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Monthly Archives: August 2007

Fake movie trailer thingie

Star Lords Star Wars / Lord of the Rings mashup. The first half is a bit…. ho hum. Then… well…. OH MY GOD funny. You want to watch this. It’s three minutes. You’ll like.

All I’m saying is that it’s hard to beat Bruce Sterling

Physicist Chow links to exactly one article. It’s this one. Just… read. Think. Enjoy. Then tell me that it’s not, actually, fairly probable. PS: it’s the gender ratios bit that makes it science fiction. Everything else is futurism.

Hexayurts – if you want to use lumber

Trackback messaging Drop me an email. There’s some stuff that might work ideally for your application.

Oops…

“What do I labor for?” she asks. “If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true.” Mother Theresa had some issues.

Cluttering Barnett’s blog…

A long comment I should have made a blog post to begin with. Tom, yes, I may well have missed your point, but I do think that it’s worth noting just how differently these things look. In the 20th century, the West went completely insane, and the madness was contagious. First you have WW1, which [...]

Nepalese appropriate technology boom

Amazing news from Nepal. It has gone almost unnoticed that Nepal’s infant mortality rate has been reduced by half since 1990. How did that happen? Not because a lot of state-of-the-art hospitals were built. Fewer babies die in Nepal these days mainly because of the spread of awareness about safe drinking water. The message went [...]

Brilliant demo

Semantic Image Resizing Deletes the least visually important bits from an image rather than scaling or cropping. Blade Runner.

OMG bad wind at Burning Man this year

WIND WARNING. . . Reposted from Arcana in LA Burners…. Greetings from the playa where I am happy and well and holded up in my car. I dont want this to deter anyone from coming, as it’s still a blast – but..batten down the hatches kids, cause the wind is the worst I’ve seen in [...]

Interbegging at Y-Combinator

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44869 Hi. My name is Vinay Gupta, of the Hexayurt project, a FOSS-style organization aimed at radically improving the lot of refugees and the poor. We’ve had some luck, recently, and we need help coping. Here’s the technology – we call it “Disastr” – a simple approach to using the network to reinforce efforts to [...]

Incredibly important and subtle point about gender and evolutionary biology

This is a major eye-opener. The punchline: looks like about 2/3rd of the ancestors of the current human race were female, because a lot of men died without ever reproducing. Impacts for our understanding of our own genetic heritage? Huge.