A little creepy, but it looks delicious. And it just goes to show that you really can find absolutely anything on the Internet. 😉
Antikythera Mechanism Duplicated — in Lego!
The odds are that you’ve heard about the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient (2000+ years old) mechanical device that was dredged up off of Greece more than a century ago. Four years ago, scientists finally figured out what it was for, calculating solar eclipses and other celestial events. It was really big news at the time, because we hadn’t realized that the ancient Greeks had the knowledge and skill to pull off that kind of feat.
Well, these guys have built a mechanical computer that duplicates its function — and they did it entirely out of Lego!
Now that’s freakin’ awesome. 🙂
I’m sure you’ll be able to buy a Lego kit specifically for this, at some point, if there’s enough interest in it. I’m not sure I’d have the interest to buy it, but I know several people who might.
(Thanks for the heads-up, c-square!)
Russian Viagra spammers, take note
The thought that girls like a big penis is not properly conveyed by the English phrase “big penis like a girl.” 😉
(Yes, I actually got several messages yesterday whose text was exactly that, claiming to be from “EnlargePenis.VeryGood4@yahoo.com”, to my great amusement. Somebody really needs an English lesson. Or a biology lesson, maybe. 😉 )
iGod?
Got any burning theological questions? Now you can get them answered… sort of. They really should put a warning on it though… “iGod cannot authorize crimes, crusades, or jihads.” 😉
“Silencing Wikileaks is silencing the press”
I’m sure some of you have been following the Wikileaks news recently… how the founder and spokesperson for the organization, Julian Assange, has been arrested in England, over an accusation in Switzerland. There are reports, which I haven’t been able to confirm, that the US is trying to criminalize Wikileaks retroactively and get him extradited, though on what legal grounds I don’t know — he’s not a US citizen or even a US resident, so he’s not subject to US laws by any legal theory I’ve ever heard of.
His only true crime is that he has embarrassed the great and the powerful. And while that is rarely without consequences, those consequences cannot — and must not — be enforced by the US legal system.
The US government works for us, the US citizens. At least, in theory. More often the people in high positions in the government work for themselves, and do whatever they think they can get away with. Wikileaks, no matter what you think of the organization’s recent actions, is just showing US citizens (and incidentally everyone else) what their government is doing in their names. Like it or not, we need to know this stuff. To quote key points from that article:
[…] I believe Wikileaks as an organization to be flawed and Assange to be a problematic figure, to put it charitably. There are negative effects and public benefits from the project’s actions, so far. But Wikileaks has a right to exist, just as you have a right to know when your government’s secrets grow into public deceptions.
I believe we are better off knowing what we now do of those deceptions from the material Wikileaks has brought to light.
Just as past court struggles for the legal protection of free speech in America have sometimes involved characters or groups one might find flawed at best, and abhorrent at worst, so too is this an imperfect entity deserving of the full protection of law and due process.
Wikileaks may be flawed. But Americans cannot allow the US to criminalize Wikileaks. If we do, the rights of all citizens are jeopardized.
I won’t even get into the government’s sizable hypocrisy in this matter.
We need to keep an eye on what our government is doing, and throw the bastards out when they start getting grandiose delusions of power. To (possibly mis-)quote comedian Robin Williams: “Politicians are like diapers and must be changed frequently for the same reason.”
Fortunately, the Internet makes this sort of censorship a lot harder. As I’ve said before on this blog, if the governments of the world had realized the power that the Internet offered their citizens, they’d have quietly strangled it in its cradle.
Again I’ll haul out my favorite Supreme Court Justice quote:
Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.
— Justice Louis Brandeis, Other People’s Money, and How the Bankers Use It, 1933.
It’s the absolute truth.
“Why Richard Feynman can’t tell you how magnets work”
Have I ever mentioned that the late Richard Feynman is one of my heroes? This is a perfect example of why — he could have taken the easy way out and given a BS answer that would have satisfied the interviewer, but instead he tried to explain why he couldn’t explain it properly, while giving enough hints that someone familiar enough with science could pursue it further and figure it out.
“Capital One Made Me Different Loan Offers Depending On Which Browser I Used”
Inexplicable and puzzling. If I didn’t know that it was impossible, I’d say that their webmaster was playing a joke on them.
And since we’ve no place to go…
We’ve had more than three feet of snow here so far, and it’s still coming down — forecasts are saying we could see another foot and a half to two feet in the next twenty-four hours. News reports say that it shatters the previous record snowfall in this city, set in the early seventies. Where’s global warming when you need it? 😉
I can’t even see the picnic table in the back yard anymore… in better weather it’s a large octagonal affair, built on the stump of an absolutely massive tree, with an octagonal bench circling the entire thing. GoddessJ’s father refers to it as “the UFO.” Now it looks more like a wedding cake, with snow piled up on the table in the center, and a visibly separate pile surrounding it on the bench. Which has now merged with the snow building up from the ground. Yes, I have pictures, which I’ll probably post in the near future.
There’s a small extension on the front of the ground floor of the house, below the windows of my office. The snow is piled up so high on the roof of it that it’s literally halfway up the office windows. And yes, I have pictorial evidence of that too, as well as other fascinating and disturbing sights from our house.
We’ve also heard more sirens going by in the last two days than we’d heard in the entire previous two months. By several multiples.
Fortunately, our industrial-strength snow thrower is in the garage too, next to the snow shovels, and it looks like there’s enough room to get it out without moving the car (which wouldn’t be possible anyway) — whatever genius came up with the concept of the car-and-a-half-width garage gets my fervent thanks, yet again! I just hope that it will start, because I don’t think GoddessJ and I are up to clearing a path through this by hand.
Wish me luck, I’m off to do battle with the elements.
“Eight Days a Week”
Hyperbole? I would never indulge in it. Not in a million years.
The White Stuff
Judging from the picnic table in our back yard (one of the few things that I can see both the top and bottom of to properly gauge depth), we’ve gotten nearly two feet of snow in the last twenty-four hours. And it’s still coming down. Hard.
Looks like it’ll be time for the annual inaugural firing-up of the snow thrower, as soon as it lets up, or we’ll never get out of the driveway. On days like today, I’m very glad that my commute is so short. 😉
I’m also insanely happy about our relatively-new house, specifically the garage. I had to go out last night, and for the first time ever in my life, I didn’t have to excavate the car from the entire day’s accumulation of weather first! To me, that alone makes this place worth its weight in gold. 🙂 And I can lay my hands on our snow shovels without trudging across an entire winter wonderland of a back yard to get to the shed, too. When you’re living dead center of the buckle of the snow belt, believe me, that’s a huge bonus. 🙂