Various amusing or interesting topics, or things that shock and appall me. Kind of a miscellaneous bin.
Science fiction fans have long been known to make replicas of things from their favorite books, movies, or shows. There was even a fellow in Britain who turned his apartment into a replica of the Star Trek ship Voyager a few years back. This, however, is the first full-sized building created from a cartoon movie …
Continue reading ‘“Replica of Disney-Pixar ‘Up’ house for sale in Utah”’ »
In 1985, the Wall Street Journal had a quote from an unnamed Xerox executive to the effect that “we’ll have a paperless office when we have a paperless bathroom.” Well, paperless bathrooms are here, but offices still use a lot of paper. In a bid to reduce that, Xerox has come up with self-erasing reusable …
A primary theme of this blog is that science fiction drives science. Apparently science is now directly feeding back into science fiction too. 🙂 I don’t expect this to really go anywhere. The motivation for it is pretty transparent: keeping NASA in the public eye now that there are no shuttle launches, so that Congress …
Continue reading ‘“NASA to work on approved sci-fi books”’ »
I doubt this sort of thing will become the preferred way to attend a wedding any time soon, but until recently it wouldn’t have been possible for the home-bound bridesmaid to attend at all. Telepresence will only get better — easier to use, more reliable, with more control for the remote user — over time. …
Continue reading ‘“iPad bridesmaid attends wedding via FaceTime”’ »
I generally ignore conspiracy theories. The more you know about history, probability, and human nature, the harder it is to seriously attribute malicious intent to things that happen by random chance, or as a result of public and well-known systems. The assassination of John F. Kennedy was (probably) a legitimate conspiracy. The claim that Kentucky …
Short, sweet, and very amusing. If you don’t read this one, you’ll regret it.
Definitely tongue-in-cheek, but amusing for us programmer-geeks.
I love this.
Finally we discover the reason that the Internet was created.
OMG, mind control rays… from the SUN! 😉 Okay, not really. At worst, the solar storms only added some additional impetus, the basic reasons for both the riots and the market fluctuations were already there. But I find it very interesting that research has linked solar storms to pessimism and depression. Our local star may …
Continue reading ‘“Riots, wild markets: Did space storms drive us mad?”’ »