So the state of California went ahead an executed Stan Tookie Williams. As an opponent of capital punishment I wish that California would outlaw the death penalty, but at least Tookie’s death answered one pressing question — exactly what would I have to do to get motivational speaker Tony Robbins to show up and say…
December, 2005
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Just a couple of awesome Lego projects here. First, <a href=”http://www.truerwords.net”>Seth Dillingham</a> sent me a link to <a href=”http://www.simons-rock.edu/~patrick/images/escherlego.jpg”>this awesome Lego recreation</a> of a famous work of MC Escher’s, <img src=”|images|2005_12_20_escher_lego.jpg”> How do you top that? Well, I’m not sure this tops it, but <a href=”http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6022866702″>this E-Bay auction</a> of Republic Attack Cruiser comes close, <img…
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I’ve been wanting to add some network storage to my home LAN for awhile and the price was finally right on Netgear’s SC101 Ethernet Disk enclosure. After using it for a couple weeks, I can say this is a very low-end solution that works (at least for Windows PCs) and is appropriate for some, but…
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The New York Times’ Claudia Dreifus recently interviewed longevity researcher Michael Rose. In the 1970s Rose managed to extend the average lifespan of fruit flies by forcing them to breed at relatively old ages, thereby providing a selection event for longer life (since only older fruit flies would be able to reproduce in this experiment).…
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PlaylistMag’s Christopher Breen has an excellent tutorial on how to get the most out of iTunes’ Smart Playlists.
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Over the past few years, my action figure collection has grown significantly, while my space to display them has declined. My wife and I have reached an uneasy true on the matter — the house we bought earlier this year has a walled-off finished area in the basement which makes a small 226 square-foot office…
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Richard Pryor died this month after a long battle with multiple sclerosis. MS is stilly poorly understood, but according to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, it is believed to be an autoimmune disorder that causes the body to attack the myelin protecting nerve fibers. Almost every piece written on Pryor’s death noted his long struggle…
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Probably the funniest thing I’ve read in the last 15 minutes is this piece by Andrew Orlowski attacking Wikipedia. Wikipedia is certainly right there at the bottom of trustworthy sites, but one of the few things I’d trust less than a Wikipedia article is anything written by Orlowski. Between them, Orlowski and Wikipedia demonstrate that…
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Where were classes like this when I was an undergraduate? I remember writing a 100-page analysis of George McClellan’s footdragging, not spending time on MUDs (the closest equivalent at the time) and writing “ethnographic analyses.” But I’m not bitter. Anyway, for a communications class an instructor had her students write ethnographic studies of World of…
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For something like 3 or 4 years the “Store” tab up there has had a “Under construction”-type message, but as of today there’s actually something for sale there. Its all pretty much World of Warcraft-inspired t-shirts (my wife’s been going crazy with slogans and t-shirt ideas; I keep telling her she should have been a…