The world’s first scanning tunneling microscope, outfitted to do double duty as an atomic force microscope. This machine was invented at IBM Zurich in 1981; its creators won a Nobel Prize in 1986. And yes, it really is one of the coolest pieces of tech in the world.
See that orange round thing in the lower right hand corner? It’s an Arizona Iced Tea can. Some things in experimental physics never change. 😉
…via physicsduck
Video of a French guy who makes triodes (a type of vaccum tube) by hand. And when I say “by hand,” I mean glass envelope and all.
Pay particular attention to his testing equipment.
Man, this is really, really, really cool. If you like tech, you like seeing tech made, and you like old school tech, check this out. Worksafe, sound.
S&M blogger outs web host malware attack: When Google meets kink.
When I was last in Chicago, dayo and I drove about three hours into Wisconsin to see a house.
Not just any house. To understand this particular house, imagine that you were a space alien. Imagine that you came from a strange culture that did not build buildings. Maybe you lived in caves, or, I dunno, burrowed parasitically into the flesh of gigantic alien space walruses or something. Or maybe you lived in trees like the elves in The Lord of the Rings, and went everywhere barefoot because your fantastically advanced magic hadn’t ever got so far as to develop shoes.
Anyway, the point is that you don’t build buildings. And then, let’s suppose you’d heard of a thing called a “house,” which was an enclosed structure divided into “rooms.” Armed with this knowledge, you set out to design and build a house, but you weren’t quite clear on what exactly a “room” was.
If you were this space alien, the house that you built would probably be The House on the Rock. The Web site and the brochures describe it as the “grand vision” of a guy named Alex Jordan, but I’d say it’s not so much a “grand vision” as it is a study in ad-hoc chaos and arguably the world’s greatest monument to obsessive-compulsive disorder.
It’s an enclosed structure. It’s probably about a hundred thousand square feet or so, and it’s three stories tall, more or less. I say “more or less” because it wasn’t so much “designed” as it was thrown together over time by a man whose grasp of architecture and construction was theoretical at best, and the result is…um, well, it’s hard to actually call it a building, really.
You go in, and you find that it’s a hallway. It’s kind of like being inside a living organism, like the organic space ship on that science fiction TV series whose name I can’t remember with the one chick who’s really hot and shoots lots of people, only more so. The hallway winds and twists and ascends and descends more or less at random, and occasionally it widens out into a place with a bed, or a table, or some other object of furniture you might expect to find in a domicile. It’s hard to say how many rooms there are in this house, because the house doesn’t really do “rooms.” Wide spots in the hallway-tunnel-alien-innards-thing pass for rooms, for the most part, and going from one place to another sometimes involves taking a route that’s…unexpected.
I took many pictures, and they’re very large. For those of you who don’t mind the crushing bandwidth: onward!
So now that Thanksgiving’s over and the leftovers in the fridge are slowly dwindling, it’s time to turn our attention to the upcoming holiday season. And I’d just like to take a minute to remind each of us to remember the *true* reason for this holiday.
With commercialization, and vacation scheduling, and all those other things, it can be easy for us to forget. Even the carols we listen to quickly become mere words, and we no longer remember their true import.
Think about it. Really. Those carols are not just empty words:
Up from the sea, from underground
Down from the sky, they’re all around
They will return: mankind will learn
New kinds of fear when they are here
The traditions we enjoy have a much deeper meaning, and one that we lose far too easily, I fear. The twinkling lights on the Christmas tree were originally there to remind us of the stars, and of the threat that looms like an ominous shadow over everything we love: on that winter solstice night when the stars are right, the Great Old Ones will awake from the slumber of death once more, to wreak destruction and terror on all mankind, exposing our existence for the hollow and purposeless shell it is.
We have no hope on that day but to pledge our souls in service to the Elder Gods, so that we may be devoured first, spared the long slow spiral down into gibbering madness.
So as the nights grow longer and the days grow shorter, take some time out of your hectic schedule to meditate on the coming of the Great Old Ones. Should the stars not align properly in the heavens this year, and humanity be granted yet another year of our tiny, meaningless existance before the Crawling Chaos covers us all, breathe a sigh and exchange presents with those close to you in thanks.
Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Ftaghn!
Back from Chicago. While I was there, dayo took me to a place that sells hot chocolate.
Now, this was not any ordinary place selling hot chocolate, mind you. Many places sell hot chocolate–Starbuck’s, grocery stores, even Amazon.com. But this place offered hot chocolate that was different. Better. Beyond the ordinary. I knew something as up when I saw the sign outside the door. It proclaimed, in neon green dry erase marker on shiny blackness, “Our chocolate kicks more ass than Chuck Norris.”
The place was Coco Rouge.
