edgore: December 2004 Archives

NASA has built a 50 foot tall robot - out of flowers - a giant rose-bot, if you will. This killing machine will be seen as a float in the Rose Parade, making it possibly the only thing ever worth watching the Rose parade for. According to a NASA spokesdrone: "The robot will wow the crowds with special effects ranging from smoke from the robot's rockets to strobe lights and animation. A remote control Web camera inside the robot's head will provide an unprecedented view of the parade route". Also, precise weapon targeting.

LINK

Watch in amusement as I attempt to explain evolution, natural selection and the faults with Intelligent design to what I can only assume are two teen-aged 733t hax0r5 on my blog. Hey, at least they have to think...

LINK

Plus, apparently, about 1000 disk images that you can play on it. Just about every much beloved game I remember from the eighties and early nineties was available when I checked. It requires Windows and Internet Explorer - but it lets you play Wizardy! WIZARDRY!!! It also doesn't clutter up you hard drive with emulator files.

LINK (via bOINGbOING )

This one primarily caught my interest because it's here in Colorado. A few weeks ago, there were articles in several places about a guy out here, Alek Komarnitsky, who had hooked his Xmas lights up to the internet, and made a web site where people could control them remotely. Turns out that what he actually did we take a series of photos of his house at various times during the day, with the various "controllable" lights turned on and off, and serve up those pictures based on what the user would expect to see. He was found out when a reporter went to his house to interview him. Funny thing is, it probably would have been easier to just make the lights really controllable.

(via Slashdot)

Wow, it seems that three children are getting coal in their stockings instead of a shiny new Nintindo DS. The parents of these horrible tykes have put the machines up on Ebay, where they are going for above market value. I hope that Sara now realizes how lucky she is...

LINK (via Engadget)

A neat site by a Ukrainian woman who spent the summer of 2004 going around Kiev with her friends and a metal detector finding buried treasure. Everything from 1000 year old pre-mongol jewlery to a PPSh-41 submachine gun left over from WWII. Interesting from a historical standpoint, and also charmingly written.

LINK (via William Gibson)

So, about two years ago, back in 2002, scientists detected a strange noise deep undersea - something like a "bloop" but very stretched out, and slow; and very very low frequency. Stranger still, this noise emanates from just about the exact location of H.P. Lovecraft's "fictional" undersea city of R'lyeh. Naturally, this made some poor guy create a website where he collects news clippings of real world events that indicate the stars are right.

LINK (Thanks Lance!)

Someone has scanned in a series of images from a McCall's Needlework & Crafts Magazine from 1965. They are possibly the most disturbing things I have ever seen made out of yarn. The guy also might be willing to pass on the patterns.

LINK (via bOINGbOING)