Rambles at starchamber.com

Good piece about the technical goings-on behind Google. Internet Week > Infrastructure > Google Defies Dotcom Downturn > April 27, 2001 (via BoingBoing)

Read Full Post »

I’m hooked on the APOD site now. It’s a real wonder. First I went to gawk at the pictures, then I discovered that the prose and links at the bottom are also very good. For instance, I found this cool Soviet propaganda booklet about Yuri Gagarin. Ever wonder why stars in astronomical photographs look like [...]

Read Full Post »

WikiWiki site about Artificial Life. Have a wander.

Read Full Post »

APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) is fun. The April 18th edition was a nicely animated tesseract, that elusive higher dimensional polyhedron.

Read Full Post »

This really is pretty magical: Zoom into the Earth from space with NASA. Take the time to download it. It’s basically the old Charles and Ray Eames “Powers of Ten” concept, only with real no-fooling-around pictures. Eye-popping.

Read Full Post »

Google is doing newsgroups now, and with Deja.com’s database behind them, they’re going to do a damn good job of it. For instance, here’s comp.soft-sys.matlab, the newsgroup devoted to the product I work on, MATLAB. As they say in their FAQ page, “Our goal is to offer improvements both in the quantity of postings available [...]

Read Full Post »

I was reading something (can’t remember where) about why people write open-source code. It used the word “reputationism” (as opposed to capitalism) as the motivating force. I think there’s something to that. The author mentioned Advogato’s trust metric as an example of how trust and reputation can be automatically tracked in large communities. If this [...]

Read Full Post »

You’ve heard all about the human genome. Here it is. The National Center for Biotechnology Information has made a good web-based interface for zooming down to wherever you want on the chromosome. You can search for something like Huntington’s disease, and it will highlight the part of the genome you care about, in this case [...]

Read Full Post »

From my friend JMike and his poker-playing friends comes this discussion of the phrase “to beg the question.”

To beg the question is to use an argument that assumes what was to
be proved. It derives from a secondary meaning of “beg,” to evade
or dodge. This time-honored and useful meaning is fast disappearing under the
prow of [...]

Read Full Post »

From the Coffee Czar: Why Mathematicians Now Care About Their Hat Color

Read Full Post »