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Understanding Engineers, Take 1 >>>


Tuesday,  03/23/04  10:40 PM

If you're new to blogs, you may be interested in "All About Blogs" on The Daily Scan.
(also, Wired: Why RSS is Everywhere :)

These wooden kinetic sculptures are absolutely amazing: Wood That Works.  Great website, too, with flash animations and movies.  I want one.  Really.  Actually I want to be able to make things like this, wouldn't that be cool!

Dave Winer remembers his cross-country trip a year ago.  I remember it too, for a different reason; right before he left I posted Tyranny of Email, which he was kind enough to link.  And he left that link at the top of his site all week as he traveled to the East Coast.  The resulting exposure got me slashdotted, and the rest is history.  Actually "Tyranny" remains far and away my most popular post.

The I, Robot trailer is out.  Looks pretty cool.  Although it doesn't appear to have much to do with the Issac Asimov books, except for the "three laws" references.

In other news, Sony is setting up an Intelligent Robot lab.  I wonder if it costs more to build intelligent robots, or to make a movie about them?

Continuing with robot news, Wired reports Robots invade San Francisco.  "Over 400 robots rolled, walked, climbed and strutted their stuff at the first Robolympics."  Great stuff.  So when do you think the first robot will start a blog?

And in even more robot news, NASA announced that rover Opportunity is sitting on a beach.  "We think Opportunity is now parked on what was once the shoreline of a salty sea on Mars."

Tom Coates invents a new people classification system, the 2D Elf-Dwarf Pirate-Ninja scheme.  One axis measures style: "Ninja are skilled and proficient, elegant and silent, contained and constrained, honourable and spiritual.  Pirates are  loud and flamboyant, gregarious and unrestrained, life-loving and vigorous, passionate and strong."  The other classifies by method: "Elves are elegant and timeless, conceptual and refined, abstract and beautiful while Dwarves are practical and structural, hard-working and no-nonsense, down-to-earth smiths and makers."  What are you?

The red circle is me.  I think.

Speaking of classification (we were), is Sedna a planet?  Alan Stern has a great article in SpaceDaily which makes a convincing case for "yes".  He also proposed a very reasonable litmus test: "a planet is any body with enough gravitational mass to assume a spherical shape, but with too little mass to generate energy as a result of sustained nuclear fusion in its interior."  But I also like his daughter Kate's objection to more solar planets: "we will just have a mess on our hands when it comes time to name them all on tests."

Lore Sjöberg: The winner for most fun headline to add and/or remove commas from:

Video Games Make Kids Fat, Violent, Swedish Experts Say

Steve Largent was one of my favorite football players.  What's he doing now?  Running with wireless.

Scoble takes a look inside Buck's.  Yeah, I've been there.  One of those places which is famous for being famous, but not much else...

AlwaysOn says It's a good time to be an entrepreneur.  That's good to hear!  On the other hand, I'd say any time is a good time to be an entrepreneur :)

Ottmar Liebert: A record company executive came to visit.  He had a new contract for me.  He smoked a fat cigar.  He was short, but powerful, and his hands and head were glowing.  I sent him away.

Adam Curry will be talking about "Personal TV networks" at BloggerCon II.  Boy, if that isn't the Next Big Thing.  (You have tried the RSS+Bittorrent experiment, right?)

Wal*Mart opened their online music store!  It looks ugly.  But they did what they always do, discount.  The bar has been lowered to $.88/track.

Cory Doctorow likes Shrook.  Yeah, it's my favorite RSS reader for Macs, too.  If you use a Mac and haven't tried Shrook, try it!

This, I like.  If you are convicted of drunk driving in Ohio, you get a special license plate.  [ via Mark Frauenfelder ]