Tag Archives: Friday Links

At NASA’s request, a master watchmaker handcrafts mechanical watches that run on Mars time.

So apparently this is a thing: metal clay. You mold it into whatever shape you want, just like regular clay. Then you fire it, burning away the clay, leaving only pure metal. The world’s total net sweetness is increasing by the hour.

xkcd presents thoughtful analysis of human nature, via crazy straws.

Two Guys and Guy brings the funny this week with a quantum flux joke. Oh, alternate timeline humor! Classic.

SMBC tells us where butts come from.

Hope you do something fun this weekend. See you Monday!

Author Gore Vidal died on Tuesday at 86 years old. I never read any of his books, never knew much about him except that he was one of those towering literary figures that people invoke reverently from time to time. The New York Times piece has given me a little more perspective on who he was as a person. Anyone more familiar with his work care to enlighten me in the comments?

Did you know that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has hundreds of their courses available online, for free, without even the need to register? Some have videos (or audio recordings) of lectures, some have notes, some have projects and exams, and some have all of the above. You don’t get course credit, naturally, but there’s still a wealth of instant knowledge out here, on topics from aerodynamics to brain science philosophy to chaos theory. Stanford also has a nice collection of free online lecture videos.

Ever wanted to construct your name from the Periodic Table of Elements? No? Well then you’re probably not geeky enough for this site.

PvP asks the important questions.

SMBC explores the practicality of alien abduction.

Two Guys and Guy has an important lesson about consequences.

Finally, quite possibly the cutest thing you will see all week: bulldog puppies learning to walk.

Have a great weekend.

In case you haven’t heard: Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, has died. She was 61.

Why is computer programming so hard for a lot of people? Maybe the people who write books about it aren’t helping…

PvP gets a double link this week for delivering two great comics.

SMBC offers its opinion on robotic souls with its customary aplomb. Also, “aplomb” is a fun word.

Not sure if I’ve linked to Buttersafe before, but it’s pretty rad on occasion. Also, nobody says “rad” anymore.

Have an excellent week!

The final results of Monday’s poll are in:

“Roly poly” was by far the most popular option, with “potato bug” coming in second. One commenter, momenteye, broke away from the pack and called it a wood louse. Ceci n’est pas une Armadillidium vulgare.

Of course, this was a small and informal survey. It should surprise no one that the academics asked this question years before I did, and to a lot more people.

You can even see a color-coded map of responses across the US. Roly poly is still the winner, but by a much smaller margin. Their survey also includes some names I’ve never even heard of, like “basketball bug” and “twiddle bug.” People! Forget the recession – the greatest priority facing us today is to standardize the name of this bug!

Meanwhile, SMBC clarifies the nature of philosophical debates with its usual precision.

And now for something completely different. The brassiere was long thought to be a 20th-century invention, but recent discoveries prove otherwise. Researchers discovered a hidden stash of clothing in an Austrian castle, and it included a 600-year-old bra (shown above) that looks even more like the modern garment than the ones in the early 1900s. Well done, Austria. Maybe now Americans will finally stop confusing you with Australia.

That’s it for this week. I’m seeing Dark Knight Rises tonight. What are you guys up to?

Have an excellent weekend!

This guy built his own musical instrument out of PVC pipes, and he plays it pretty damn well. The epic five-minute medley includes everything from the Pirates of the Caribbean theme to Daft Punk.

You may not have heard, but the latest mission to Mars is currently en route, scheduled to land early next month. The Curiosity rover will be twice as big as the previous ones. This video breaks down the “seven minutes of terror” of Curiosity’s fantastically complicated descent.

Want to watch a robot dominate a human at Rock, Paper, Scissors? Of course you do. (Submitted by longtime reader buddhafulkat.)

Very funny video about a medieval inventor’s greatest creation.

xkcd creator Randall Munroe explains exactly what would happen, in physics terms, if you pitched a baseball at 90% the speed of light. He walks you through the carnage nanosecond by nanosecond.

The Onion explains what the Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist has been up to since retiring. As it turns out, the answer is mostly “spite.”

SMBC nails it as always. The target this time: those annoying nerds who are proud of their own ignorance. I’ve been guilty of this myself on occasion.

Physicists have finally discovered the long-sought Higgs boson particle…probably.

Have a great weekend!

This week: funny stuff!

Ian McKellan, the actor who played Gandalf, reenacts the balrog scene while an audience laughs.

xkcd has an important warning for drivers.

SMBC nails it: perhaps the best explanation of aging I’ve ever seen.

A new comic I just discovered this morning: Two Guys and Guy. I’m reading through the archives now and it seems pretty good. Especially enjoyed this one.

Have a great weekend!

