Thanks to Tim Blair and his commenters, I am learning all sorts of new things about wind turbines today. I was not previously aware that they could catch fire, but this video enlightened me:
They can also explode:
Headline: Robots Take Over University
I think this is a good thing. Robotic professors will be extremely fair graders and will not inject political bias into their lectures. Of course, they may have to be reminded that human students cannot study 24 hours a day.
What about the athletic programs? Robotic coaches would be very good at strategy, but perhaps not very understanding of the physiological limitations of human athletes.
Or will the football players be robots as well? Now that would be awesome.
There was a time, not very long ago, when the Roman Catholic Church resisted the use of anything but Latin for its official communications.
Who would have guessed we’d see an age when a papal message to the faithful would read:
The Holy Spirit gave the Apostles and gives u the power boldly 2 proclaim that Christ is risen! - BXVI.
The end, surely, is near.
Every day, I learn something new. For example, today I learned that the state of South Carolina is gay. I had no idea.
Glorious Leader Joss Whedon has put together, uh, something.
It’s some kind of web mini-series of three acts that make it about as long as a normal 1 hour TV show? It’s starring Nathan Fillion, Neil Patrick Harris, and Felicia Day. Oh, okay, in GLJW’s own words, it’s “A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.”
The funny thing is that the first act is being released today, the second act on Thursday, and the third (and final) act on Saturday. “All acts will stay up until midnight Sunday July 20th. Then they will vanish into the night, like a phantom (but not THE Phantom – that’s still playing. Like, everywhere.)”
Anyways, here’s the link to the first act, that I’ll be watching as soon as I’m off this afternoon. Oh, and it’s hosted on Hulu, or, as I call it, The Future of Television.
Oh yeah, it’s called “Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”. Gratuitous Word Art included free of charge.
Apropos of nothing: sulfur hexafluoride is a nonreactive, colorless gas whose most notable property is probably its high density. Which makes possible the so-called “invisible water effect”:
Cool.
I’m not sure how much of this applies to global warming, but a New Scientist article reveals the true cause of European warming. And it’s not what anyone has been telling us. Europe is getting warmer because the Europeans are not polluting enough.
I blame France, which not only gets 80% of its electricity from clean nuclear plants, but also exports clean power to the rest of Europe. So it’s up to France to solve this problem. Fortunately, there’s a simple solution: Shut down all of the nuclear plants and replace them with coal-burning power stations. The French government can defray the costs by selling all the nuclear plants to the United States (which can certainly use them). We can even pay for the nuclear plants in coal, if that would help. We have lots of coal. It’s a win-win!
The New York Times has a problem with its new headquarters building: people keep climbing it. According to an article on the NYT website, the building is encased in a “curtain-like screen” of “distinctive horizontal ceramic rods”, and this is apparently a temptation that some people can’t resist. Three men have used the rods to scale the building in the last five weeks.
The NYT’s response has been to put up a plywood barrier to stop the climbers and, when that didn’t work, to start removing some of the rods. I think that’s the wrong approach. Why not leave the rods in place, spray them with WD40 or nonstick cooking spray, and let natural selection take care of the problem?
Via Slashdot, an article about how “novice PC users there, like students and housewives” are more attracted to the Linux flavor of the EEEPc than others are to the XP version. This is tagged with “flamebait” over at /., I assume because someone’s a little touchy about their hobby becoming mainstream. But they’re missing the point.
Watching the computing habits of my mother, I wouldn’t be surprised if she would be quite satisfied with the latest Ubuntu or Fedora distro. Were I a few years younger and still living at home, I might give it a shot, since I could be on hand for an technical issues, as I’m sure there would be.