At some time in the past, the place now called Coco Rouge was an alleyway. The sort of alleyway a careless traveller might get rolled in. The building was tall and very narrow, lit by crystal chandeliers and red neon, very BladeRunner-esque. One wall was rough stone, the others polished concrete like the floor. The decor might be described as Late Twentieth Century Pretentious meets Postmodern Gone Mad…very minimalist, very chic, very Apple. Down, even, to the black mock turtlenecks worn by the vaguely pretty, vaguely multicultural but in a non-threatening sorta way staff who took my order, and rung it up on an enormous antique mechanical cash register polished ’til it gleamed like a Terminator exoskeleton.
This was a hot chocolate place from an alternate future, a place like what Starbuck’s might have been in a version of reality where Apple, not Microsoft, ruled the earth.
I chose the house special. Select dark chocolates, it said, bitter and only slightly sweet, blended together to perfection.
Now, from that description, and the reference to Chuck Norris outside, I expected a well and good ass-kicking. You know, the chocolate equivalent of being hit over the head with blunt object and dragged off into some dark corner somewhere. I expected to wake up in an alleyway with a concussion and my wallet missing. That seemed reasonable, I thought, from dark chocolate, bitter and only slightly sweet, delivered in an insulated glass mug that looked solid enough to hit someone.
What I got was something else entirely.
The first sip didn’t blast me with Chocolate! Chocolate! Chocolate! and also, Chocolate! The first taste was surprisingly subtle, complicated, with several distinct chocolate notes and none of the cloying sweetness and slightly burnt flavor you get from cheap hot chocolate powder. It was, in other words, very good hot chocolate.
Another sip. Definitely dark chocolate, heavy and brooding, with an understated hint of mayhem. This hot chocolate did not hit me over the head and rifle through my pockets; it seduced me, charmed me, lured me out into the alley on my own. Less work, you see, if you don’t have to drag your victim.
By the time I was nearly finished, I realized that I had been sacked by chocolate, so deftly and so subtly I didn’t even see it coming. No, this was not the chocolate equivalent of blunt-force trauma; this chocolate was more like the experience you get when you meet an exotic stranger in a bar, share a deep and intoxicating kiss, and before you know it you’re waking up in an alley with your pants down around your ankles and your wallet nowhere to be found. No concussion–that’s much to declassé–but you still have no idea how you got there, or how you’re going to explain it to your partner back home.
All in all, a mighty fine hot chocolate.
Shelly’s got her Internet radio station playing, and a very strange mix of a VNV Nation song just came on, which reminded me I wanted to show this to datan0de:
I’ve been head-down in a major rewrite of my sex game Onyx for the past several weeks, and have had time for nothing–I mean nothing–else. I’ve fallen into the habit of bringing my laptop with me on my lunch break every day and coding while I’m eating.
The downside is that I’ve been having conversations like this lately:
Shelly: I’m horny!
Me: Can’t sleep…can’t eat…can’t fuck…must….code!
The upside is that the game is turning out major kick-ass, and is so much better than the current version that I’m almost embarrassed by the current version. (By the way, datan0de, I’ve implemented all of your suggestions from your last round of alpha testing, and found the crashing bug you reported… I have a new build ready for testing if you guys are up for it!)
It’s been almost five years since the last time I worked on Onyx, and I have piles and piles of small pocket-sized spiral notebooks (some of which date back to 1993) filled with notes, ideas, game actions, kinky sex ideas, and so on all pertaining to the game. I dug them out and have been flipping through them as I work, and I’ve found all kinds of things scribbled in the margins that don’t have any bearing on Onyx at all but must’ve caught my attention:
Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard. Be evil.
The secret to a great friendship is to have lots of fears in common.
Feminists fuck better.
People who make their own beds seldom want to sleep in them.
Every man is the creature of the age in which he lives; very few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.
–Voltaire
Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.
Today, we’re taking some time off to go to Busch Gardens. When we get back, time to code some more.
Courtesy of zaiah: Robot Moved by a Slime Mould’s Fear. (datan0de, you’ll get a kick out of this one!)
A bright yellow slime mould that can grow to several metres in diameter has been put in charge of a scrabbling, six-legged robot…
Physarum polycephalum is a large single-celled organism that responds to food sources, such as bacteria and fungi, by moving towards and engulfing it. It also moves away from light and favours humid, moist places to inhabit. The mould uses a network of tiny tubes filled with cytoplasm to both sense its environment and decide how to respond to it. Zauner’s team decided to harness this simple control mechanism to direct a small six-legged (hexapod) walking bot. […]
Biology is already influencing the evolution of robots in other ways. For example, researchers led by Chris Melhuish at the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK, have developed robots that generate power by consuming flies.
“Computational autonomy has been studied for some time,” says Ioannis Ieropoulos of the University of Western England team. “For a truly autonomous robot, the level of computational complexity will depend on the available energy.”
