The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon

Nova Spivack had an interesting post almost exactly a year ago today entitled “Towards a World Wide Database (WWDB).” It’s an insightful look at one compelling vision of the future of the semantic web. Great read, especially if you want a better idea of the end goal of the work I’ve been doing [...]

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This quote just blows my mind:
Our entire solar system—planets and all—sits inside a gargantuan bubble of gas about four times wider than the orbit of Neptune. The sun is responsible. It blows the bubble by means of the solar wind. Astronomers call the bubble itself “the heliosphere” and its outer membrane “the heliosheath.”
From an update [...]

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President Bill Clinton was interviewed on Fox News about his terrorism record, which he sets straight. Having read Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies, I think it’s awesome that Clinton himself got a chance on America’s most conservative popular news network to debunk the things that the conservative spinsters have been saying about his administration [...]

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From the first post in Michelle’s shiny new blog.

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Similar to the Ansari X-Prize, which was based on the prize that motivated the Wright brothers to their first flight, a new large cash prize has been created to stop or reverse aging. Let’s hope that the M-Prize does for aging what the Wright brothers did for the skies and, hopefully, what hte X-Prize [...]

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Awesome post analyzing the frequency of all the various ways one may spell the Piratical greeting, “Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!” Fitting mathematical exercise as September 19th was National Talk Like a Pirate Day, commemorated even on Wife Swap’s opening show this season. Nice work, Mah Rabu!

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From a recently received email:
And you thought those people that set up roomfulls of dominos to knock
over were amazing…
There are no computer graphics or digital tricks in the film.
Everything you see really happened in [...]

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The English version of Pravda has the story of a man who carried his twin in his belly for 36 years. Evidently it’s an extremely rare disease, and he’s lucky to be alive. YouTube has the video story, including some shots of the surgical removal of the twin.
Wing’s response: “It would have been [...]

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A version of Battleship, the classic game by Milton Bradley, has been put together by Julian Bleecker. The player has to physically go to a location in the real world that is part of the agreed upon “game board.” He then runs a small python script on his cell phone which sends his current [...]

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Kudos for pointing this out. From a story over at Centauri Dreams:
There is precedent for planetary demotion, incidentally. After its discovery in 1801, Ceres was generally thought to be a planet, but by the early 1850s so many of what we now call ‘asteroids’ were being discovered that planetary status for all was ruled out.
Ceres, [...]

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