There are many things that are pointless, and some that are awesome.
Here’s something that’s both:
Pointless: Because there’s absolutely no practical point in having your food delivered by quadrocopter if your waitress has to stand there and guide the Quadrocopter to your table using an iPad.
Awesome: Because they’re still flying food to your table in a quadrocopter.
I may have to eat there when I’m in London for Worldcon next year…
I never cared about the America’s Cup, which has always been a race for rich guys to compete against each other. But this article on the crash of Oracle’s radical 13-story, rigid-sail driven ship is fascinating from both engineering and failure analysis perspectives.
Post crash footage:
And here’s Mark 2 of the boat, back on the water and hydroplaning:
Like most Oracle products, the ship seems to need a large number of consultants to keep it operating…
Is your retroincabulator up to snuff?
It’s easy to assume that everyone in the world follows Randall Munroe’s geeky online stickman webcomic XKCD, since it seems all my friends do. For those that don’t, last Monday he put up a strip called “Time.” This strip, like his uber-large “Click-and-Drag”, plays with the conventions of the form. “Time” started out with a static, non-gag image with the hover-over label “wait for it.” Since then, he’s updated the image every half-hour to an hour, even though he’s done new strips on the usual M-W-F schedule. If you follow the images in order, “Time” shows two people (which XKCD devotees have dubbed “Cueball” and “Megan”) building a sand castle.
Here’s an animated gif of the images so far:
Here’s a quicker version, which you can also step through, speed up, slow down, etc.
Here’s the explanation page for it, as well as its own Wikia. We now have a real-life version of those people obsessively tracking online image snippets from Pattern Recognition, except we actually know who they’re from.
The obvious metaphor is how time continues to flow and things change when you’re not watching.
As of this writing, the images are still being updated. Munroe could keep updating that one comic for a long, long, er, time, especially if he decreases the update rate.
Conceivably, “Time” could be a long-running conceptual art project and keep updating for the rest of our lives, and beyond, like that German church playing John Cage’s “As Slowly as Possibly” for 629 years…
Random Google auto-completes that amuse me:
All glory…
The obligatory Stina Leicht picture:
Stina was a John W. Campbell Award nominee this year, and she moderated a panel that included Gene Wolfe, Martha Wells, and Joan D. Vinge (below).
After the panel I had lunch with Gene Wolfe, Gary K. Wolfe (below), Gene’s daughter Teri Goulding, and Gary’s girlfriend Stacie Hanes.
Gary ordered the Frank Gehry Sandwich, impressively postmodern and completely impractical.
Alaskan David Marusek:
Laura Ann Gilman. “Smile broadly! Drink heavily!”
Bookseller and Tiger Eye Press publisher Chris Edwards:
Allen Steele.
Jim Minz and Catherine Asaro. I trust you can guess which is which.
James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel and David Marusek. “Look into my eyes!”
Toastmaster and SFWA President John Scalzi:
Today Apple became the most valuable publicly traded company of all time. Not bad for the once “beleaguered” company which has been declared dead more times than pretty much any other company.
Here’s a quick history of the company pre-iPhone:
And here’s a quick visual look at of a few of Apple’s computers over the years:
Microsoft discontinued the Zune (i.e., their unpopular iPod clone that, despite coming in brown and being able to “squirt” songs at other people) back in October of 2001. So why am I still getting the same braindead Zune-related comments spam I’ve gotten for the past two years?
“This is getting a bit more subjective, but I much prefer the Zune Marketplace.”
“The new Zune browser is surprisingly good, but not as good as the iPod’s.”
“Hands down, Apple’s app store wins by a mile. It’s a huge selection of all sorts of apps vs a rather sad selection of a handful for Zune.”
My theory is that someone out there sells a ScriptKiddie Comment Spamming Kit that includes pre-loaded Zune comments as the example payload text, and most spammers never bother to switch them out.
Now if I could just figure out why I keep getting comment spam promoting a washed-up rapper…
Flying robot quadrotors perform the James Bond theme:
This was done at Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science‘s Vijay Kumar, Daniel Melligner and Alex Kushleyev. The quadrotors are under computer control.
It’s not a particularly good version, but I’m sure they’ll have time to improve before the final enslavement of humanity. Now you’ll have to excuse me, I have to write a quadrotor heist novel…
(Hat tip: Derek Johnson)
