Bob's Ballbearing and Blog Factory

I am switching my blogging activity from radio Userland to Blogger. Previously, the Radio weblog was aggregated directly to my Blogger page, but starting now I will no longer be updating the Radio page. To view my weblog, go to: http://bobme.blogspot.com/

Albert Einstein. "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible." [Quotes of the Day]

triskaidekaphobia: Dictionary.com Word of the Day. triskaidekaphobia [Dictionary.com Word of the Day]

Canon Mistakenly Announces 11-Megapixel Digital Camera [Slashdot]

9/11: One Year Later [Scientific American]

xenophobia: Dictionary.com Word of the Day. xenophobia [Dictionary.com Word of the Day]

Art Buchwald. "You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it." [Quotes of the Day]

"Drawing the Line" by Steven M. Wise. A Harvard professor says science itself proves that such animals as parrots, apes and elephants should be considered persons with legal rights. [Salon.com]

anodyne: Dictionary.com Word of the Day. anodyne [Dictionary.com Word of the Day]

Konrad Lorenz. "It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young." [Quotes of the Day]

How to catch an asteroid ...Cosmic airbag could save the planet [New Scientist]

John A. Wheeler. "If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day." [Quotes of the Day]

It's bad for you to drink coffee. No, it's good for you to drink coffee. Turns out, it's good for you slather coffee all over your body! Caffeine 'lotion' protects against skin cancer [New Scientist]

Edmund Burke. "It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact." [Quotes of the Day]

Mind boggling work in artificial intelligence!'Animals' grown from an artificial embryo [New Scientist]

God Promises 'Big Surprises' In Store For Hurricane Season [The Onion]

Friedrich Nietzsche. "At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid." [Quotes of the Day]

Corky Siegel. "Life is too important to take seriously." [Quotes of the Day]

The right man for the job. His county -- and his country -- cried out for him. And Bruce Springsteen came through. [Salon.com]

Ambrose Bierce. "Admiration, n.: Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves." [Quotes of the Day]

I come to bury IAmCarbonatedMilk.com, not to praise it. From BuyClamsOnline.com to billromanowskisucks.com, a stroll through the graveyard of defunct domain names offers a melancholy vision of really dumb hopes that were cruelly dashed. [Salon.com]

Bert Leston Taylor. "A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you." [Quotes of the Day]

E. B. White. "Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time." [Quotes of the Day]

Do You Know Where You Live? [Slashdot]

Analyst: Apple to lie down with Intel. Will the Mac maker pick up Intel's chips? Signs point to yes, says Andrew Neff, the analyst who foresaw the HP-Compaq merger. He also predicts Sun will ally with Dell. [CNET News.com]

Analysis: Who is a terrorist? [BBC World]

Check out the helpful Microsoft Word spell check suggestion

Pablo Picasso. "I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it." [Quotes of the Day]

Anti-gravity ... it's not just for science fiction novels anymore.
Anti-gravity research on the rise [New Scientist]

Just got a new toy -- a Concept 2 Indoor Rower. But it's not like the shiny new one you'll see on that link. It is actually a model B rower, about 10 years old, much more like the one on this link. It showed up tonight around five o'clock, and I immediately pressed it into action. Since I am just starting out, I started slowly. First I had to sort out the drag settings. There are two different sprocket positions, and there is a baffle box outboard of the flywheel/fan assembly. An interesting factoid is that rowing at 5000 feet creates much less air drag than at sea level. The readout device includes a double-secret key combo to pop up the drag display. I was not seeing numbers anywhere near what the manual says one should see with a brand new rower. After switching the sprocket and adjusting the baffle to wide open, I obtained a drag that was "within normal limits." I rowed three 10 minute sessions this evening, falling just shy of 2000 meters with each try. It was quite a pleasant 5k row for my first go. The newly downloaded electronic music in the background helped a lot.

Now this is fascinating. If you don't want to devote the time to reading the books (I don't), have a look at this review. Kind of make a little bit of sense about what's going on in Washington. --rgm
Fundamentally unsound. Left Behind, the bestselling series of paranoid, pro-Israel end-time thrillers, may sound kooky, but America's right-wing leaders really believe this stuff. [Salon.com]

Eyewitness: Zimbabwe's hunger [BBC World]

Bad Penmanship Foils Holdup [Yahoo! News: Strange News - AP]
I guess I had better look for other career choices. -rgm

M.J. Moroney. "The words _figure_ and _fictitious_ both derive from the same Latin root _fingere_. Beware!" [Quotes of the Day]

Here is a link to my photography site

Here is a link to my photography site. All images were made digitally with the Canon D30 camera. Digital darkroom work was done with Photoshop 7 on a Macintosh running OS X. I print my images using an Epson 1280 printer and typically output at sizes up to 13"x19". I sharpen images using Nik Sharpener Pro, an indispensible Photoshop plug-in.

Want to set up a community Wi-Fi network?. 80211b News notes that the EFF posted its friendly sharing ISP list: the Electronic Frontier Foundation made public their page that lists ISPs which either do not prohibit or explicitly allow shared use of bandwidth of a single account in a way that community and free wireless networks require.

