The older I get, the more I am a believer in the power of free markets. The natural balancing and moderating influences of free trade have been fundamental to our nation’s economic power and health. I’m also a big believer in exposing people to what this means in their daily lives as early as [...]
Don’t miss reading this link at McSweeny’s. Hilarious.
via Gizmodo.
Yes, my favorites are all irreverent, but I just can’t resist. Check out the growing collection at the Fine Art Photoshop Contest posted here, where you can also see the un-retouched originals.
You’ve heard of crop circles? Well, here’s the Japanese version made of living plants. By patterned planting of four different varieties of rice plants, each with different colored leaves, Akio Nakayam and friends grew these reproductions of the Edo-period prints. Wow.
I just stumbled on a great post from Julieanne over at Cosmic Variance.
“My temporary officemate runs down to the vending machine and buys a bag of gummi bears. He dumps them on the desk, sorts them by color, and then proceeds to eat them in order of increasing bin size (i.e. the pile of [...]
Update September 8, 2007:
I happened to walk into our kitchen the other morning to discover my wife and a friend chatting over a late breakfast. I said my normal hellos and good mornings but really intellectually engaged at the time. But as I was turning around to go back to my home office, our [...]
The title says it all. I almost couldn’t stop laughing and crying at the same time.
“First, I computed my annoyance ratio to determine the probability that each student would want to beat me up,” said Mosley. “Then I gauged that against the Beatings to Hand Raises Theory [...]
Do you have friends who still play Dungeons & Dragons? Well, then this is the perfect gift for them. The Catapult watch. Co-workers will never again sleep within range.
Purchase the catapult watch here.
The best collection I’ve seen so far made with ordinary household objects.
It figures that as soon as I set up a play structure for the kids, I discover the real artists of the playground world. Check out Daniel’s Wood Land.
My one consolation is that while incredibly cool, they look out of my price range….well, that and the hopes that the kids won’t be jaded by [...]
Check out the model number on this bad boy.
Yes, it’s Pi to 27 digits. From techEblog.
Okay, I admit it. I’m a nerd. But this one killed me.
This one spoke to me. My wife even nodded when she read it, “Yep, I could totally see you doing that.”
The roll-over caption says it all. “How could you possibly choose avoiding a little pain over understanding a magic lightning machine?”
From xkcd, and thanks to Benjamin over at The World’s Fair for the [...]
Have you ever found yourself saying something, and the very moment those ill-considered words passed your lips, there was a subtle foreshadowing that you had touched off a chain of events that would soon escaped your control? Well, I was reminded of one such historical gaffe from my teaching years this morning.
It all began [...]
The original post of advice for Evil Overlords was an immediate Internet cult classic. See the vastly expanded list here, complete with new tips for excelling as an evil henchmen, or a trooper in a legion of doom, or the Overlord’s accountant, or even for the Evil Overlord’s beautiful but wicked daughter.
A couple of [...]
Via TechBlog and Tree-Hugger, and an auto-translated version of the original Japanese site.
The Skycycle at Washuzan Highland Park in Okayama, a pedal-powered roller coaster.
For those of you unfamiliar with Mr. Popeil, you may perhaps recall several of his company’s products which in total, have pulled in over $2 BILLION in sales. My favorites are Ronco’s Pocket Fisherman, the Ginsu, the Vegamatic, and Mr. Microphone.
But this one, while currently an independent product, was just too priceless to pass [...]
Rob Knop over at Galactic Interactions posted a nice thread on “funny cheating stories.” Here’s mine:
My favorite cheating story was as much about the botched follow-up as it was about the idiocy of the execution. Back in the late eighties when I was a High School teacher, I had a Trig & Analytic Geometry [...]
Astrology has always ranked somewhere behind phrenology and the study of navel lint in my taxonomy of pseudo-science. I even distinctly remember a crushing blow from many years ago (before I was married) when this smoking blond was purchasing some software ahead of me in line at Comp USA. I mean really, [...]
I realize that most of you are probably not reading this blog to find out more about the wireless or broadcast industries and I generally try to avoid blogging about work. But this is just too good to resist. RCR Wireless, one of the industry’s trade rags has just nominated me as a [...]
One of my favorite technical books from a couple of years ago was this textbook by Robert Lang on the mathematics and symmetry properties of paper and origami.
But there was just that something that was missing. The models were so…, well…, so traditionally Asian that I had trouble connecting with them culturally. NOW, [...]
