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Interesting things from the outside world
Jul. 28th, 2009 01:35 pmInteresting things worth sharing, found since the last one of these...
Time Wastes Too Fast, a photo essay from the NYTimes.
So, these people sell kits to make bags, shaped like polyhedra dice. They also post the directions, so you can make 'em yourself, if you want to, instead of buying the kit from them. Brilliant!
Jimmy Carter, past President and Deacon, leaves the Southern Baptist Church, because the Church formally declares Women secondary to Men
The Apollo 11 Lunar Lander software (the code that actually ran the module that made the landing) is readily available. So some enterprising folks have written a simulator to run it. So you can have your very own moon-landing sim. Or, if you're a bit more ambitious, your very own lander. (Although, frankly, you wouldn't want to even use a simulated version of the guidance computer in any modern equipment)
An excellent article on both the history of Moore's Law, and comparing it to advances in other fields. This was particularly interesting to me, because I've been thinking and talking about Moore's Law a lot recently, as a side effect of reading Stross.
Pardon me, do you have a flag? A lovely collection of flags of countries and empires that are no longer with us.
What Brave New World we live in? Blogger Guy gets involved with a new girl, blogs about it, gets contacted by other people who know her, who tell him that she is scamming him. Public outing ensues.
An amazing essay on being a working photographer in dangerous places like war zones. Stunning pictures to go with the advice.
A TED talk (because you knew that there was going to be one in here) by John Doerr, on Green Tech and Climate Change. He also goes into detail about what Walmart has been doing to change their energy footprint, and what sort of impact they have. He also talks a lot about why going green is economically beneficial for an economy.
The DOE commissioned Lawrence Livermore to analyze how much Energy production in the US is wasted - that is, just plain lost. It's a bit more than half. That's a very interesting number, and a very optimistic number, and I'll want to talk about it more in another post.
While we're on the subject of climate, here's a Texas A & M paper on efficiently using water in your home landscaping. Go Tamu.
The NYTimes reports on Dow Chemical's work on Algae-based fuels. This won't repeal third law any time soon, but cooking CO2 back into liquid fuel is awfully appealing. Although, interestingly, Dow is reported to be much more interested in being able to make CO2-based plastics, and cut the use of long-chain hydrocarbons out of the plastic cycle. Which is very, very, very sexy.
This is from a couple of months ago, file under the public treats censorship as damage and routes around it, a teenager started a lending library of banned books from her locker. When she ran out of space, she hijacked the empty locker next to hers.
Do I take District or the Circle line to get from Hamlet to Macbeth? A map of the primary characters in the works of Shakespeare, presented as an Underground map. Brought to you by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Although I have a bit of a quibble with some of their applications of the iconography, I don't think they used connected stations properly in all the cases.
A lovely parable of Economics.
It's 2009. Do you know where your code from 40 years ago is? A brief history of the modern work to recover the earliest versions of the source code to Unix and the first C compiler.
An extremely interesting discussion of the definitions of marriage in different parts of the ancient world, notably Rome, Classical Greece, and pre-Roman Celtic traditions.
And finally, some purely amusing bits -
The Doctor Who credits, a la Dallas.
I found your ring...
Time Wastes Too Fast, a photo essay from the NYTimes.
So, these people sell kits to make bags, shaped like polyhedra dice. They also post the directions, so you can make 'em yourself, if you want to, instead of buying the kit from them. Brilliant!
Jimmy Carter, past President and Deacon, leaves the Southern Baptist Church, because the Church formally declares Women secondary to Men
The Apollo 11 Lunar Lander software (the code that actually ran the module that made the landing) is readily available. So some enterprising folks have written a simulator to run it. So you can have your very own moon-landing sim. Or, if you're a bit more ambitious, your very own lander. (Although, frankly, you wouldn't want to even use a simulated version of the guidance computer in any modern equipment)
An excellent article on both the history of Moore's Law, and comparing it to advances in other fields. This was particularly interesting to me, because I've been thinking and talking about Moore's Law a lot recently, as a side effect of reading Stross.
Pardon me, do you have a flag? A lovely collection of flags of countries and empires that are no longer with us.
What Brave New World we live in? Blogger Guy gets involved with a new girl, blogs about it, gets contacted by other people who know her, who tell him that she is scamming him. Public outing ensues.
An amazing essay on being a working photographer in dangerous places like war zones. Stunning pictures to go with the advice.
A TED talk (because you knew that there was going to be one in here) by John Doerr, on Green Tech and Climate Change. He also goes into detail about what Walmart has been doing to change their energy footprint, and what sort of impact they have. He also talks a lot about why going green is economically beneficial for an economy.
The DOE commissioned Lawrence Livermore to analyze how much Energy production in the US is wasted - that is, just plain lost. It's a bit more than half. That's a very interesting number, and a very optimistic number, and I'll want to talk about it more in another post.
While we're on the subject of climate, here's a Texas A & M paper on efficiently using water in your home landscaping. Go Tamu.
The NYTimes reports on Dow Chemical's work on Algae-based fuels. This won't repeal third law any time soon, but cooking CO2 back into liquid fuel is awfully appealing. Although, interestingly, Dow is reported to be much more interested in being able to make CO2-based plastics, and cut the use of long-chain hydrocarbons out of the plastic cycle. Which is very, very, very sexy.
This is from a couple of months ago, file under the public treats censorship as damage and routes around it, a teenager started a lending library of banned books from her locker. When she ran out of space, she hijacked the empty locker next to hers.
Do I take District or the Circle line to get from Hamlet to Macbeth? A map of the primary characters in the works of Shakespeare, presented as an Underground map. Brought to you by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Although I have a bit of a quibble with some of their applications of the iconography, I don't think they used connected stations properly in all the cases.
A lovely parable of Economics.
It's 2009. Do you know where your code from 40 years ago is? A brief history of the modern work to recover the earliest versions of the source code to Unix and the first C compiler.
An extremely interesting discussion of the definitions of marriage in different parts of the ancient world, notably Rome, Classical Greece, and pre-Roman Celtic traditions.
And finally, some purely amusing bits -
The Doctor Who credits, a la Dallas.
I found your ring...