Here’s a video for the Leap, a new motion control system for computers. Seems to operate something like a touch screen, without the touch. The creators claim it’s 100 times more accurate than the Kinect. We’ll see – but it certainly looks cool. Apparently you’ll be able to buy one early next year for $70.

This news will probably excite nobody but me, but hey, it’s my blog, right? Honda has leaked details of the 2013 Accord. As a lifelong Accord driver, I gotta say, this thing looks sweet. Very pretty on the outside. On the inside, Bluetooth and backup camera now come standard, which is not exactly groundbreaking technology but certainly a step up from my ’06 model. Of course, if my ’06 keeps running as smooth as it has been, I may not even need a new car till the 2016 model.

And, apparently I’ve become a Honda commercial. Moving on…

Ben Trube delivers the funny this week with an excellent tribute to a less-than-excellent pizza delivery guy. Please to enjoy.

Finally, the Sinfest webcomic offers its own unique take on Fifty Shades of Grey. Sometimes, it’s best to keep things simple.

Anybody have big plans for the weekend? Stay cool out there. See you Monday.

Yeesh! Well, this week was a fail, no? Where the hell was I, anyway?

As it happens, I was in Phoenix, Arizona, traveling on business. The hotel was extraordinarily nice, except for its wireless Internet, which was extraordinarily bad. Like, “timeout errors checking Gmail” bad. Blogging was not in the cards.

Anyway, I’m back in fabulous Ohio and reconnected to the fabulous IntarWebNetz, so let’s do this thing. Links are sparse this week due to the aforementioned epic fail, but we’ll do what we can.

Just this morning, I learned that Australia lost one of its Prime Ministers. As in, he went swimming and they never found him again. Learn more about the 1967 disappearance of Harold Holt.

Be sure to check out the Johnny Cash Project, a collaborative online effort to build a music video for “Ain’t No Grave (Gonna Hold This Body Down)” by having different people create each individual frame separately, and then voting on favorites. The result is pretty much as strange and cool as you’d expect.

Finally this week, PvP explains – via webcomic – what to do about girls.

Have a great weekend! I’ll be back on Monday with actual posts again!

Ray Bradbury, the legendary author of Fahrenheit 451, died this week at age 91. I never read much of his work beyond Fahrenheit, but that was enough. His dystopian image of a human family living in a room where every visible surface is a television screen, will stay with me forever. Bradbury never went to college, and called himself “completely library educated…I discovered me in the library.” He will be missed.

A few weeks ago I discovered Delanceyplace, and I’ve been hooked ever since. The concept is simple: you subscribe (as easy as typing in your e-mail and clicking a button), and then they send you a short passage every weekday that explores some new and fascinating topic. The topics are wildly eclectic – today’s was Nietzsche, and yesterday’s was about how most soldiers in battle deliberately miss when they shoot at real people. You can browse the archives for free. Give it a try!

You may have heard that you can make yourself sneeze by looking at the sun. But did you know that it’s a genetic trait, which only about 20-30% of the population has? Or that it may also be triggered by eating a big meal? It’s called the photic sneeze reflex, and it’s far more interesting than I ever suspected.

This Dilbert strip dates all the way back to 1993, but it’s one of my favorites of all time. Sometimes the simple jokes are the best.

TIME this week reports on a bizarre new national golf tournament. Bizarre because it takes place in the most secluded and autocratic nation in the world, North Korea, which only has one golf course. In the entire country.

Finally this week, Questionable Content offers a refreshingly upbeat take on the Singularity.

Have a great weekend. Over and out!

The SpaceX Dragon capsule splashed down in the Pacific yesterday, marking a flawless victory for the first-ever privately-run mission to the International Space Station. I’ll go on record right now – this is the start of a new era.

Big congratulations to Snigdha Nandipati, an 8th grader from San Diego who scored a flawless victory of her own. Just yesterday, she won the National Spelling Bee with the word “guetapens,” meaning ambush or snare. (No way I would have gotten that one!) Indian-Americans have won the last five National Spelling Bees in a row, and 10 of the last 14, setting up quite the dynasty.

Fractal Recursions is simply the most gorgeous and varied gallery of fractal art I’ve ever seen. The thumbnail above is from this image. Another of my favorites is here. Each page comes equipped with a “Random Fractal” link that should keep you enthralled at least through your lunch break.

SMBC delivers as usual with a great webcomic about the ethics of Batman.

A flash “brighter than a thousand suns”: that’s how physicist Anatoli Bugorski described the experience of a high-energy proton beam passing through his skull. The incident happened back in 1978.

And finally, one of the more terrifying visions of the Singularity that I’ve ever seen. Enjoy.

Have a great weekend.