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If Granny had wheels, she’d be a trolley
Starting with this review of a CNN.com Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko is Socko“. It prattles on and on about the inequalities and suffering that result from illness. All true most likely. Read that and ask yourself, “So What?” Is the same leviathan that brought you the Iraq War (or “Peace” if you prefer) likely to improve matters? Or for that matter, one that couldn’t even find a way to discreetly have sex with interns?
The second one is “What if Lincoln Had Survived?“, also on CNN.com. If they had the medical technology of today but not the 25th Amendment, what would have happened?
Isn’t there some news site that caters to the person who is interested in news?
For far better non-news brain candy, check out this history of the 1920 Wall Street bombing. The perpetrators of that attack, much like the anthrax mailer, were never caught.
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Wind Power in Popular Mechanics
Popular Mechanics has an interesting article on Wind Power on their site. Sadly, it makes it seem unworkable on any kind of large scale. It would be quite handy on a small to medium scale though.
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First HDR attempt
The image is nothing spectacular, but the HDR process really brings out the grain and contrasts from the source files (HDR stands for high Dynamic Range).
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First thoughts on Brave New War
I just finished reading John Robb‘s Brave New War and I’m struck by how similar his vision of the future was to David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom.
I’ll have my review of the book later. On the whole I liked it a lot.
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Local cooling
I sit here at four in the morning, listening to Woodie Guthrie trying to restore a database that a client accidentally deleted the day before launch (yay me). And it’s 54 degrees outside. In Georgia, in the middle of May. It seems unnaturally cold lately.
I wonder if there’s a site somewhere that tracks local temperatures and plots, plots a yearly average and indicates if that is lower than average or higher. If not, that would be a cool AdSense supported project…
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How does the West expect to win…
When we have judges like this
“The trouble is I don’t understand the language. I don’t really understand what a Web site is,” he told a London court during the trial of three men charged under anti-terrorism laws.
Prosecutor Mark Ellison briefly set aside his questioning to explain the terms “Web site” and “forum.” An exchange followed in which the 59-year-old judge acknowledged: “I haven’t quite grasped the concepts.”
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A cool idea
ThinkCycle.org – an open source community for machines.
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Interesting bits of knowledge
About evolution in this case
Since records on the subject began in the mid-1800s, the average breast size in the US has increased from a 32-B to the current average of 36-C. This may be a result of better nutrition, healthier lifestyle, or the result of the aforementioned sexual selection.
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A mad scientist period
For some reason I’m going through a mad scientist phase right now. My current idea is pair a passive solar heater with a Stirling engine and see how much power is actually generated. Hopefully I’ll have time to work on it in a few weeks.
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Quote of the moment
Via CodePoet, and from this page
It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. (Nathaniel S Borenstein)
and
There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses. (Bjarne Stroustrup)
and
Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. (Stan Kelly-Bootle)