Random and assorted site updates:

• I’ve made a new Minions banner. Yay!
  • Moved banners to the top
    • Removed the Blogger banner
      • Updated the Messagebox
        • Gave the Systembox a dropdown menu
          • Removed then replaced the Recent Blogger listing
            • Begged Rod to make a script that would extract recent updates from Linkwatcher
              • Put said list into a new box
                • Begged Robert to update Pinky so it now shows sites that have been updated in the last hour as red
                  • Added Humanclick

Yay! Amy redesigned Domesticat with Greymatter. If only she would enable comment-posting, so we could leave foul messages hiding in wait for her. [Actually, Greymatter has a configurable word-filter list, too.]

What wonderful times we live in: Lego Mosaic allows you to upload an image of yourself, and convert it to LEGO “Blocks”. You can then order a $30 LEGO kit that includes about 2000 bricks, a frame, and instructions on how to put it together.

The Nueva Extraterrestrial Project was the “culmination of the Nueva sixth and seventh grade science classes’ physiology unit in 1998-99.”

The kids created three different science-fictional planets, then populated those planets with creatures that filled appropriate ecological niches.

My favorite creature? The Europan Devil’s Minion.

I’m not sure whether I’m more terrified by the fact that the P-Mate exists, or the fact that it “won the Dutch Millenium Award.”

Scary as it is, I do admire the …intestinal fortitude… of the marketing team that came up with phrases like “Surprise a friend and be orginal!” “Stand up, aim and go!” and “The vertical solution for women who want to go when they have to go; anywhere, anytime.”

For the compulsive, the obsessive, the insane, and for people like Jeff, there is a special place on the web: The Vi Lovers Home Page.

An Aerogel is a super-porous silicon-based substance that is over 99.8% air. Aerogels are currently being used by NASA to catch micrometeorites, as well as for insulation.

Since aerogels can possibly (rarely) occur in nature, there has been some speculation that there are aerogel-based organisms living in the higher reaches of Earth’s atmosphere. These organisms would be almost invisible, nearly weightless, and would almost never reach the surface without dissolving.

Sometimes dreams do come true: since id open-sourced the code to Quake 1, some lunatics have ported the game to the Dreamcast. What makes this even cooler is the fact that since the code is all OpenSource, it’s perfectly legit to post the software anywhere.

More details can be found at DC Emulation.

At CStoreWarehouse.com, you can order 12-packs of Jolt, 24-packs of Red Bull, and 12-packs of Bawls. Bottled glee!

I’ve always been fascinated by scientific future-casting (if such a thing can be scientific). I’m particularly interested in future timelines that are constantly modified to account for current events. Two such timelines are presented by J. R. Mooneyham: The aptly-named “Timeline“, and “Perspectives“.

The Timeline is a general outline of future history, and somewhat conservative and circumscribed in what it offers the reader. The Timeline is meant to be the ‘harder’ of the two works, in terms of science and predictions. But this also means the Timeline must be more generalized, more risk-averse– and also peter out entirely as we venture into the deep, deep future, where everything must ultimately give way to outrageous guesswork (partly due to technology advancing to levels indistinguishable from magic, as a famous quote by Arthur C. Clarke suggests).