Random links

• Joel Spolsky "If something seems possible, that's probably because someone is already doing it. When something seems that it can't possibly work, nobody tries it. Real innovation happens when someone tries anyway, overlooking an obvious flaw, and finds a way to make an idea work."
• Female Patriarchs in Albania - apparently they swear virginity, live as men, and take over the male role as head of the family. Very weird.
  

Saturday reading

• From George Will -

  America says to foreign producers: We prefer not to pump our oil, so please pump more of yours, thereby lowering its value, for our benefit. Let it not be said that America has no energy policy.

• Wilkerson on Global Warming
• Joel Splolsky on Architecture Astronauts - worth reading, especially in conjunction with John Robb.
• This is weird
• Inventions by year
  

Quick roundup while uploading

• A nice article on the Golden Section in design
• China and Demography from Coming Anarchy
• Making engines more efficient - using steam of all things - very cool
• Cutting Edge Designers
• Prediction Markets - nice graphics
  
• Woman jailed for testicle attack

  Amanda Monti, 24, flew into a rage when Geoffrey Jones, 37, rejected her advances at the end of a house party, Liverpool Crown Court heard.
  
  She pulled off his left testicle and tried to swallow it, before spitting it out. A friend handed it back to Mr Jones saying: "That's yours."

  
  

Application wanted

Some time ago I read that Bill Clinton (starting in his younger days) would try to meet as many people as possible in a day, and then at night write down the particulars of everyone he met. It would be nice to have some sort of visual web app to do that. It would allow the user to note all of the relevant details about a person, and also visually show his connections to existing contacts, companies and concepts/entities. It can be done manually in Visio, but that's hardly a workable solution. Does anyone know of any products that do this?

If not, then it goes on the list of stuff to build.

Random Thursday links

• How to fix the Microsoft Home Page
• Robert Conquest's 3 Laws of Politics

  1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
  2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
  3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

• More Stirling Engines how to guides - this one looks a bit better than the last one I posted. Here is another one.
• The top 100 web apps for freelancers - mine is not on it, yet.
  

Worm gears and motors and robot, oh my!

As my mad scientist phase continues, I've come across a few cool supply sites (some from Mark)

• Robot Objects
• Surplus Robot Parts
  

In other news, I just ordered 3 sets of brass robot gears for ten bucks from E-Bay. They should arrive soon.

Local cooling

I sit here at four in the morning, listening to Woodie Guthrie trying to restore a database that a client accidentally deleted the day before launch (yay me). And it's 54 degrees outside. In Georgia, in the middle of May. It seems unnaturally cold lately.

I wonder if there's a site somewhere that tracks local temperatures and plots, plots a yearly average and indicates if that is lower than average or higher. If not, that would be a cool AdSense supported project...

A cool idea

ThinkCycle.org - an open source community for machines.

A mad scientist period

For some reason I'm going through a mad scientist phase right now. My current idea is pair a passive solar heater with a Stirling engine and see how much power is actually generated. Hopefully I'll have time to work on it in a few weeks.

The tin can Stirling engine

I came across simple plans for a tin can Stirling Engine on the interweb, I think I'm going to build one. I've had some thoughts on how to pair one up with a solar chimney that might actually work. I'll keep everyone posted.

Friday round up

• Batwings! No, really, those look very cool.
• The physics and biology of Superman's possible reproduction
• Possible cheap hyrodgen to fuel cars.
• Why women have fat thighs.
• Amazing RC Plane Demo
• Get rid of the Thumbs.db file that Windows creates in every folder.
• Julian Sanchez and the conflicts that a pro-drug legalization citizen (like myself) faces when called for Jury Duty. I had a similar internal conversation with myself last year when I was called.
  

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Quotes That Caught My Eye
Eric Hoffer

• The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.
• We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.
• It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.
  

Ambrose Bierce

• Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
• There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know.
• To be positive: To be mistaken at the top of one's voice.
  

H.L. Mencken

• An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
• Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
• Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
• Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
• I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
• It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
• Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
• The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

A quick one while uploading

• Make Magazine's gift guide is pretty cool.
  
• Sexomnia? A bit ridiculous if you ask me. If it's "often brought on by alcohol" how it different than intoxication?
• And from the same paper "Man Pleads Guilty In Horse-Sex Case". The guy in question was videotaping the magic event, when evidently the horse kicked it's human lover to death (or that was what I drew from the description). There are very strange people in the world, and they seem to find each other with great ease.