show’s stock in trade, it was something of an eye opener–although I guess I had unconsciously know that there had to be a lot of editing and other stuff going on behind the curtains, I never imagined how much.

Oh, and Charlie Pierce is probably right–“Elihu Root”:http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1912/root-bio.html has to be the funniest name in the history of American politics.

“Here’s a NASA shot of Isabel”:http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/2003260-0917/Isabel2.A2003260.1824.250m.jpg.

*Warning*: This is huge. I mean, 10MB. 7000 by 9600 resolution. Muy gigante. Act responsibly.