Stale Thoughts and Broken Links

Old posts from my weblog.

(Click here for posts on geophysics and the energy industry.)


2009.04.28

Time: The World's Most Influential Person Is....

"In a stunning result, the winner of the third annual TIME 100 poll and new owner of the title World's Most Influential Person is moot. The 21-year-old college student and founder of the online community 4chan.org, whose real name is Christopher Poole, received 16,794,368 votes ... to handily beat the likes of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and Oprah Winfrey. To put the magnitude of the upset in perspective, it's worth noting that everyone moot beat out actually has a job."

Music Machinery: Inside the precision hack.

"Looking at the first letters of each of the top 21 leading names in the poll we find the message ‘marblecake, also the game.’ The poll announces (perhaps subtly) to the world, that the most influential are not the Obamas, Britneys or the Rick Warrens of the world, the most influential are an extremely advanced intelligence: the hackers."


2009.04.19

Oxford University Press Blog: Nine Words You Might Think Came from Science but Which Are Really from Science Fiction.


This site is total spam, and this video footage of a DUI stop is actually pilfered from a five-year-old Comedy Central sitcom. But it's funny anyway --

LiveLeak: DUI stop.


2009.04.14

Science, Optics and You: Powers of 10.

"View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree.... After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons."


2009.04.10

Here's an iTunes mix for Good Friday. The Hold Steady is a midwestern rock band.


2009.04.07

Yeah, I know. North Carolina won it all.


2009.04.06

WSJ: Former Highflier's Final Landing.

"Silicon Graphics Inc., once one of the computer industry's highest fliers, filed for bankruptcy protection for a second time and will sell its assets to Rackable Systems Inc. for $25 million." ...

"Rackable, founded in 1999, initially grew at a rapid clip by selling simple servers to Internet services. But the company has run into stiff competition and has posted five consecutive quarterly losses. Rackable has only about 300 employees, compared with nearly 1,200 for SGI."


Walter Kessinger

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