A stungun test to show how utterly ineffective stunguns are.

Batteries printed on paper

Textual analysis as a clue to suicide

Phillip K. Dick's letter to the FBI where he denounces Thomas Disch's "Camp Concentration" for containing coded neo-Nazi messages "to be read by the right people here and there" Curiously, in other correspondence he gave it the highest praise.

Look around you at the environment we live in. Carbon dioxide, flourocarbons, and methane have increased since 1968. Earth is being aclimatized. They are turning our atmosphere in to their atmosphere. We are like a natural resource to them. Deplete one planet, move on to another. They want benign indifference. They want us drugged. We could be pets. We could be food. But all we really are is livestock.
Our impulses are being redirected. We are living in an artificially induced state of consciousness that resembles sleep. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled in to a trance. They have made us indefferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.

--John Carpenter's "They Live"

This is hilarious. To be seen to the tune of the Transformers soundtrack only!

Deep-space probes are decelerating for no apparent reason.

The woes of Ultima Online
"Lord British wears a silver crown and a gray tunic with a silver serpent emblazoned on the chest. As the ruler of Britannia, he has been a frequent target of protest; at one point, hundreds of disgruntled citizens stripped down to their underwear, broke into his castle, and stood around shouting (well, typing) profanities."

Apple says "Think Different", but Not Too Different

Evolving soccerbots
NOTE: The good stuff (pictures and captions) is near the bottom of the page.
The evolved soccerbot problem is an order of magnitude more interesting than something like evolving CoreWars bots, because the individual bots that make up a successful robotic soccer team have to cooperate without any direct communication (that would be mind-reading).

A brief overview of the role of military funding in artificial intelligence research.
And here is another look

An interview with John Koza, inventor of genetic programming
'There was incredible hostility to genetic programming,' Koza remembers. 'And most of it was centred in the genetic algorithm community - which is curious because the GA community on the whole has been excluded from the mainstream AI and machine learning community'

A cool Linux MPEG player

Clueless journalist's attempt to prove Why OpenBSD Will Never Be as Secure as Linux and his flaming death
flaming death
flaming death
flaming death
flaming death

It turns out that the aforementioned journalist had died the death of a thousand flames before, when he announced The End of SSL and SSH

Checkpoint Firewall 1 vs IPFilter
The message is somewhat dated, but I'd be a lot of the criticism still applies.

Zark for the Thing King! in The Paging Game

Dennis Ritchie, a creator of C and UNIX, interviewed in LinuxWorld.

Another interview with him is available in RealAudio format.

The ANSI C99 standard is the latest C language standard.

What if "The Matrix" was about real hackers?

A new study shows the German public was fully aware of the Holocaust as it happened.

A testament to the efficacy of the US Patent system:

Smucker's sues over infringement of its peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich patent

U.S. Patent 6,004,596 contains such gems as: "first bread layer having a first perimeter surface coplanar to a contact surface" and its careful legalistic delineation "wherein said first filling" is "comprised of peanut butter" and a "second filling is comprised of a jelly."

A funny, odd, and frequently disturbing series of Japanese comic characters. More here.

European Art Brut

An interesting international argument over the International Space Station.
Science in space... Russian vodka... Mexican TRUCK nuclear weapon delivery systems... and a good time for all.

Asian Spider Wrestling

Who ever thought there were so many ways to bake a potato? www.bigspud.com has lots of Usenet threads on baking, boiling, roasting, microwaving, and pretty much anything else you can do to a potato. Oh, and then there are all of the potato types. Truely a great find.

Kung-fu action like you've never seen it before!
(Thanks to Joel for this one)

Have a happy Easter onion!

Interactive Fiction is alive and well. Read the FAQ, then look at how a game is made, in any of ten authoring systems.

Call of Chtulhu, will soon become a computer game, with a sanity system... As your character witnesses horror after horror, he slowly goes insane, in the true Lovecraftian tradition. "This can have subtle effects--perhaps you start hearing voices in your ears, perhaps every shadow looks like a horrific creature, or maybe you start hallucinating too."

"The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity" -- A.E.Newton

Check out the cool robots at Robomenu.
(Note: Click on "sorted by robot" or "sorted by builder" in the left frame.)

Ask questions of a real librarian in real-time here.

Although television violence has never been shown to cause hostile behavior, its sinister reputation lives on.

American society has created for itself a Mobius-like reality by privileging capital, or property rights, above all else

Tips for effective lucid dreaming (bottom of page), and a dream machine (top of page).

A nice collection of comparisons to fuel flamewars:

Linux vs FreeBSD vs NetBSD vs OpenBSD vs Hurd
Debian vs Slackware vs RedHat
Monolithic kernel vs microkernel
Microsoft Windows NT vs Unix
Java vs LISP vs Scheme vs C vs C++
Perl vs TCL vs Python vs AWK vs Ksh
Qt vs Gtk vs Tk vs Xt vs Xlib vs GNUstep
Apple II vs Atari 800 vs C=64 vs TRS-80
Atari ST vs Commodore Amiga vs Apple Macintosh
Motorola vs Intel
Unix vs VMS vs MVS
Microsoft Windows vs Macintosh
USR Pilot vs Apple Newton vs WinCE
RMS vs Bill Gates

From Christopher Browne's fascinating Internet Data Filtering Talk

Forget "When Worlds Collide" (do you even remember it?)... see what happens when galaxies collide.

Check out the vital stats and compare and contrast various IRC networks such as EFNet, DALNet, Undernet, etc...