[80211b News] [Mac Net Journal]

Pardon Me, but Could You Help a Girl Down on Her Luck? [New York Times: Technology]

The Matt Lauer haircut lives! I just went out and got all my hair shaved off. It's part of my new weight loss regimen -- I'll bet I lost a good 5 pounds of hair ... or is that grams ... One or the other. This reminds me of a story. Back in (I think) 1984, I was working as a new start-up company called Spectra-Tech, Inc in Stamford, Connecticut (the F.U. state). I was working there because I had recently been fired from my job at Harrick Scientific Corp in Ossining New York. At Harrick I had met and become friends with Frank Wesley. Frank and I decided that we would fly to Germany and buy used BMWs and have them shipped back to the US. At the time, one could privately import a used German car and be exempted from the EPA emission requirements (one time only). I soon found a candy apple red BMW 3.0CS and bought it. Frank and I drove said car through Germany, through France, onto the ferry at Calais, and over to Dover. We then proceeded onto London where we were to stay at the home of Phil and Dianna Buckberry, friends from my Penn Biochemistry days. But all of this has nothing to do with haircuts you say? You are right. There are about ten stories here that I want to write about, but let me move on to the haircut story. Frank and I found ourselves the next day in Trafalgar Square and inexplicably, we both decided we needed haircuts. We spied a barbershop on the square and went inside to meet the world's oldest barber with the world's oldest clippers and straight razors. After the cut, the barber/salesman convinced us both to buy a bottle of his special pink hair tonic. Could this have been Pirelli's Miracle Elixir?

Thinking about tiny digital cameras lately. I don't tend to carry around my Canon D30 for snapshots, because it is just too big and conspicuous. Here is a review of a couple tiny cameras: Tiny digital cameras head to head. Japanese reviewer and friend of dpreview Yamada Kumio has today posted a head to head comparison between Casio's Exlim EX-S1 and Sony's DSC-U10. The comparison includes a quick side-by-side size and features... [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)]

Test posting with blogscript. Gosh this is a really cool AppleScript for Mac OSX.

Test posting with blogapp

H. H. Williams. "Furious activity is no substitute for understanding." [Quotes of the Day]

Here is an interesting review of Stephen Wolfram's new book: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/11/science/11WOLF.html

I'm thinking about getting the new Matt Lauer haircut :) : http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/usatoday/20020618/en_usatoday/4200988

Rocking Darwin's World: New Theory of Cell Evolution Rejects Single-Ancestor Doctrine [Scientific American]

A new book seeks to explain a fascinating phenomenon: "Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid," by Robert J. Sternberg. Scholars finally tackle the question that has plagued humanity since time immemorial. [Salon.com]

My new favorite store is Wild Oats. This is a small chain of "organic" grocery stores, which is based in Boulder, Colorado. I stopped by after work tonight to pick up some stuff to cook. I plan to make shabu-shabu for some guests Thursday night. Major observation: you can apparently make soy beans into every imaginable shape, texture, and flavor. Soy milk takes up two sections of the store (refrigerated and not). It greatly outpaces the space alloted for cow's milk. It is available in vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and "original" whatever that is. The space devoted to soy milk is dwarfed, however, by that reserved for tofu. Tofu comes in a numbing array of styles and flavors. It can masquerade as cheese or meat or even ice cream. Soy mayonnaise? You bet! The only kind of soy I could not find at Wild Oats was, believe it or not, regular old soy beans. Fortunately I have some of those in my freezer - edamame. Over to the deli, and guess what ... more tofu! Sometimes known as tempeh. Hidden in with sesame noodles. Flagrantly impersonating mozzerella. Stop the insanity! I wheeled my cart to the checkout, abundantly full of natural goodness. Eightly dollars worth in fact. But there were problems. The totally natural looking, patchouli-wearing, sandal-footed check out clerk did not know her veggies, a cardinal sin. She stared quizzically at a bag of tomatilla. She asked me what they were, but this was not enough. She needed to look up the register code, but first had to decide if they were fruits or vegetables. Now you must believe me that I did not want to prolong the agony, but I felt compelled to say that while they are technically fruits, she would probably find them filed in her book under vegetables, and she did. This prompted her to ask me how this issue is decided, and I gave her the whole seed-case explanation. At this point she had pretty much stopped ringing up my order and was thinking up objects on which to quiz me about fruit/vegetable classification. Tomatoes? Fruit. Eggplants? Yes those as well. Here she interjected that even though she was curious as to the fruit nature of eggplant, she actually hates the taste, which reminds her of Windex. hmm. She reached for another object. Oh dear. It's bok choy I told her, and she dutifully looked up the code. She told me that her maternal step mother (I think) is Japanese and that she used to carve cute little animal figures out of baby bok choy. Next item: again no clue. Leeks, I said. She had no humorous aphorism about leeks. I thought about making a pun, but thought better of it.

I enjoyed reading this article about Bush policy on bioethics: Playing God. Bush's bioethics czar Leon Kass wants to criminalize lifesaving medical research as violating the natural order of things. Would he have opposed wiping out smallpox? [Salon.com]

For my Canadian friends: P. J. O'Rourke. "Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited by anyone but the Queen and illiterate sport fishermen." [Quotes of the Day]

I recently became interested in the topic of entangled photons, which through a borderline-divine process are being used in the laboratory to demonstrate teleportation. This article describes a new breakthrough where a data stream, encoded in photons, was teleported: Australian teleport breakthrough. A team of Australian scientists says it is able to teleport a laser beam from one place to another almost instantaneously. [BBC News: sci/tech]