Rambles at starchamber.com

Cool self-reconfiguring robot: Polypod: Example Locomotion with Reconfiguration. They’ve really built a prototype of this robot, but the niftiest stuff is in the movies of what they might be able to do some day. It’s creepy to watch this robot walk like a caterpillar, then crawl like a snake, then mutate into a spider-like tetrapod. [...]

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Next-new-thing stories are a dime a dozen these days, but this strikes me as something worth getting excited about: spintronics and magnetic memory chips (from the New York Times).

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Internetworking (3.3): Article-Designing for Information Foragers

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Saw this on kottke.org. Weird Al Yankovic recently married Suzanne Krajewski. Here is their Amazon wish list. Al would sure appreciate it if you’d buy him a Viking CF128M 128 MB CompactFlash Card.

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The ExploreLearning is impressive. It’s divided up into ExploreScience and ExploreMath. Throughout these sites there are hands-on Shockwave demos. I like the Orbit Simulator and the Ultrasound: How does it work? pages.

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Does the decoding of the human genome mean those zany creationists will shut up and go home? Well, of course not. This article from Family.org is a good example of the kind of weird argument whereby creationists use scientific reasoning to refute scientific reasoning. Look guys, just say: “God made everything six thousand years ago [...]

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No matter how good your vision is, adaptive optics can make it better. Nifty lasers and flexible mirrors can give all but the legally blind 20/10 Super Vision. As a spin-off from the Cold War, this beats the pants off of Tang.

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Good list: Jakob’s Heuristics for User Interface Design.

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I like the whatis.com site. For instance what is .NET?

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One-stop shopping at asteroid.net for all your asteroid-related needs.

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