Wordle.net is a little online toy that takes a chunk of text, finds the most common words and makes a “word cloud” out of it, with the most commonly repeated words being bigger and so on. Very fun and nerdy waste of time. I popped over to Project Guttenberg and grabbed a poem there just […]

From launch to landing, I witnessed it all! Went over to the coast to see the launch 15 days ago, saw the International Space Station and Endeavor go over last night (Endeavor had already undocked and trailed behind by about 10°) and I just heard the double sonic boom as the shuttle passed south of […]

OK, sorry, my one super power is the ability to close my eye when the shutter of the camera clicks. I have a different picture with my eyes open, but Gigi the Cat is not in it and she’s cuter than me anyhow.

I painted the banners this afternoon, just for fun. They say “Peace […]

This is a Max Fleischer cartoon from 1932 featuring Cab Calloway as a freaky ghost walrus. I pulled the clip from the fabulous Archive.org and cleaned up the horrid audio (normalized, eq a bit to get rid of the hiss). Very trippy, weird and not a little bit scary!

Apparently, I’ve been Banned in China. Well, this domain has been banned, anyhow. I’m not going to flatter myself by thinking that the Authorities of the People’s Republic of China were outraged and put me on The List: I’m sure the overly enthusiastic censor was software on a silicon machine. Still, I’d like to pretend […]

“Usually, it is believed that Schadenfreude has no direct English equivalent.” according to a wikipedia entry. The word means “happiness in the misfortune of others.” As I was explaining this to a friend of mine who had never heard the word before, he came up with the best definition ever: “Oh, you mean like Nelson!”

In […]

Sodium in the toilet was fun in high school, but this is awesome:
Braniac

The front end of maxent.org is getting an overhaul. All the old pages are still here and will keep their old e-ddresses and look for now, but I hope the new design will let me more easily add new content to the site on a much more regular basis.
No: this is not a blog.
As you […]