Daniel W. Corson, an engineer, decided to try making his own watch, and documents the whole project on a web-site.

The work took him a year, but provided a great deal of amusement. Corson writes:

One of the joys of this work was the constant changes in skillset needed. From machinist to watchmaker to silversmith, etc.. As such the work is never boring, never repetitive, always new challenges and unknowns to be overcome.

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Hat tip to Cory Doctorow.

The twisted imaginations of a lot of Photoshop users go to work on the above image.

Shotgunning the processes

Dennis Chao proposes using DOOM as the user interface for System Administration.

What a great idea!

The Inquirer, a UK tech site, has a very alarming photo of a Dell notebook PC allegedly exploding at a conference in Japan.

AN INQUIRER READER attending a conference in Japan was sat just feet away from a laptop computer that suddenly exploded into flames, in what could have been a deadly accident.

Gaston, our astonished reader reports: “The damn thing was on fire and produced several explosions for more than five minutes”.

This story is suspiciously lacking in factual detail, but the Inquirer really does looks like a legitimate tech news and humor source. If they faked this photo, or misidentified the notebook’s brand, I would expect that Dell could, and would, sue the pants off them.

I looked at Dell’s Press Releases, and found nothing so far. It may be worth checking back later.

If you subscribe to any Yahoo Groups email lists, you have undoubtedly been hit today by numerous copies of a worm. I’ve seen about twenty copies this afternoon, all stopped by PC-cillin.

Information Week warns:

A new worm targeting Yahoo’s Web-based e-mail service bent on collecting addresses for a spam database has been spotted in the wild, a security company warned Monday.

The “Yamanner” worm exploits a JavaScript vulnerability in Yahoo’s Web mail, Cupertino, Calif. security specialist Symantec said in a Monday morning warning to customers of its DeepSight Threat Management System. Yamanner is spreading, added Symantec, which has assigned the threat a “2” in its 1 through 5 rating system.

The worm targets addresses with the “yahoo.com” and “yahoogroups.com” domains, and arrives as an HTML message containing JavaScript. As soon as the recipient views the message, the script automatically runs to spread the worm to other users in the Yahoo address book. The message will have a From” address of av3@yahoo.com and a Subject: of “New Graphic Site.”

“Harvested addresses from the address book are then submitted to a remote URL, which is likely to be used for a spam database,” noted Symantec in its alert.

The Antikythera Mechanism was a specialty of a good friend on the Yale faculty, the late Derek de Solla Price, and he often talked about the intriguing questions connected with the object recovered by sponge divers off the Greek Island of Antikythera in 1900, part of shipwreck dated to around 87 B.C.

Physorg.com reports that significant new progress has been made in reading the Greek inscriptions on the device.

A team of Greek and British scientists probing the secrets of the Antikythera Mechanism has managed to decipher ancient Greek inscriptions unseen for over 2,000 years, members of the project say.

“Part of the text on the machine, over 1,000 characters, had already been deciphered, but we have succeeded in doubling this total,” said physician Yiannis Bitsakis, part of a multi-disciplinary team of researchers from universities in Athens, Salonika and Cardiff, the Athens National Archaeological Museum and the Hewlett-Packard company.

“We have now deciphered 95 percent of the text,” he told AFP.

Scooped out of a Roman shipwreck located in 1900 by sponge divers near the southern Greek island of Antikythera, and kept at the Athens National Archaeological Museum, the Mechanism contains over 30 bronze wheels and dials, and is covered in astronomical inscriptions.

Probably operated by crank, it survives in three main pieces and some smaller fragments.

“(The device) could calculate the position of certain stars, at least the Sun and Moon, and perhaps predict astronomical phenomena,” said astrophysicist Xenophon Moussas of Athens University.

“It was probably rare, if not unique,” he added.

The rarity of the Antikythera Mechanism precluded its removal from the museum, so an eight-tonne ‘body scanner’ had to be assembled on-site for the privately-funded project, which used three-dimensional tomography to expose the unseen inscriptions.

The first appraisal of the Mechanism’s purpose was put forward in the 1960s by British science historian Derek Price.

Wikipedia

Antikythera Mechanism Research Project

Tech guru Jaron Lanier objects to new-fangled collective-based web phenomena, like Wikipedia, as Digital Maoism, and comes out for individualism.

Reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure…

..the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous…

For instance, most of the technical or scientific information that is in the Wikipedia was already on the Web before the Wikipedia was started. You could always use Google or other search services to find information about items that are now wikified. In some cases I have noticed specific texts get cloned from original sites at universities or labs onto wiki pages. And when that happens, each text loses part of its value. Since search engines are now more likely to point you to the wikified versions, the Web has lost some of its flavor in casual use.

When you see the context in which something was written and you know who the author was beyond just a name, you learn so much more than when you find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia. The question isn’t just one of authentication and accountability, though those are important, but something more subtle. A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning. Personal Web pages do that, as do journals and books. Even Britannica has an editorial voice…

..The artificial elevation of all things Meta is not confined to online culture. It is having a profound influence on how decisions are made in America.

