Got this from my friend Curt’s blog. I didn’t do so well; see how you do

My uncle passed on a link he received from my cousin to an amazing video showing dolphins cleverly making sophisticated bubble rings and manipulating them in interesting ways:

Although I disagree with Richard Feynman’s conclusions on some of the more important questions we can ask, no one can deny he is an interesting and amazing person. I’ve read a few biographical books about him, and they were quite entertaining. Here is a video interview he did for the BBC in 1981.

Although I’ve read a fair amount about him, this was the first time I heard his voice. I noticed he sounds very much like Regis Philbin

UPDATE:
Here are a few more BBC video links:

I came across a web site that required job candidates to solve a puzzle to be able to access a job application page. I’m a sucker for puzzles. The original puzzle is at the following site:

http://www.telogis.co.nz/

But in case, they take it down at some point, here is the plain text version nicely formatted:

z = 4254145 * 0x18712495;
b = (z & 1) << 4;
a = b--;
o = [];
c = a - b;
x = b - a;
while (z) {
  x = a & x ? a & b : c + x;
  {
    o[z & b^x] = (x + 6 * a + b / 5 - c).chr;
    z = z / a / a;
  } if (!(z / a & b^x))
}

To apply go to “http://www.telogis.co.nz/” + o + “.html”

I don’t think this will parse correctly in any language, but I decided to solve the puzzle using Ruby since it wasn’t that far from it and Ruby is my main programming language currently. I had a couple false starts due to a subtlety in Ruby compared to other languages.

I’ll come back in a while and post the Ruby solution, but I don’t want to post a spoiler too soon.

I learned about this lawn chair flight from Matt Promise’s blog.

Balloons suspend Kent Couch in a lawn chair as he floats in the skies near Bend, Ore., Saturday, July 7, 2007. Couch, on his way to Idaho, carried a global positioning system device, a two-way radio, a digital camcorder and a cell phone. He also had instruments to measure his altitude and speed and about four plastic bags holding five gallons of water each to act as a ballast, he could turn a spigot, release water and rise.

Couch is the latest American to emulate Larry Walters — who in 1982 rose three miles above Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by balloons. Walters had surprised an airline pilot, who radioed the control tower that he had just passed a guy in a lawn chair.

Here is an article on Fox News.

Three months to design, six months to build, $15,000 in parts…

When I worked at CompuServe around 1993, I saw a picture of Kwajalein Island on Alisa DeSisto’s cubicle wall. As it turns out, she was stationed there for a year or two. I was fascinated by the concept of people actually living on such a tiny island (about twice as long as the airport runway!) in the Pacific Ocean many hundreds of miles from any decent size chunk of land. Is this place cool, or what? Click on the link or picture to view Kwajalein on Google Maps so you can explore virtually. Google allows zooming in to the 200 ft. resolution level.

