General

Ooh! Are you Fascist or not?

Tons of alien lifeforms fall onto Earth every year. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, anyone?

For my birthday, I want the Athlon Deathstar.

There is a special Hell reserved for whichever moron that signed me up —again— for CrushSuck’s spam service. Apparently, said moron didn’t read my rant last time.

According to Humans For Sale, I’m worth exactly $2,290,950.00.

Woodlice are frequently found in clumps or groups. When parts of their bodies touch a surface, woodlice slow down and will eventually stop if enough of their body comes into contact with an object or another woodlouse (thigmokinetic response). This type of behaviour will cause clumping of woodlice as they come into contact with each other as they explore their habitat. This clumping will result in an overall reduction in the surface area to volume ratio of the group (compared with individuals) and this will lead to a reduction in the rate of water loss.

A Digital Sundial displays the current solar time in digits, words, or pictures. Two closely-spaced parallel masks project different images depending on the angular position of the sun in the following way: The first mask, a regular array of thin vertical slits, casts a striped light pattern onto the second mask. This light pattern is independent of the height of the sun. The second mask is composed of narrow stripes of the digits, words, or pictures to be displayed. The striped pattern of sunlight cast by the first mask illuminates exactly those stripes of the second mask corresponding to the image representing the current time. The light shining through both masks is projected onto a translucent viewing screen mounted closely behind the second mask, which results in a digital display of the time. A plate of light-refracting material can be inserted between the two masks, effectively linearizing the motion of the light pattern cast onto the second mask. Using this linearized version, it is possible to construct not only a sundial displaying the hours, but also a minute display which, for example, repeatedly displays the minutes of the current time in five-minute intervals.

Woohoo! I so badly want a Cell phone jammer, just for the movie theater.

In 1987, Gary Grossman wrote Instruments, Cybernetics, and Computer, a short thesis on the correlations between computer-produced music and music produced by analog instruments. This paper is part of a larger body of work pertaining to the SAWDUST project. SAWDUST was created in the early 1970s, and was one of the first waveform-creating pieces of software.

Interesting People: a hypermail archive.