Dark Matter
UF's weblog
entries 2001-

New weblog - Site main - >Weblog archive 2001-2009< - Old aviation blog - Old model railway blog - Old ferret blog - Old ferret diary

• 2010-01-12

  Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant
  "Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body."

• 2010-01-08

  Atheist Ireland Publishes 25 Blasphemous Quotes
  Why? Because blasphemy is now a crime punishable by a 25,000 euro fine in Ireland.

  The last paragraph is significant when considering the problem of laws such as this:

  "Finally, as a bonus, Micheal Martin, Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs, opposing attempts by Islamic States to make defamation of religion a crime at UN level, 2009: "We believe that the concept of defamation of religion is not consistent with the promotion and protection of human rights. It can be used to justify arbitrary limitations on, or the denial of, freedom of expression. Indeed, Ireland considers that freedom of expression is a key and inherent element in the manifestation of freedom of thought and conscience and as such is complementary to freedom of religion or belief." Just months after Minister Martin made this comment, his colleague Dermot Ahern introduced Ireland's new blasphemy law."

• 2010-01-08

  Surviving Cueva de los Cristales - The Giant Crystal Cave
  Beautiful cave, but hot and humid.

• 2010-01-08

  Human Genome Is Part Bornavirus
  "Bornaviruses, a type of RNA virus that causes disease in horses and sheep, can insert their genetic material into human DNA and first did so at least 40 million years ago, the study shows."

• 2010-01-07

  Gripen at Tiger Meet 2009
  Nice photos of a tiger-decorated Gripen.%09

• 2010-01-07

  Lines of Confusion Illusion
  Video showing clearly that it's your perception which changes. Another: The Checker-shadow illusion.

• 2010-01-04

  Age of the Solar System Needs to Be Recalculated
  By a rather tiny amount. But important in the actual creation process.

• 2010-01-02

  Sweden culls its resurgent wolves
  Since this article was posted, the hunt is over in three of the five counties as their quota had been filled. At the time of writing, 20 wolves had been confirmed killed and about 15 more shot at.

• 2010-01-02

  'Lifeless' prions can 'evolve'
  "The Scripps Research Institute in the US says the prions can change to suit their environment and go on to develop drug resistance."

• 2010-01-01

  Review of the Seiko SBCM023
  One of my favourite watches. Not expensive at all, but very good overall. Apart from the technical aspects, I like that the rotating bezel's minute marks are the same shape/colour all round. Don't like it when the first 15/20 are a different colour.

• 2010-01-01

  Aeromodding in the 1930's: 38 mpg, 70 mph Model T
  "The end result was a custom car that would go 70 mph with its original engine. The Model T in stock form topped out around 45 mph."

• 2009-12-28

  Space-Time for Springers
  Short SF story by Fritz Leiber.

• 2009-12-28

  TSA Free Airline
  There is on in USA which uses the lack of security checks as a marketing advantage.

• 2009-12-26

  Water Resistant mark
  Watches and how they're tested and marked.

• 2009-12-23

  Front Drive is Safer
  Advertisement for a front wheel drive car in 1930.

• 2009-12-23

  Brown dwarf pair mystifies astronomers
  "Two brown dwarf-sized objects orbiting a giant old star show that planets may assemble around stars more quickly and efficiently than anyone thought possible, according to an international team of astronomers."

• 2009-12-21

  Klemm Kl 35D SE-BGA
  Photos of an aircraft that has recently been restored to flying condition. It's painted in winter camouflage.

• 2009-12-20

  Data to expose "ghost mountains"
  More information about the Gamburtsevs range which is hidden under ice in Antarctica.

• 2009-12-17

  Saving Earth From an Asteroid Will Take Diplomats, Not Heroes
  Interesting viewpoint.

  "The only problem is that such a process would take time and as the asteroid's trajectory changed, it would be "pointed" at different places along a horizontal plane on Earth called the risk corridor."

• 2009-12-16

  Lego Hoth photos
  Very good snow effect in the photos, made in a very creative way.

