An Apple engineer has reproduced the Antikythera mechanism with legos.  From The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Really weird. Really…

I stumbled on the artist Ben Heine and found these pencil plus photograph drawings pretty sweet.

Way too much time on his hands, but really cool at the same time. Yes, you too can build your own lightsabre

An article that turned up in ScienceNews has tripped me out a bit. It’s a thought experiment on how seemingly unrelated data affects the odds in, um, odd ways.

I have two children, one of whom is a son born on a Tuesday. What is the probability that I have two boys?

Gary Foshee, a puzzle designer from Issaquah, Wash., posed this puzzle during his talk this past March at Gathering 4 Gardner, a convention of mathematicians, magicians and puzzle enthusiasts held biannually in Atlanta. The convention is inspired by Martin Gardner, the recreational mathematician, expositor and philosopher who died May 22 at age 95. Foshee’s riddle is a beautiful example of the kind of simple, surprising and sometimes controversial bits of mathematics that Gardner prized and shared with others.

This article turned up back during the .com madness of 2000. At the time, I found it rather insightful, but the concepts apply just as well to my preferred profession, microchip design, as they do to software. From Things You Should Never Do, Part I.

Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long time in the Internet world. During this time, Netscape sat by, helplessly, as their market share plummeted.

It’s a bit smarmy of me to criticize them for waiting so long between releases. They didn’t do it on purpose, now, did they?

Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:

They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.

LifeHacker had a great article on accessing hidden parts of the internet.

• Skip Past Annoying User/Pass Requests
• Read Articles That Rupert Murdoch Wants You Paying For
• Change User Agents to Get Around Browser Blocks
• Get to Gmail When It’s Down
• Get Actually Usable BitTorrent Speeds
• Get to Sites Taken Down by Traffic
• Control Computers at Home
• Download YouTube and Other Flash Videos
• Access Country-Blocked Streaming TV
• Roll Your Own Proxy to Access Blocked Sites

All very good advice…

Lego mindstorm robots have been tearing up the puzzle problems. First, Rubik’s cube, then Suduku. I feel so inadequate…

As seen on Seen On Slash (my favorite place to go for a obscure laugh):

There are lies, then there are damned lies, and finally there are statistics.

Indeed. For example: there are two popes per square kilometer in Vatican.

I’ve run across these videos a few times, and I think that they do a great job of capturing the financial meltdown in all it’s glory. Hat tip to My Money Blog for reminded me