Crazy But Able

Control systems engineer invents a bus sized vehicle that fixes roads while driving over them: http://www.newswise.com/articles/POTHOLE.SNL.html
About the size of a Greyhound bus, the vehicle would “see” the road surface from scanners on the front bumper. Any anomalies would be cleaned with high-pressure air and then vacuumed. On-board image processing would distinguish the location and size […]

New study finds that everyone is governed by 15 fundamental desires: http://www.newswise.com/articles/GOALS.OSU.html
“Nearly everything important a human being wants can be reduced to one or more of these 15 core desires, most of which have a genetic basis,” said Steven Reiss, co-author of the study and a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Ohio State University.
[…]

FINALLY! After seeing this chart [defunct link -ed.] in my recent issue of New Media magazine, I have been looking for it on their web page. It’s a big chart (over 400k!) of the 500 top companies and how they all invest in each other. I guess if you want more information you can check […]

A new (gnu) search engine from the “Everything should be free” community, like Yahoo with volunteers: http://www.gnuhoo.com/
As the web grows, automated search engines and directories with small editorial staffs will be unable to cope with the volume of sites.
Project GnuHoo’s goal is to produce the most comprehensive directory of the web, […]

Is France starting to lose it’s national identity? http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/world/061398/world7_1951_noframes.html
And where do liberty, fraternity, and equality fit in with urban violence, disaffected youth, joblessness, homelessness, collapsing authority, political scandal, police brutality, racism and xenophobia?
The Front, a France-first party which blames society’s worst ills on North African immigrants and globalization, scares many people. […]

Research on back pain uses mice to test theories on disc degeneration: [Messy URL]
The researchers attached a device that exerted varying degrees of pressure on the discs in each mouse’s tail. They found that chronic compression triggered an array of changes in both the structure and biological activity of the discs.
(I wonder about how well […]

New theories on the origins of cosmic rays (and an interesting byproduct): [Messy URL]
“If you’ve ever used borax you have washed your hands in old broken up cosmic rays.”

C.S. Lewis on the distinction between allegory and symbolism:
http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~dsulliva/classes/lewis/symbolism_allegory.htm
If you are hesitating between an angry retort and a soft answer, you can express your state of mind by inventing a person called Ira with a torch and letting her contend with another invented person called Patientia. This is allegory . . .
If our passions, being […]

The integrity of the Chernobyl “sarcophagus” in question: [Fox News] [Messy URL]
Kliuchnykov said an explosion could potentially be triggered inside the sarcophagus, releasing radioactive particles that would pose a danger for plant workers and those in the 19-mile “dead zone” around it.

I started this weblog back in June of 1998. It didn’t last very long, mainly because it was so much work to create a post. And there weren’t very many other weblogs to crib links off of (I can only think of three), so it was kind of hard to find new stuff. […]