Kwajalein on Google Maps


Rank Create date Domain name
1. 15-Mar-1985 SYMBOLICS.COM
2. 24-Apr-1985 BBN.COM
3. 24-May-1985 THINK.COM
4. 11-Jul-1985 MCC.COM
5. 30-Sep-1985 DEC.COM
6. 07-Nov-1985 NORTHROP.COM
7. 09-Jan-1986 XEROX.COM
8. 17-Jan-1986 SRI.COM
9. 03-Mar-1986 HP.COM
10. 05-Mar-1986 BELLCORE.COM
11. 19-Mar-1986 IBM.COM
11. 19-Mar-1986 SUN.COM
13. 25-Mar-1986 INTEL.COM
13. 25-Mar-1986 TI.COM
15. 25-Apr-1986 ATT.COM
16. 08-May-1986 GMR.COM
16. 08-May-1986 TEK.COM
18. 10-Jul-1986 FMC.COM
18. 10-Jul-1986 UB.COM
20. 05-Aug-1986 BELL-ATL.COM
20. 05-Aug-1986 GE.COM
20. 05-Aug-1986 GREBYN.COM
20. 05-Aug-1986 ISC.COM
20. 05-Aug-1986 NSC.COM
20. 05-Aug-1986 STARGATE.COM
26. 02-Sep-1986 BOEING.COM
27. 18-Sep-1986 ITCORP.COM
28. 29-Sep-1986 SIEMENS.COM
29. 18-Oct-1986 PYRAMID.COM
30. 27-Oct-1986 ALPHACDC.COM
30. 27-Oct-1986 BDM.COM
30. 27-Oct-1986 FLUKE.COM
30. 27-Oct-1986 INMET.COM
30. 27-Oct-1986 KESMAI.COM
30. 27-Oct-1986 MENTOR.COM
30. 27-Oct-1986 NEC.COM
30. 27-Oct-1986 RAY.COM
30. 27-Oct-1986 ROSEMOUNT.COM
30. 27-Oct-1986 VORTEX.COM
40. 05-Nov-1986 ALCOA.COM
40. 05-Nov-1986 GTE.COM
42. 17-Nov-1986 ADOBE.COM
42. 17-Nov-1986 AMD.COM
42. 17-Nov-1986 DAS.COM
42. 17-Nov-1986 DATA-IO.COM
42. 17-Nov-1986 OCTOPUS.COM
42. 17-Nov-1986 PORTAL.COM
42. 17-Nov-1986 TELTONE.COM
42. 11-Dec-1986 3COM.COM
50. 11-Dec-1986 AMDAHL.COM
50. 11-Dec-1986 CCUR.COM
50. 11-Dec-1986 CI.COM
50. 11-Dec-1986 CONVERGENT.COM
50. 11-Dec-1986 DG.COM
50. 11-Dec-1986 PEREGRINE.COM
50. 11-Dec-1986 QUAD.COM
50. 11-Dec-1986 SQ.COM
50. 11-Dec-1986 TANDY.COM
50. 11-Dec-1986 TTI.COM
50. 11-Dec-1986 UNISYS.COM
61. 19-Jan-1987 CGI.COM
61. 19-Jan-1987 CTS.COM
61. 19-Jan-1987 SPDCC.COM
64. 19-Feb-1987 APPLE.COM
65. 04-Mar-1987 NMA.COM
65. 04-Mar-1987 PRIME.COM
67. 04-Apr-1987 PHILIPS.COM
68. 23-Apr-1987 DATACUBE.COM
68. 23-Apr-1987 KAI.COM
68. 23-Apr-1987 TIC.COM
68. 23-Apr-1987 VINE.COM
72. 30-Apr-1987 NCR.COM
73. 14-May-1987 CISCO.COM
73. 14-May-1987 RDL.COM
75. 20-May-1987 SLB.COM
76. 27-May-1987 PARCPLACE.COM
76. 27-May-1987 UTC.COM
78. 26-Jun-1987 IDE.COM
79. 09-Jul-1987 TRW.COM
80. 13-Jul-1987 UNIPRESS.COM
81. 27-Jul-1987 DUPONT.COM
81. 27-Jul-1987 LOCKHEED.COM
83. 28-Jul-1987 ROSETTA.COM
84. 18-Aug-1987 TOAD.COM
85. 31-Aug-1987 QUICK.COM
86. 03-Sep-1987 ALLIED.COM
86. 03-Sep-1987 DSC.COM
86. 03-Sep-1987 SCO.COM
89. 22-Sep-1987 GENE.COM
89. 22-Sep-1987 KCCS.COM
89. 22-Sep-1987 SPECTRA.COM
89. 22-Sep-1987 WLK.COM
93. 30-Sep-1987 MENTAT.COM
94. 14-Oct-1987 WYSE.COM
95. 02-Nov-1987 CFG.COM
96. 09-Nov-1987 MARBLE.COM
97. 16-Nov-1987 CAYMAN.COM
97. 16-Nov-1987 ENTITY.COM
99. 24-Nov-1987 KSR.COM
100. 30-Nov-1987 NYNEXST.COM


I found the list here.

Who was the game winning pitcher in game three of the 1926 world series? Who were the four people in George Washington’s cabinet? When was Sir Walter Raleigh executed? What day of the week was that? Kim Peek has no trouble answering questions like these and thousands more from memory. He is the person the “Rain Man” character was based on. He reads eight books a day. A page that would normally take three minutes to read takes him eight to ten seconds. He reads the left page with his left eye and the right page with his right eye and retains 98% of it. The neurologist who originally diagnosed him only gave them five minutes of his time because he was late for a golf game; he said they should put Kim in an institution and forget about him.

Other parts of the series:

Part Two of Five

Part Three of Five

Part Four of Five

Part Five of Five

I was listening to Buzz Out Loud and Tom mentioned being able to run Firefox from within Firefox from within …

Copy and paste the following URL into the location bar in Firefox:

chrome://browser/content/browser.xul

Is that cool, or what?

Ya gotta love robots Trevor Blackwell, the founder and CEO of anybots, worked with Paul Graham on Viaweb which was a pioneering ASP using Lisp which eventually sold to Yahoo! for a nice sum and became Yahoo! Store. Very sharp guy, but I’m quite skeptical that a walking humanoid robot (technically a remotely operated machine since it won’t be autonomous) will be profitable. I hope it is.

Anybots announces the world’s first dynamically balancing walking humanoid robot.

Go to anybots.com for more info.

SIGGRAPH award winning animation of the inner life of the cell. To see a version with narration, click the image below, then choose the version appropriate for your internet connection speed:

It’s been a few days without a video of something exploding Some friends of mine got together a while ago to explode ginger bread houses in various ways. This was one of the more effective ones:

You can see the rest of them here