What Mad Pursuit

"By the time most scientists have reached age 30 they are trapped by their own expertise. They have invested so much effort in one particular field that it is often extremely difficult, at that time in their careers, to make a radical change. I, on the other hand, knew nothing, except for a basic training in somewhat old-fashioned physics and mathematics and an ability to turn my hand to new things. Since I knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.".
- Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit

Koyaanisqatsi

CamWorld's review of Koyaanisqatsi offers this definition:
ko-yaa-nis-qa-tsi (from the Hopi Indian language) n. 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living. Life out of balance.

Not the Dead Parrot Sketch

A while ago Paul claimed that parrots can live up to 200 years and that Captain Cook's pet parrot survived until the 1950's. The blue fronted amazon parrot is described "one of the longest lived of all parrot species, with potential lifespan of nearly a century in captivity". This is more believable.

WebCollage picked up a fragment (an ear, in fact) of the homepage of William H. Press, one of the authors of Numerical Recipes.

Melmoth's homepage includes a selection of poems from Soundings.

The Hunley, a Confederate submarine that sank a Union ship off Charleston in 1864 and then itself mysteriously sank, has been recovered. Coincidentally, there was some discussion of John Holland on s.c.i. a while ago.

Nuclear Blast Mapper

The Nuclear Blast Mapper lets you map the effect of a nuclear explosion on a location of your choice. Fallout can kill people up to 90 miles from the bomb site, depending on the direction of the wind. A large (25 megaton) bomb exploded in the air would wipe Dublin off the map.

UNIX history

UNIX history traces the Byzantine genealogy of the the Unix family.

I now have an entirely unearned blue on Advogato, thanks to all of two people deciding that I deserved to be a Journeyman. I suspect the trust metric isn't quite as stringent as it should be.

Faster than a speeding bullet

Faster than a speeding bullet is a New Scientist article discussing the use of supercavitation to build very high speed torpedoes and submarines. It was linked to from a Slashdot article reporting that the sinking of the Kursk may have been caused by an accident with a rocket-powered cavitation torpedo. The New Scientist's comparison of supersonic submarines to Concorde, just three days before the Paris crash, now seems eerily ironic.

WebCollage

WebCollage does exactly what it says on the tin.