This experiment shows the really mysterious behavior of quantum particles. Electrons behaving like waves and then like marbles? Mind blowingly cool.
Tags: science
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The System of the World Flickr’d
Flickr set documents locations in Neal Stephenson trilogy
Neil sez, “Great chunks of Neal Stephenson’s ‘The System of the World’ trilogy (review) use the Tower of London as a pivotal location, but I never got a clear enough mental picture of the place. So I photo-documented the Tower, with Flickr notes text extracts to provide a visual guide for the interested reader. The Baroque Cycle takes in a lot of the specific geography of London, and I’d love to see a collective gazetteer emerge, perhaps using ‘baroquecyclelondon’ as a tag?
A confluence of two of my favourite things: The Baroque Cycle and Flickr. [via]
Tags: books, photography Neal Stephenson
Back in the good old days of the Spectrum 48k cheating at computer games involved the BASIC command POKE to set a key value in memory to a different number in order to get infinite lives or some such thing.
Well POKE is back in the form of free to download program. It really is the ultimate gaming utility and I have just the perfect use in mind for it at work. But like the girl from Hoboken in the limerick be careful of Pokin’ as you might cause your game to become broken.
There was a young girl from Hoboken
Who claimed that her hymen was broken
From riding her bike
On a cobblestone pike
But it really was broken from pokin’!!!
The top spot of the Pinball high score table will be mine. Oh yes it will be mine.
Tags: games
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LOL foiled!!
Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net
Tags: humour
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Serenity sells
According to Michael and Evo’s Slice of SciFi DVD Sales have pushed Serenity over the top and into the black.
All DVD reports up to January 31st are in and it looks like over 2 million DVD’s have been sold and VideoBusiness.com, an organization that tracks video rental information, announced that Serenity has made $9 million in DVD rentals alone.
It hasn’t even been released on DVD worldwide yet, it gets released in the UK in a few days and I for one shall be buying a copy. So this makes up for the poor box-office that it received but I wouldn’t count my chickens just yet.
The fact that Serenity has taken Universal out of the red and into the black is great news, but don’t cheer too early. According to Universal execs it still may not be enough for them to wager on a costly sequel, even though Whedon brought this one in at $1 million under its original projected cost of $40 million.
Like practically every other Firefly fan on the planet I just can’t get enough of the crew of Serenity and would welcome further adventures but what I really would like is another season of the television series.
Failing that then perhaps I can settle for a set of Lego Serenity crew members.
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Berkeley lectures as podcasts
Almost as good as actually attending Berkeley…?
I wholeheartedly approve of programmes like this bringing the best education in the world albeit in a reduced form to those that cannot afford it.
Tags: Digg
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One Billion Mazes
This site contains one billion mazes in high-quality printable PDF format. You may view, print and solve these mazes… and yes, there are exactly one billion mazes!
That’s one hell of a lot of mazes and so they must surely be dynamically created as clearly even if they were computer generated it would require massive storage on a webserver. Talking about Terabytes of data.
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BAFTA
Congratulations to the ‘Gay Shepherd’ movie and to the new Fellow of the British Academy David Puttnam. I agree that the movie-making business is enjoying a resurgence in terms of quality and that it has been proved that movies can be both entertaining and informing, we had great examples of both of those qualities being in abundance amongst the five nominations for Best Picture. But it was Brokeback Mountain that took it.
Tags: movies
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Storycode
I stumbled across the website Storycode yesterday and it may prove to be an excellent source of recommendations for my future reading.
StoryCode.co.uk is a unique source of inspiring book recommendations and a great way to find the next book to read. And its power comes from the collaborative passion of readers.
Users of the site are asked to code the books by answering several questions using a sliding scale system i.e. is this book humorous or serious or somewhere in between. Then a profile of the book is built and can be compared to theirs in the database to find similar books.
So by looking at The Confusion by Neal Stephenson I saw that the book Some Danger Involved by Will Thomas was similar and liked what I read about it.
Modeled after the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, but with a verve all its own, this debut mystery introduces a likable pair of sleuths and explores the Jewish quarter of Victorian London.
And promptly purchased it from Amazon.co.uk
We’ll have to see how this works out once I’ve read the novel, but I’m intrigued by the idea of Storycode.
Tags: books, Neal Stephenson
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Old school gaming
Cubefield feels very much like the kind of videogames that you might have played in the 80s. Graphically very simply, very easy to understand how to play but also very addictive.
Old school gaming at it’s best.
Talking of old school, Cuban Boy’s Old Skool for Scoundrels is simply fantastic.
Tags: games