lunch conversation: si units and where they came from

Defination of SI base units
nifty graph of the relations between SI units

And on the subject, a brain hurting description of measures
of alcohol content

And just for kicks, the http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html
which of course, requires a mention of powersoften.com
based on the Eames film “Powers of Ten”

Speaking of things big and small, there is Boeing’s
Pelican a concept for one big ass ground effect plane.

Or you could buy the Hendix/Zappa burnt strat. You can probabaly pick it up for about $3 megadollars. Or 3M$. Which is kind
of not really ironic considering Paul Allen will probably buy it.

Charkha Spinning Wheel

And a a history of spinning. The odd things
you find while trying to find names for things.

CODeDOC
Whitney page commenting on digital art _and_ the source code used to generate it.

Didn’t do much over the weekend.

Read Ender’s Game. Not bad,
I enjoyed it. I now see why it’s so popular among military types. Though
reading a book set in outer space, and suddenly seeing a reference
to Guilford County, North Carolina is a bit odd ;->

Couldn’t sleep so decided to inventory all the music gear at
about 4am last night. At least I have all the serial numbers
written down now. I suppose I should get that into an
electronic form at some point.

Continuing the theme from yesterday:

timhunkin.com, aka, the guy that
did The Secret Life of Machines

Great web page, somewhere between Mr. Wizard[1][2], MacGyver, James Burke,
and Norm Abram, with
a touch of Burning Man Thrown in.

[1] Gasp! The Horror! google doesn’t seem to find a good
Mr. Wizard web page! Ack! The internet is broken! Someone fix
it!

[2] At various points, me, Marty and Scott from
Japan Air have talked about starting a band called “The Don Herbert Trio”.

Perhaps something to do if I ever get some
motivation

Illegal Engineering

How can you not like an article about the history of safe cracking from the
guy that did The Secret
Life of Machines that includes references to Ray Bradbury and
Richard Feynman?

Worked. Went home. Groceries. Decided to buy Fruit RollsUps for no apparent reason.
Also Starburst Sour Fruit Chews. If there was a pill to get rid of a sweeth tooth,
I could use it.

Played guitar for a while. The Parker -> Korg x911 -> Dod MetalX ->
Ibanez pm7 Phase Modulator -> Dod Meatbox. Made many wonderfully
bizarre and entertaining sounds. I also enjoy just randomly saying
‘Ibanez PM7 Phase Modulator”, with my voice, it’s very Marvin the Martian.

Stumbled across a link on constructed languages via metafilter. Found the
Heinlein inspired artifical
language I discussed with badger a few months ago but couldn’t
remember the details.

Got to work just in time to see the crane they used to install the generator
disassembling itself.

www.trianglerock.com/ seems
to be verging on useless these days. Seems like every band listed is some
derivation of the new “garage rock”, “70’s bar band” or “alt.country” genres.
Bleah. And is it just or did “garage rock” have a fairly specific meaning say
two years ago, that is not what it means now? Yay, labeling things
is fun! Time to go look for actually interesting shows.

my new personal hero