Rambles at starchamber.com

Can you tell gender by nothing but the sway of the walk? And if the answer is yes, how exactly do you do it? How does one dissect the gestalt of the gait? The BioMotion Lab (split between Ruhr University in Germany and Queen’s University in Ontario) is focusing research on “perception of biological motion [...]

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Synthetic life is much in the news these days. In the last month there has been a Discover article on simulated evolution, a Popular Science article (Life Built to Order) on the synthetic life efforts of Steen Rasmussen and his colleagues in Los Alamos, and a cover story in New Scientist on artificial life. The [...]

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Why do otherwise clever people consistently underestimate how long it will take to do something, even when they really should know better? This problem is rampant in the software business. Even veteran developers, people with years of programming experience, will look you in the eye and name an insanely optimistic timeline for their next project. [...]

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The Boston Globe today included an article on Googlewhacks, the mysterious art of doing a two-word Google search that results in exactly one document: One-hit wonder. I am certain that this article will decrease workplace productivity in the Boston area for the next few days. Googlewhacking is a dangerously seductive anticyclonic mixolydian way to waste [...]

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Jon Udell’s Heavy Metal Umlaut video is being passed around a lot these days, and with good reason. He took a quirky page out of Wikipedia, coupled it with some quick and dirty video manipulation from Camtasia, and made a compelling illustration of how the Wikipedia actually works.

Here’s the current Wikipedia entry that initially tickled [...]

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Go ahead. Play this game and see if I care. It’s your own damn fault if you waste an hour staring at the screen and clicking like a drooling gameboy lab-monkey.

Here, I’ll make it easy for you.
Click here. Nobody’s peeking.

(This is a seductive logic game I found on Jesse Ruderman’s site. It was written by [...]

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Found this at Jesse Ruderman’s Squarefree site: Beerware code in Mozilla. Open source people talk about the difference between “free as in beer” and “free as in speech”. Carrying the beer idea a little bit further is coder Poul-Henning Kamp who put this comment into his Mozilla code (as subsequently discovered by Jesse Ruderman).

/*
* [...]

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Last night my wife was flying back to Boston from Florida on Delta Flight 1994. I was watching the Super Bowl (Go Patriots, naturally), and could only spare a little time away from the game to see if her flight was on time. As I dashed upstairs I wondered to myself, “Do you suppose Google [...]

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I like this NY Times article about various hack-your-own-TiVo-for-free solutions that are cropping up on the web: Arts > Television > Steal This Show” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/arts/television/30manl.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5090&en=e82b9db497df2928&ex=1264741200&partner=rssuserland”>Steal This Show. It makes the point rather forcefully that no TV executive is going to be able to stop services like MythTV (an open source TiVo-like program) and Videora [...]

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Kotaku is a game site from the Gawker Media stable. A few days ago while browsing Kotaku I came across this item: GPS Tron. A guy in Germany has written software that lets two people play a real world version of the light cycle game from the movie Tron. The object of the game is [...]

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