NASA Robonaut ...

Max McLean on His Adaptation of The Screwtape Letters

Randy Pausch "Time Management"

Chess In 1851

SEE HERE

Speed Chess Is Totally Insane, but Fun!

Screwtape from Max McLean (Letter #12)

Here's a short excerpt from The Screwtape Letters as Max McLean interprets it. Quite a marvelous production. Our oldest son treated us to it when it was in Washington last year on the occasion of our 40th wedding anniversary. HERE's a column about it. Screwtape's secretary Toadpipe is played by Australian actress Elise Girardin as a mime, with no spoken lines but all the more eloquent for that as she illustrates with posture and posing the ideas Screwtape is projecting. This is a wonderful performance and you should see it if you get the chance.

Is the iPad Approaching the Dynabook level?

SEE HERE Now that iPad is here there is research afoot to see if it is useful for doing the kinds of things that Alan Kay's Dynabook vision envisioned. We'll see, but it seems as if sooner or later we have to get there.

UPDATE: 8-19-2010 I went and saw one up close and personal at the JMU College bookstore and spent some time with it. The long and short of it, is that the iPad is cool. As a web browser it's great and fun. As a computer it's not all that hot. The touch screen just doesn't make it as a keyboard and if you can do text entry easily and fast then for touch-typists like me at least, it's a loser! I guess I'll wait to see what the next round of technology brings.

You Can Still Have Fun On Airplanes

First Comment on the Thread: (at least when I copied the embed code) was:

If this happened on a US Airways flight, the plane would have returned to the terminal and everyone on board would have been dragged off to jail.

Fun is NOT tolerated on US flights!

Ironic/sad that the Germans are more able to loosen up than the Americans.

Belloc Singing

Recording made in 1932 of Belloc singing.

G.K. Chesterton In His Own Speak

I had not seen this recording of G.K. Chesterton before so I was thrilled when I ran across it on the BLOG which my sister runs. We both attended the 29th Annual G.K. Chesterton Conference sponsored by the American Chesterton Society. This year's conference was themed with the 100th anniversary of Chesterton's book of essays: "What's Wrong With The World."

Here's another recording of Chesterton which also includes the first.

A Mirror Without a Mirror: Two Twin Babies Laugh At Each Other

I just thought this was adorable so I put it up.

Do You Like Cars? How about Ferraris?

What you do if you have too much money to know what to do. Get a really hot car and pretend to be cool.

JavaOne Conference ... and We're Almost Out of Internet Addresses ... the Countdown Begins!!

Amusing! Meanwhile we're running out of web addresses ... this could be a serious problem, actually this is a serious problem, one we may actually have to fix soon. People have been gabbing about it for years and now it's actually on the doorstep. SEE HERE

Focus Project Prezi from Powerpoint

You can use the arrow keys or your mouse to fool around with the Prezi. This one is basically a power point that was converted to a pdf file and then put into Prezi and given a set of navigation arrows. I also converted one slide to a series of frames and linked the frames in. It's a fun thing and you can find it HERE

Prezi

This is just a cut at embedding my first Prezi, a rather boring combination of three elements, an image from my Weedless Garden blog, a text title, and a youtube video. So let's see how this work. If you're interested in Prezi you can find it HERE

Richard Feynman In His Own Speak

HERE's ONE ON PHOTONS
QUANTUM BEHAVIOR
PARTICLE INTERACTIONS
MEANING & WHERE IS IT ALL LEADING
HERE ARE THE MESSENGER LECTURES Courtesy of Microsoft
THE LAST JOURNEY OF A GENUS
THE NECESSITY OF ANTI-PARTICLES
THE PLEASURE OF FINDING THINGS OUT

Can You Speak Klingon? Do You Want To?

SEE HERE This is amusing. I'm definitely a Trekkie but more of a Federation Starship Officer type not a Klingon, or any of the other myriad alien races that populate the galaxy in the StarTrek universe.

