Rambles at starchamber.com

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Clean energy is going to save us. Oh no, wait! Clean energy is going down the tubes. Maybe nuclear energy ia the next big thing after all. Oh, right, except for the earthquake that vaporized all political support for nuclear power. But maybe thorium fission is the magic we’ve been looking for. Or maybe not. [...]

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Drew Berry is an animator, and what he animates is something that can’t be seen. He takes the latest research on molecular biology and turns it into movies about how life works. His protagonists, the molecules that constitute our cells, are smaller than the wavelength of the light we use to see. But in a [...]

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Kickstarter precipitates novelty and weirdness from the web. Kickstarter is a site that helps people who need a little capital to reach out to the world and ask for it. It’s a clever idea, but they’ve executed on it so well that it has become a remarkably successful platform for launching small companies. By asking [...]

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As I noted last week, Vladimir Putin is having his share of troubles these days. Now we hear that Kim Jong-Il has moved beyond earthly troubles. As to whether he’s still got problems wherever he is now, I can’t be sure. But I do suspect that the blog Kim Jong-Il Looking At Things is unlikely [...]

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Buckaroo Banzai was a physicist, rock star, neurosurgeon, rogue inventor, and presidential advisor. He was also fictitious. A little bit closer to home, Jesse Ventura was a Navy SEAL, professional wrestler, and 38th governor of Minnesota. He even had a political action figure. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as we all know, was a governor who played action [...]

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The rain forest is shrinking. Right, you knew that. But did you know this? Google Earth lets you research the topic on your own. Like Superman, you can spin the globe forward and backward in time to see what the yesterworld looked like. I zoomed in on a region around Ariquemes in Rondônia, Brazil. Once [...]

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What do borders look like? We know that they are lines on maps and checkpoints on roads and sometimes walls and fences. But can they be seen from the sky? In The Sword in the Stone, T.H. White tells the story of young Arthur and his mentor Merlin flying as birds across the countryside. Arthur [...]

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I once saw a documentary about skyscrapers where the architect says, “It’s not that hard to make a 100 story building. You just need to make a one story building 1500 feet up in the air, and the rest is easy.” Sometimes it’s easy to miss where the real work is. Makani Power is a [...]

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The Eleonora Maersk is one of the very biggest ships in the world. At 1300 feet long (the Titanic was a mere 880), it can carry 15000 twenty foot trailers. And how big is the crew for the Eleonora? As explained in this Economist post, the answer is 19. Shortly after reading this, I happened [...]

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