Gene Wilder Willy Wonka's famous rant - YOU LOSE! GOOD DAY, SIR!

Cloud Atlas Extended Trailer #1 (2012) - Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Wachows...

A Working Assault Rifle Made With a 3-D Printer

I have mixed feelings about this, too.  On the one hand, the Rep-Rap world is wonderful, but I wasn't expecting this to happen as quickly as it did, i.e. before we had any sort of systems in place to control it.  Moore's Law takes everyone by surprise sooner or later, I guess.

via Popsci.com

Sight

Sight from Sight Systems on Vimeo.


What a world will look like with Google Glass -- I have mixed feelings about this: it looks so cool that I almost can't resist, but it would make me less connected in the ways I know really matter.

Project Management Template from the Military

Our tax dollars at work.  Very cool.

http://kkovacs.eu/free-project-management-template-mil-std-498

Shadows in the Woods

A beautiful board game from England

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B0006443P8?m=A6VLL9VL7SDVJ

Recent updates in the Prisoner's Dilemma

http://bosker.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/the-prisoners-dilemma/

John Branyan - The Three Little Pigs

Quote of the Day -- Old Proverb

It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room.  Especially when there is no cat.

quoted in Stuart Firestein's Ignorance

Epicyclic Gearing

http://bl.ocks.org/d/1353700/
I love the different frames of reference.

Sixty One Years of Tornadoes

via BoingBoing

kansas Point of know return

Quote of the Day -- John Maynard Keynes

"When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done."

 -- John Maynard Keynes in The General Theory  


via James Fallows at the Atlantic

Rethinking recycling

The dismal science of economics has a dim view of recycling as currently done in the US, according to the NYTimes.

The Line

From a photo taken at the high-tide line of an aluminum spill from a chemical factory.  It reminds me of the aftermath of the Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington.

via boingboing

From Bench to Bunker - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

In a small, anonymous office in the Trump Tower, 28 floors above Wall Street, a man sits in front of a computer screen sifting through satellite images of a foreign desert. The images depict a vast, sandy emptiness, marked every so often by dunes and hills. He is searching for man-made structures: houses, compounds, airfields, any sign of civilization that might be visible from the sky. The images flash at a rate of 20 per second, so fast that before he can truly perceive the details of each landscape, it is gone. He pushes no buttons, takes no notes. His performance is near perfect.


http://chronicle.com/article/From-Bench-to-Bunker-/132743/

Every Shuttle Launched at Once

The "Me" Half-Century op/ed from NYTimes

Going forward, the youthful masses of every age would be permitted as never before to indulge their self-expressive and hedonistic impulses. But capitalists in return would be unshackled as well, free to indulge their own animal spirits with fewer and fewer fetters in the forms of regulation, taxes or social opprobrium.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/04/opinion/the-downside-of-liberty.html?smid=pl-share

The problem with stack-ranking

Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

From a Vanity Fair article about Microsoft's "lost decade."  I think Jack Welch was famous for doing the same thing at GE.  It also explains why grading on a curve in a school is not always a good idea, and reminds me of the old joke about the two campers and the bear.

Match Rockets

Programming Koans

http://thecodelesscode.com/contents

All of the Earthquakes

Roshambo (rock-paper-scissors, not the other one) Robot with 100% winning rate

Apparently Janken is another name for the Rock-Paper-Scissors version of Roshambo (not the other one).