Rambles at starchamber.com

The latest MATLAB Programming Contest is under way. And what makes this contest interesting? The fact that you can steal the code from whoever is in first place, modify it, and make it yours. Fit together a model of a molecule in the shortest time, and win the adulation of the MATLAB-speaking peoples of the [...]

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Here’s a good story about Christophe Bruno, a poet who used Google as his publisher. He bought five bucks worth of Google AdWords and used them to display his handiwork, thereby winning thousands of unsuspecting readers for his bizarre dada-esque miniatures. It was a good hack while it lasted, but Google got wise and shut [...]

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From the Sneak Peek department: Although she says it doesn’t officially launch till Thursday, you can still take an early look at Mary C’s Science Fair blog over at blogspot.com. Not much there just yet, but there’s a nifty mini-interview (original blog content! Imagine!) with Jeremy Drake of Harvard talking about stars made of exotic [...]

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Bio-blogical analogies are in the air: This article by Jon Udell on the O’Reilly Network, Blogspace Under the Microscope, pursues a biological metaphor for how networks of blogs can join together to form larger entities in the same way that single-celled organisms can join together to form multi-cellular organisms. It’s a little bit of a [...]

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Remember the story of the towboat that got sucked under the bridge? It’s making the rounds again. I got two more emails just today pointing me at it. It is a great set of pictures. Since the pictures have been going around and around, I decided that there must be a good explanation of the [...]

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I happen to know that the Coffee Czar is a big fan of Get Your War On, a bizarro mixture of cultural satire, profanity, inanity, and endlessly recycled business clip art. The Czar got me started reading the site, and I have to admit this obscene minimalist comic has a very high laugh-out-loud quotient. A [...]

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I’ve been a fan of Erik Davis ever since I picked up TechGnosis at a bookstore years ago. He talks about our technologically frenzied culture from a mythological point of view, something generally absent from other cultural commentary. At the same time, he is an enthusiastic participant in the technoculture. He doesn’t scoff; he embraces [...]

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I can’t say that I’m very surprised by this. Craig Venter, formerly of Celera Genomics, built that multimillion dollar company to decode… his own genome. I wonder how many people knew what he was up to? Did he sneak in and switch the test tubes? It’s easy to make fun of him, but if you [...]

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Seed magazine is a science-n-fashion magazine. It’s every bit as odd as it sounds. The ads look like they came straight out of Vanity Fair, and an article about James Watson’s new memoir is nestled next to a fashion shoot (“Unleash the gypsy within this spring, as the casual ease of a bygone bohemian era [...]

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