A Little Ajax Dynamic Content from Deitel iw3htp4 text

SEE HERE This is a book that I use for CSCI-330 Scripting Languages. It's really a wider deal than that and has a nice progressive feel as it takes the reader through XHTML,CSS, JavaScript, XML, AJAX and lots of other technologies along the way. We touch many scripting languages in the course of the text. This example comes from the first Ajax example in chapter 15.

HERE's Figure 15.8 which pulls images onto the page

And HERE is the AddressBook application.

DoJo Toolkit app Fig15.11 HERE

More Alan Kay, Here Recapitulating the History

Wow! It's hard to realize that history has so compressed progress that the world we are entering is only a few decades old. Kay recapitulates the history for those who were not there.

Alan Kay: Doing With Images Makes Symbols

Alan Kay is the father of "Dynabook" a seminal vision which led to the personal computer and beyond.

UFO Over China, purported to by July 9, 2010

So what is this thing. Alternatives: 1) Totally fake, 2) some sort of hypersonic experimental vehicle with shockwave, 3) a meteor or something ??? I don't know what it is and so far have failed to find anything that explains it. Interesting!

The Shroud of Turin Focus Project

Here's another short video which shows Petrus Soons' "holographic" three-D image of the shroud face and mentions his conviction that the Hebrew letters for "lamb" have been found under the chin of the image. HERE IS THAT VIDEO

Classroom of the Future

SEE HERE This is a piece that came into my mailbox in today's mail updates. One of my Focus Projects is The Classroom of the Future. The objective or vision, is the envisioning of the classroom of the future, what will be the ultimate classroom of the future? How will it work? What has to happen to move us from where we are to where it is in the future? I don't know the answers ... in fact that is what Focus Projects are all about, finding answers to vision oriented problems where the answer or even the path to the answer may not be particularly obvious.

Here's a LINK to the little presentation I gave on Focus Projects this past semester.

How To Make a Cloud Chamber

Visible Analyst

Potato Bugs

Since I was avoiding work this morning, like every morning during the Summer when I'm off school and don't feel motivated to do any, I started researching "Potato/buds/ and Potato/bugs/" ... my dad used to tell us how he would vacation with his family in Wisconsin on a farm and pick potato buds|bugs. I guess I didn't listen too carefully. So I prowled around this morning with that question wandering around in my head. A little internet research revealed that potato buds are not a problem but potato bugs are ... so I guess that answers that question. The picture is from a web-site that talked about picking them early in the morning when they had not had time to wake up and get active chomping the plants down to the ground.

Fooling Around With Styles In Blogspot

Font-Size 10 pt and color gold

Font-Size 15 pt and color tan

Font-Size 20 pt and color goldenrod

Color worked but size didn't ... hmmmm...

Color Tan h1

Color Goldenrod h2

Color Gold h3

Color Red h4

Rocket Man Exists!

Check it out! Great Run.

What's Your Favorite Programming Language and How It Stacks Up

Gotta Gutter to Clean? This is Cool!

Check This Out!

SEE HERE This is a heartwarming video showing a deaf baby experiencing sound through a cochlear implant for the first time. You can see how impressed he is.

Google Sites ... A Quick Look!

The Incredible World of the Very Tiny

Sculpture on the head of a pin! Awesome!

More SCRUM ...

SCRUM In Less Than 10 Minutes

Truth In 1:42 No Jive Be Alive

Gotta see this one! Cool, compact and true.

The Hubble-verse

The Time Management Fairy

SEE HERE This is a cute video which highlights some real time management problems that today's students commonly have. Check it out. It's only a little over three minutes.

Why the Free Market Works!

SEE HERE This video was put up today in an email from the On-Course Newsletter ... if you watch it (it's 18 minutes long) it will show you how some extremely interesting incentive models work better than more common direct reward models. That's fascinating and it also, intrinsically, explains why the free market works. Think about it after watching the video.