An oldie but goodie: Recursive Make Considered Harmful
"Symptoms that the UNIX community have long accepted as a fact of life, but which need not be endured any longer..." "...recursive makes which take ``forever'' to work out that they need to do nothing, recursive makes which do too much, or too little, recursive makes which are overly sensitive"

One good thing about all the attention the demise of the Mir space sation is getting is that it gets people interested in science who otherwise would not have been interested in it at all. Another good thing is the popularization of cool satelite tracking Java applets like this one. Its particularly convenient because you can use it from within your browser. You can rotate the globe in 3D, zoom in and out, and track various sattelites, like Mir and the ISS.

Michael Abrash's classic Graphics Programming Black Book is now available free online at Dr.Dobbs. Beware, the graphics stuff itself is obsolete, but the optimization and general assembly programming info is still relevant.

An excellent resource for finding rare books.

Recently laid-off tech sector emloyees should not forget to fill out their 1040.com forms!

CoreWars, the antediluvian, abstract, assembly language version of RobotWars (for software nerds instead of hardware jocks) got more interesting when warriors were evolved instead of written. More here and here. Perhaps CoreWars@home will be next. :)

A computer language genealogy, in PDF format, and others.

"...the US law system has allowed for a decade the filing of patents for elementary software processes. The 30.000 software patents filed every year are now used to attack and eliminate independant software publishers or free software authors."
From: www.freepatents.org
Its aimed at Europeans, but is still very interesting and relevant.

Using Genetic Algorithms for Game AI

The One True Programming Editor wars continue... this time its settled in a paintball match! Guess which editor wins?

A rant about privacy.

Letting computers evolve a language.. Is this a step towards spontaneous development of an AI ?

See what happened on any particular day in Dr. Mac's Cultural Calendar.

How Power Shapes the News from FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting). Lots of blatant manipulation of the press is exposed here... as if the mainstream media weren't good enough lapdogs as it is... I guess the dogs have to get whipped in to shape sometimes. Check out the article to see which carots and sticks are being used on whom.

Things my girlfriend and I have argued about. Well, no, not me personally, but someone has... specifically the someone who wrote that web page.

"BlöödHag ... are dedicated to the promotion of literacy in a Heavy Metal format. All their songs are short speed metal bios of some of the greatest science fiction writers of all time. With songs such as "J.R.R. Tolkein and "Michael Moorcock" they will blow your illiterate ass right back to the library.."

NASA is secretly developing a Death Star underground!

The real-world problems of managing 40,000 bitmaps and textures to 3D models, sounds and music, and source code files for Age of Empires 2. I blame it on Microsoft! :) Seriously, though, they should have used Perforce.

A trackball designed for manipulating objects in a 3D virtual-reality space.

A trackball that scans your hand in infra-red for biometrics applications such as credit-card transactions. It seems to be an interesting alternative to fingerprints or retina scans.

Who wouldn't love a site dedicated to philosophical humor?

A talented artist's comic depiction of his obsession with chess.

Microsoft's assertion that Open Souce stifiles innovation has sparked a huge thread on Slashdot. Although interesting, I hesitate to call it a discussion, as all the high-rated posts are of one oppinion. I hope some more effective alternative forms of moderation become popular soon. It would be nice to see well-thought-through oppinions come from all sides of an issue, rather than hear the party line endlessly repeated.

How much journalistic integrity does the news media have? Grade the News brings some of the issues to light. (thanks to Sean for this one)

Parasites and Parasitalogical Resources

What religious/political group is responsible for most of the "30 Worst Atrocities of the 20th Century" ?

Burned remains of the "greatest classical library" are now readable using new digital imaging techniques. Lost classics from Aristotle to Epicurus to Sappho to Euclid may be available for scholarly study for the first time in hundreds if not thousands of years. Here is another fascinating article about the applications of the technology.

The Art of UNIX Programming by Eric S. Raymond (of the annoying "The Cathedral and the Bazzar") seems to be worth looking at.

Quantum mechanics meets information theory.

Amputation set collecting. Need I say more?

Someone called the Humor Police AKA the FBI on the parody site www.bonsaikitten.com

After the Singularity, will we still be human? Does it matter? And will we still know the difference? Look here to find out.

Help Mars researchers by cataloging craters. Its sort of like SETI@home. But you do the gruntwork that computers are too stupid to do, and real researchers are too busy to do.

Gems from the blank card game.

Curious objects delivered by the USPS.

Black box recordings from aircraft that crashed.

First, learn assmebly language... then finish a new OS, V2_OS. It is built for speed in pure assembly.

For $7 (including shipping) CDPost will download your choice of music or software from the internet, burn it on a CD and mail it to you.

Ogg Vorbis is a file fomat like mp3. However, unlike mp3s, it does not have restrictive licensing, and is free (whereas mp3s soon won't be).

You're stupid if you don't eat Vitamin A

Tasty worms

IBM develops a screen that, at 200 pixels per inch, is almost 5 times the resolution of top-of-the-line HDTV. But, if my measurements are correct, this is not such a big deal. At 1600x1200 resolution, a 19" screen has over 10000 pixels per inch.

What is a singularity? Look here: The Singularity

Comments on Vinge's Singularity

Fascinating account of a surgeon with Tourette's syndrome.

Snow Crystal Research

Insect jewelers

This shrimp makes Geiger's Alien look tame.

Should fingerprints be admissable as evidence in a courtroom or are they just a pseudoscience ?

A car that runs on air

The Vomitus Maximus Museum

If you can prove that something has already been thought of you can earn tens of thousands and help reform the patent system at BountyQuest

A tiny (coffe-cup-sized) helicopter named Pixel

My current favorite gadget

Lovecraft meets the X-Files in a comic

Terrorists and other organizations plotting to overthrow the government should remember to register under the California Corporations Code, Title 5, the "Subversive Organization Registration Law".

I don't know if I believe this headline by BBspot: Linux Developer Gets Laid

What Hell really is.

A stunning image.

That damned elusive black dot!!!

Home-made 1-pin dot matrix printer