Are you, like me, a fan of Ottmar Liebert?  And are you, unlike me, in the market for a new guitar?  Then you might check out this eBay auction of a Pimental guitar made from two Ottmar Liebert guitars (the neck of one, and the body of another).  The auction didn't meet its reserve, but the seller might still be interested...

Check out fabprefab, modernist prefab dwellings.  This will be the future, when land is at a premium.  I can imagine apartment buildings like container ships, where you buy your 120U prefab apartment and it snaps right into the rack, with power, water, sewer, garbage, recycle, and [of course] internet connections all standardized.  You'll buy them at Fry's, and they'll be delivered by helicopter.  [ via David Pescovitz ]

This is excellent - the civilian space eXploration team has reached space!  As reported by ARRL, the 21-foot Civilian Space eXploration Team (CSXT) GoFast rocket quickly attained the 100 km altitude to make Amateur Radio and amateur rocketry history.  Another X-prize contestant?

CNet notes Point, Click, and Swap - digital photos go P2P.  "OurPictures, a Palo Alto start-up, plans to launch its service for letting subscribers share pictures over the Internet but without the constraints of e-mail attachments or Web sites."  Photos today, movies tomorrow?

I'm loving this: Wired considers Online Grocery Shopping, Take Two.  We were dearly-departed Webvan's biggest fans three years ago.  Would I pay more for home delivery?  YES.  Too bad suburban Los Angeles is so spread out - it makes a lousy pilot area for this kind of project.

Want to know what this is?  A URL, of course!  Semacode is a way of representing URLs using datamatrix 2D barcodes.  This allows 'net-connected cameraphones to scan a code and automatically retrieve the URL.  This is going to have a lot of applications... look for them on a product near you, soon.  I predict this will be big. 

I'm going to print them on the back of my business cards :)

From FuturePundit, Longitudinal Brain Scan Study Shows How Brain Matures:

The brain's center of reasoning and problem solving is among the last to mature, a new study graphically reveals. The decade-long magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study of normal brain development, from ages 4 to 21, by researchers at NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) shows that such "higher-order" brain centers, such as the prefrontal cortex, don't fully develop until young adulthood.

A time-lapse 3-D movie that compresses 15 years of human brain maturation, ages 5 to 20, into seconds shows gray matter - the working tissue of the brain's cortex - diminishing in a back-to-front wave, likely reflecting the pruning of unused neuronal connections during the teen years. Cortex areas can be seen maturing at ages in which relevant cognitive and functional developmental milestones occur. The sequence of maturation also roughly parallels the evolution of the mammalian brain, suggest Drs. Nitin Gogtay, Judith Rapoport, NIMH, and Paul Thompson, Arthur Toga, UCLA, and colleagues, whose study is published online during the week of May 17, 2004 in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This is just amazing, please see the article for more information and a lot of links to other resources about brain development...

A new blog I'm subscribed to: Joshu Newman's self-aggrandizement.  Found through my referer logs.  I feel I'm in a bit of a rut, need to follow some new blogs.  Anyway check him out - for example, transmorgification...