• The Stupid Store: The Remarkable Hamster Clock :: Robot hamster clock– looks a lot like my life
• Non-invasive blood glucose metering watch :: no needles!
• The Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager :: Visualizing Baby Names — cooler than it sounds (Java)

Jorn Barger is posting at Robot Wisdom again! RW was one of the earliest blogs…

Jeremy Zawodney is absolutely right Google needs to develop a calendaring app

I am so sick of proprietary calendaring solutions, none of which adequately integrate with one another and none of which provide syndication and APIs to utilize in other applications!

• Transforming Information into Knowledge at the Portal | MySmartChannels :: E-Mail is where knowledge goes to die.
• ERADC - ePortfolio research and development community ::

Ben Hammersley points out a new/beta Google feature for movies

• Perform a google search for something like movie:Dogville
• Select the title to get to the primary movie page

As Ben notes, this is similar to part of Rotten Tomatoes, a site I (and many other movie lovers) frequent. But is it really a ‘category killer’? If it eventually becomes as adept as Google News, then I suspect this will be a death-blow for many sites whose sole purpose is to aggregate film criticism.

What can save Rotten Tomatoes, though, are its social networking features. Rotten Tomatoes is only partially an aggregator of movie criticism– it is also has the vine, a place for movie lovers to blog, find others with shared cinema interests, and perform all those socially oriented activities people seem to love within the context of their movie database. That’s the future that Google can’t automate…

• IT Conversations: Malcolm Gladwell – Human Nature :: Malcolm Gladwell speaking at Pop!Tech 2004 (a bit before the release of Blink)
• fac.etio.us :: Drill down through recent week of delicious tags (faceted)

While browsing for Python resources I ran across a GoogleAd advertising a brand new vulnerability in a popular chat tool. I followed the link and the page included full code for this apparently brand-new exploit along with pointers on how to create variations! A strange idea of public service…

For me, The Best American Science Writing 2004 is a dangerous book. Full of compelling and sometimes poetic writing about science of all kinds, it threatens to make me question what I am doing with my life and begin wondering if it’s really too late to become a neuroscientist or an astrophysicist. Last time that happened it took a year of physics and math classes to convince myself that it was indeed too late to become a cosmologist.

Some of my favorites include:

• William Langewische’s frank account of the failings of NASA that led to the Columbia disaster
• a beautiful miniature musing by Diane Ackerman on our place in nature
• a fascinating (and terrifying) investigation into attempts to communicate with “locked-in” people who have suffered total paralysis
• a piece from Wired (!) detailing the visceral, delicate, and ultimately unlikely events that surround and support successful organ transplantation

From string theory to the ramifications of the radically increased human lifespan to the science of explaining alien abductions, there really isn’t a weak piece in this book. And as it turns out, this wasn’t even the book I was actually looking for following a brief author interview I heard on the radio. Perhaps after I get my medical degree I’ll have time to find that one…

I had a good time in my last class talking about USENET and IRC and how they laid a foundation for discussion communities and IM. One of my students told me that a colleague of his heard he was learning about USENET in class and commented that it was “old stuff.”

Old, as I try to tell the young ladies before they escape, don’t mean a thing. I don’t expect that most people will invest their social currency in USENET discussion boards or IM channels. But as a tool for problem-solving and troubleshooting, USENET is hard to beat. IRC is still the easiest and most common method to have a chatroom for many people, and if you are clueful enough to use it you can hobnob with the developers and guru users of many of the cool pieces of software that everyone is so hyped about today.

Old School is where it’s at. Just ask the kids…

• Co-links :: Multiple links on a word… interesting
• The Eggcorn Database :: Make this site a last-stitch effort…