It's bee season; we had three yellow jackets today trying to get into the screen porch – somehow they find their way in between the screen and the glass. Then, if they can figure out how, they're only one step away from being inside the screen porch. Ayiee! So it's time once again for me… Continue reading

Earlier this month, I wrote My sweetie is not only an all-around great guy :-), he's also smart and electrically talented. Well, he did it again 🙂 Continue reading

On April 25, 1953, James D. Watson and Frances H.C. Crick announced the structure of DNA in the journal, Nature. Unlike many scientific papers, this one had a simple title: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid. Fifty years has gone by; a lot has changed. Today we have sequenced the human genome. In April 2003… Continue reading

This was the third (and last) day of the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference. Still a winner. We didn't attend even one session that didn't make us think and give us something to discuss. No session that we attended was boring or uninteresting, nor was any session exactly what we thought we expected. I think this… Continue reading

More interesting talks at Day Two of the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference. We made it to the first keynote (scheduled for 8:30 am) after a 1-hour drive through some nasty rain. Yuch!. The first speaker was Alan Kay, inventor of SmallTalk, who gave a well-attended talk on User Interface history, entitled Daddy, Are We There… Continue reading

Day One of the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference. Fun stuff. We went to a talk on Biological Computer Models – how to use ideas from "swarms" (e.g. ant colonies, bees, wasps…) such as "simple rules" and "bottom-up modeling" to make new and different computer systems. When Southwest Airlines applied these models to their air cargo… Continue reading

I've found another cool web site. This one is part of science.nasa.gov. The site I discovered today (with the assistance of a mailing-list friend 😉 is Space Station Science: Picture of the Day. You can subscribe to get the latest nifty info and picture in your mailbox, daily. I love the web. Here's an excerpt… Continue reading

A private manned spaceflight program was unveiled Friday at a desert airport where it has been in secret development for two years. A rocket plane, dubbed SpaceShipOne, and the White Knight, an exotic jet designed to carry it aloft for a high-altitude air launch, were shown off in a hangar at Mojave Airport by famed… Continue reading

"This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind," says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, … "This process can deal with the world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming." A new process, soon to be in commercial production,… Continue reading

It's not Kraken sized, exactly, but it could try to eat a London bus. Researchers have retrieved an example of a colossal squid, yclept Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni . Then again, half a millennium or more ago, ships were much smaller. Columbus's ships averaged less than 3 times the length of the modern London bus. And this… Continue reading