What we are witnessing today is the alarming rise of the fallacy of the infallible collective. Numerous elite organizations have been swept off their feet by the idea. They are inspired by the rise of the Wikipedia, by the wealth of Google, and by the rush of entrepreneurs to be the most Meta. Government agencies, top corporate planning departments, and major universities have all gotten the bug.

Most people have probably already experienced the joys of playing with Google Earth and Windows Live Local. NASA is now offering another really cool satellite imaging program, with add-ons for Mars, the Moon, and the Night Sky. Go to: NASA World Wind, and download. Don’t forget the add ons.

The SF Chronicle profiles an intriguing new Google feature:

Elmhurst, Ill., Loves Gay Porn. Which U.S. city seeks the most sex? Who wants to impeach Bush the most? Ask Google Trends…

the fact is, for all of last year, Elmhurst, Ill., population about 43,000, home of the Sunshine Biscuit Co. and former home of the largest Chevy dealer in the United States and pretty much quaint upscale yuppie Anytown, U.S.A., was the American city that looked up the term “sex” most frequently on Google.

Isn’t that cute? Isn’t that interesting? Sort of? I know this because Google just unveiled this nifty and somewhat baffling tool called Google Trends, wherein you simply enter your search term and choose a couple of parameters and hit Return and boom, you can see which regions (or countries or cities) in the world are looking up that term most actively for a given year (the data also shifts day to day), using Google’s massive search database, and it’s random, semipractical stuff like this that makes it difficult to hate Google for whoring out to China and for becoming the new Microsoft and for their billionaire geek teenager CEOs. But that’s another column.

Google Trends. It is utterly fascinating, at least for a while. It is cool and useful and at the same time enormously frustrating due to its obvious limitations, though I imagine it will spawn enormous amounts of titillating filler for countless PR firms and marketers and research papers and news reports that cite all sorts of vague data that seems to tell you something really important but when you stop and think about it doesn’t really tell you all that much at all. You know, just like religion.

Elmhurst, Illinois, is apparently way into sex. Or at least the idea of sex (googling that hugely broad term returns a decidedly unsexy array of sites, including those for “Sex and the City,” the Sex Pistols, Playboy.com, the National Sex Offender Registry and Sex Addicts Anonymous — not exactly a steaming cup o’ hot titillation).

But that’s not all. Elmhurst has darker, juicier secrets. Turns out Elmhurst is also, at least for 2006, the town most actively looking up “anal sex” (followed closely by Norfolk, Va., and, of course, San Antonio, Texas). And also “porn.” And also “gay porn” (just ahead of Las Vegas). And also “vibrator.” Do you sense a trend? I sense a trend. And also someplace I might need to get a summer home.

What does this say about Elmhurst? What does this say about small towns across the United States? What do you think it says? Because that’s pretty much what it says.

Google, thoughtfully, also includes any relevant news articles it can dig up to go alongside your search results to perhaps explain some of the interest. Does this help explain why Rockville, Md., looks up “Vishnu” more than any other city? Verily, I have no idea.

But still, it can get interesting. Who’s looking up “impeach Bush” most actively? Portland, Oregon. (San Francisco is third). “American Idol”? Honolulu, Hawaii — by a strangely huge margin. “Gas prices”? Minneapolis. “Dildo”? That would be Oslo, Norway. “Dildo,” among U.S. cities? Tampa, Fla. “Tom Cruise”? Cambridge, Mass. “Tom Cruise gay”? Irvine and New York. “Da Vinci Code”? Salt Lake City. “Gun control”? Cincinnati. And “Viagra,” for 2006? That’s Fort Worth, Texas. Go figure.

In fact, Google Trends is pretty much the biggest “go figure” tool you’re likely to see all year. You can speculate to your heart’s content about why the hell Phoenix would be looking up “Jenna Jameson” more than Las Vegas, or why Nashville is so heavily into Christ, or why they really love Ashlee Simpson in Newark, N.J., or why Philadelphia, for some unknowable reason, loves the fact that Britney Spears is pregnant whereas Santiago, Chile, really, really loves Pearl Jam, but you could only guess. One bit of historical news: Jesus has resurged and is once again more popular than the Beatles. Just FYI.

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Hat tip to Stephen Frankel.

Narrator demonstrates the principle of the electromagnetically-powered Gauss gun.

video

(I had to let it load all the way, and run it again. On the first pass, it was choppy.)

Wikipedia

video

Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine describes in yesterday’s New York Times magazine the impending electronic Universal Library:

The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.

Until now…

..Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn’t make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there? The universal library should include a copy of every painting, photograph, film and piece of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should include all radio and television broadcasts. Commercials too. And how can we forget the Web? The grand library naturally needs a copy of the billions of dead Web pages no longer online and the tens of millions of blog posts now gone — the ephemeral literature of our time. In short, the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time.

This is a very big library. But because of digital technology, you’ll be able to reach inside it from almost any device that sports a screen. From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have “published” at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow’s technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet — if it doesn’t plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what’s taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)

The only fly in the ointment of Kelly’s optimism is the enormous extension in recent years (in a series of concession to corporate interests) by Congress of the duration of copyright.