This is Amusing

This guy is a hoot. Music as NOISE! ... and such noise. This is an amusing romp back through time to 1960, about the time I got out of high school.

More on Robots ... and also WEB Design

SEE HERE Check out the final projects here ... lots of very cool ideas

If instead you're into WEB development here's a LINK to find lots of Web design web sites that popped up on a SIGCSE conversation.

Robots to the Rescue ... Depth Perception

This is a fun little video showing how a relatively simple algorithm can let you calculate depth ... of course two cameras a fixed distance apart or even on a variable platform would likely work better.

Battle of Midway

Powered By: VideoBuzz I was born on June 4, 1942 the day of the battle of Midway. So I've always had a special interest in that battle.

The Silent Service

I've been an ASW guy and now have a son going into the "silent service." This excerpt from Victory at Sea shows some footage of the impact that the submarine service had during WWII.

This is Troubling ... New and More Dangerous Submarines

Concorde Aborts Crosswind Landing

Sure looked like the right decision!

Flybyes to Die For!

Awesome!

iPad Hype is Here: Can It Really Be This Good?

SEE HERE Where are the specs? It certainly looks incredibly cool. When the other foot falls of course you may discover that there are not too many apps and the battery life probably is not terrific, but we'll see. April is the release.

Modeling Reality

Too much fun. This is a fascinating little web page about model building. Since I really enjoyed model building when I was a kid it really brought back memories. If you read the whole thing you get to a version with a degaussing ring, a big magnet, which was apparently used to sweep magnetic mines which seems like a slightly crazy thing to do flying a low altitude.

M. Flury Lemberg on the Restoration

The 2002 "Restoration" is very controversial. Many scientists believe that not only was it not necessary but that it eliminated quite a number of research directions by destroying the evidence. In some ways it "cleaned up" the shroud, but at the expense of much material and much evidence of pollens, dust, folds, as well as the provenance of material from the 1532 fire which will now always have doubt cast upon it if it is used subsequently for additional C14 dating.

Victoria My Grandaughter: Isn't She Great!

Bloom Box: Promise of Energy Generation at Point of Use

SEE HERE I'm always a bit leery of fuel cell technology. There is no doubt that it works but the history has been of very expensive cells that are easily poisoned by impurities and use exotic metals and hydrogen. Not exactly something everyone can afford to put in their back yard. This is something different they say ... we'll see of course.

Too Good ... You Gotta Watch This

SEE HERE A friend of ours pointed here Facebook at this and it is just so much fun. Great!
Watch and see, it's less than three minutes. Give yourself a treat!

Voyager ... Greetings to the Universe

SEE HERE A love story to the universe.

Sometimes You Have to Laugh

The web site for this stuff is xkcd.com and you have to check it out especially if you're a programmer, but even if you're not. Funny stuff! I ran into it on the ACM's SIGCSE (Special Interest Group Computer Science Education).

C.S. Lewis College Announced

Shroud Interview of John Heller on Merv Griffin Show

Some of you may not know that I'm a Shroud of Turin researcher. John Heller wrote a very interesting book about the research of the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) when went to Turin in 1978 and investigated the shroud. It was the most significant scientific research ever done on the Shroud of Turin. While we're at it here's an O'Reilly piece on the shroud. SEE HERE
HERE is another YouTube, this one shows a morph between the shroud image and an artist's conception of what the man may have looked like. It's quite effective.

And the Winner Is ...

SEE HERE If you saw Avatar you know that fantasy and reality were mixed pretty thoroughly. The technology that made that possible brings an academy award to Paul E. Debevec later this month. Given how effective the technology is, it's only a matter of time before you won't be able to tell if the actors in your movies are real people at all.

Cars Cars Cars

SEE HERE This is a really really fun site ... it's hard to believe these are all models they are so realistic and the sets are so good. But seeing is believing.

The Snowstorm of February 5th 2010

C.S. Lewis on Charles Williams

Heroism: Some Heroes Are Those Who Empower Others