Rambles at starchamber.com

St. Frank recently posted about parkour, the zany and dangerous sport that mixes gymnastics with testosterone and brick walls. When it works, as it usually does in the dozens of parkour videos you can find on YouTube, it’s impressive.
The New Yorker recently did a piece on parkour, and they even put some videos on their [...]

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Have you ever wondered what happens to all the heat they generate at the power plant? They burn tons and tons of coal to make steam, the steam spins the turbine, the turbine makes electricity, which they distribute and sell. Everything else is just managing the consequences, because now you’ve got a lot of excess [...]

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Bill Moyers recently interviewed Jon Stewart for his show Bill Moyers Journal on PBS. If you have the time to watch it, I recommend it. I sat in front of my computer and watched the whole thing, something I didn’t expect to do when pressed the “play” button.
Jon Stewart likes to say “I’m just a [...]

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I just came across this Wired item on a magnetic brain stimulator that’s being discussed at the latest American Psychiatric Association meeting as a new therapeutic tool for treating depression.
It works like this: much of your brain activity is electrical. You can drive electrical activity by changing nearby magnetic fields. Thus, with cleverly designed [...]

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I used to work in aeronautics at NASA Ames Research Center. I worked in a big wind tunnel building, and the people I worked with were either wind tunnel engineers or CFD engineers. CFD stands for Computational Fluid Dynamics. They’re the people who write programs to simulate the flow of air around an airplane. They [...]

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This one is worth a million bucks, but I’m giving it to you for free.
I was at a conference last week, and I noticed how commonplace it has become for people in the audience to use their digital cameras to take pictures of all the slides. Digital pictures are essentially free, so why not? At [...]

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Last week I went to the Media Lab’s h2.0 conference at MIT. “h2.0″ stands for human 2.0; the conference centered on the surprisingly close relationship between using technology to cope with human disabilities and using technology to augment human capabilities. That is to say, people with disabilities are leading the way on human augmentation of [...]

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These days everything gets extreme-a-fied rapidly, which I suppose suits the extremophiles out there.
Let’s say you jump off a building and live to tell about it. You talk to your friends. They all think you’re crazy and you get a reputation as a head-case, but that’s as far as it goes. Now suppose you [...]

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My daughter is four years old today.

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Here’s some news you can use from the front lines of the modern dating scene: remember HOT or NOT, the tawdry-but-popular website dedicated to letting strangers rate your sexual allure? Here’s how it works: upload a picture of you (although of course you can’t be stopped from uploading a picture of someone else). Almost instantly, [...]

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