plurib.us

Tactile, and very watchable, electric musical instrument ["ReacTable"] has the heart of your average synthesizer.  Demo and Bjork live performance videos included.

wired.com/entertainment/...

Neat photos of trees, with giant white sheets behind them.

lensculture.com/myoung.html

Mars update: Spirit and Opportunity rovers are weathering a dust storm, the latter in danger of running out of juice:
spaceref.com/news/viewsr.ht...
spaceref.com/news/viewsr.ht...

The next lander mission, due for arrival in May 2008, just took off:
spaceref.com/news/viewpr.ht...

I-35W bridge over the Mississippi collapses.  I walked under that bridge for 3 months, on the way home from work.

flickr.com/photos/adamwol...
cnn.com/2007/US/08/01/...
minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/20...
startribune.com/10136/gallery/...
wcco.com/topstories/loc...

My co-worker Danny makes little twisty-tie guys for all occasions.  Recently, he has begun experimenting with using them in stop-motion photography.  If you watch these videos sequentially, you'll notice an apparent progression in the direction of "Totally Awesome."

youtube.com/results?search...

The decline of cork in wine bottles threatens many species that thrive only in cork harvesting forests.  (Who knew?)
earthtrends.wri.org/updates/node/2...

Also (and unrelated), The Shrub of Consciousness has been out-done by the Human Brain Cloud.  (The similarities are astonishing.)
humanbraincloud.com/

A day on Digg:

I never thought I'd see the day when GIMP gets a single window interface like in this test screenshot.  That day might actually come.  (Maybe I'm the only one who cares about this.)
venturecake.com/gimps-major-ui...

Surprisingly cool vintage Polish movie posters.
agrayspace.com/posters/

Captivating "kaleidescope painter".
permadi.com/java/spaint/sp...

Search engine only searches ".us" top level domain.

lemmefind.us/search.php?t=p...

Neat image of what may be the new earliest prosthetic body part ever.

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/69...

I added my 7th and latest SVG image, "Open Window", to my SVG Art Gallery.

plurib.us/1shot/2007/ope...

Fill up your car with ammonia, not hydrogen.

interocitor.com/archives/00065...

On July 17, our president submitted an executive order:

whitehouse.gov/news/releases/...

If anyone says you're against the war in Iraq, we own your stuff.

Furthermore:

Sec. 5. For those persons whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order who might have a constitutional presence in the United States, I find that, because of the ability to transfer funds or other assets instantaneously, prior notice to such persons of measures to be taken pursuant to this order would render these measures ineffectual. I therefore determine that for these measures to be effective in addressing the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 1(a) of this order.

If you are against us, we find the constitution to be useless.

This is what's going on.  Believe it.

Take away all street signs and lane markers, streets become safer.  (Maybe "make it idiot-proof / they'll build a better idiot" can work in reverse?)

radicaltrust.ca/2007/07/08/tra...

I need to reiterate my recommendation to use DVD+R for backing up important files:

Life expectancy:
forums.torrentspy.com/archive/index....
Media and format:
adterrasperaspera.com/blog/2006/10/3...

Neat exploration into old file formats and archival:

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technolog...

Ms Ceeney said: "If you put paper on shelves, it's pretty certain it is going to be there in a hundred years.

"If you stored something on a floppy disc just three or four years ago, you'd have a hard time finding a modern computer capable of opening it.

GPL 3 is officially released.  (Hasn't been updated since 1991.)
arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/...

Dude.

lawoftime.org/home.html

Great discoveries occur because the time demands them. The more urgent the need, the more necessary is the discovery. The Law of Time was unearthed to facilitate an unprecedented shift in human consciousness. Only by such a shift can the global crisis be resolved and surmounted.

By 2012, according to the Law of Time, we must be ready for this shift, the unparalleled transition into the next stage of our evolution, the noosphere. This signifies the attainment of a unified field of planetary consciousness.

Vice-President Cheney says that the Vice-President is not part of the Executive branch of the US government.

Already under fire for his secretive ways, Cheney has refused to comply with an order governing the care of classified documents; his office concluded that the order does not apply because he is not "an entity within the executive branch."

That's quite opposite the argument Cheney made in 2001, when he said that a congressional probe into the workings of his energy task force "would unconstitutionally interfere with the functioning of the executive branch."

Presumably, he did not do so well in grade-school social-studies classes.

washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content...

Bald eagles are no longer endangered.

nytimes.com/2007/06/28/us/...

This makes me really happy, for reasons I can't explain at all.

On finding the "minimum number of moves it would take to solve [a rubik's cube] from even the most difficult of its more than 43 quintillion possible arrangements".

boston.com/news/globe/hea...

New York Times dedicates Science section to Evolution for a day.  A review:
scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/200...

"EMI says DRM-free music is selling well", and others may be following suit.  Hallelujah.

arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/...

Bad Spock Drawings. "Artist are asked to make a Bad Spock drawing!"

badspock.blogspot.com/

Fashion for Ferrets:

drsfostersmith.com/product/NavRes...

This site seeks to quantify something seemingly unquantifiable: World Peace, by country.  The site is 10% numbers and 90% justification of their careful methodology.

visionofhumanity.com/

Creative Commons licenses allow you to specify how you want to be credited, but practically no one does.

spinflow.org/2007/02/06/how...

Announcing my 6th vector drawing of the year: "Grapefruit".  And with it, I think I have enough to justify compiling all of them into one page.  (I'll continue announcing new images here, though.)

plurib.us/1shot/2007/gra...
plurib.us/1shot/2007/svg...

Boy makes add-on to software; boy wins award from software company; boy gets cease and desist letter for add-on.

news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9...

Status report on two space projects: New Horizons has sent all its data from its recent Jupiter fly-by (mission accomplished); and scientists are still interpreting the data we got from the Huygens probe that landed on Titan 2 1/2 years ago.

spaceref.com/news/viewpr.ht...
spaceref.com/news/viewpr.ht...

James, my roommate, has a weblog documenting his Master's thesis (Architecture) in Biloxi, Mississippi.

upyourarchitecture.com/

Archives start here:
blog.lib.umn.edu/whee0113/archi...

His thesis involved the use of 40' shipping containers as the basis for utilitarian structures:

The building block for the conceptual basis of the thesis, it has been called many things in the history since its inception. At its most basic, it is 20’ or 40’ x 8.5’ x 8’ and comprised of aluminum or steel usually containing a wooden decking. At its most detailed it is the single most responsible reason for the global economy as we know it today.

The question that this thesis will continue to pose is “what else can it be”? This includes the re-engineering of the shipping container to include a possible second life of housing or infrastructure. The next question that gets asked is “why a shipping container”? Perhaps a better question is “why not a shipping container?” but I wanted to investigate why someone would view something of a more traditional character in a more positive light.

What can you do with a pre-manufactured house that you can’t do with a shipping container?

If you see James around, give him a high-five.  He's a remarkable guy, with a remarkable vision.