• 2009-12-12

  ISS and Astronaut
  Photographed from the ground by an amateur with a telescope.

• 2009-12-11

  What should an electric car sound like?
  Here are thirteen examples of suggested "warning" sounds. Some really doesn't seem to be serious, but they might. All text in Danish, but you can test listen and see the results of the voting.

• 2009-12-08

  Rudiments of Language Discovered in Monkeys
  "This is the first evidence we have in animal communication that they can combine, in a semantic way, different calls to create a new message."

• 2009-12-07

  Google Chrome and "Aw, Snap!" has been a mystery for me. Today I figured out what (some of) the sites it happens on have in common: They don't specify fonts. Aha! Checking the default fonts in Chrome reveals they aren't installed on my system.

  So the solution is to change the default fonts to some that are installed.

• 2009-12-07

  Fiction: Missile Gap by Charles Stross
  Complete science fiction novella. Very good.

• 2009-12-07

  I have tested ink water and light resistance again.

• 2009-12-07

  12 Creative Passport Covers
  Apart from the metal one, which isolates the RFID tag, I wouldn't have come up with any of the other designs.

• 2009-12-06

  I just re-read Iain M. Banks' Matter. When it came out, lots of people wrote more or less "yes, it's good, but it's not as good as his other Culture novels". I think it is. The first you read probably had a better chance of making a strong impression on you, but looking back it's clear they're all more or less equally good.

• 2009-12-06

  2009 Edwards AFB Open House
  Lots of very good photos.

• 2009-12-04

  Raytheon adapts AIM-9X for air-to-ground mission
  No detail except that it's just a matter of a software change. Considering the footage revealed from its seeker it's not hard to see how it easily could lock on to boats and warm vehicles. But I don't doubt it could lock on to other features on the ground too, but it's interesting trying to figure out how it's cued in that case.

• 2009-12-01

  O scale Oak tree
  Instructions for building a good looking tree for a layout or diorama.

• 2009-11-30

  Waterbomber
  About a Catalina imported to Sweden.

• 2009-11-29

  Space Shuttle Atlantis on approach
  Good photo from a not very often seen angle.

• 2009-11-29

  Airbus A310 crosswind landing
  Photo captured when only one set of wheels are on the ground.

• 2009-11-28

  If Earth Had Rings
  An examination of what Earth would be like with rings, from different latitudes and cities across the globe.

• 2009-11-22

  Lego Pop-up Kinkaku-ji
  Impressive design of this temple. Video shows how it folds out of the box, which also is made of Lego pieces.

• 2009-11-21

  Big Modular Blocks to Make Furniture
  Looks a whole lot like Lego but sized for real people.

• 2009-11-19

  A metro station in Lego
  Nice representation of an underground station.

• 2009-11-19

  Railway Car Churches
  A rather special use for re-purposed railway coaches.

• 2009-11-16

  Top 5 Social Engineering Exploit Techniques
  What to look out for to avoid be exploited.

• 2009-11-13

  The Railways of Bord na Mona
  Large peat railway system.

• 2009-11-05

  Denis d'or
  The first electrical musical instrument, built in 1748. Another early was the Clavecin électrique.

• 2009-11-04

  Xerxes
  One of my favourite music artists' web site, recently updated with downloadable music. You don't have to pay for it, but you can if you want.

  Instrumental, electronic. Mostly down-tempo I think. Easy to test listen before you choose to download.

• 2009-11-04

  Solar powered water purifier
  Video where the inventor explains how "Solvatten" (Solar water) works.

  Water is warmed to 55degC, which is a benefit when used for cooking food as it saves a lot of firewood or washing dishes, UV light through the plastic destroys microorganisms' DNA in 3-5 hours.

  Now being field tested in Kenya.

• 2009-11-01

  What Stormtrooper Do On Their Day Off
  Photo set.

• 2009-10-30

  Interview with Mikhail Simonov - the inventor of the Sukhoi jet fighters
  Some interesting information, like "T-10 was the prototype of a future Su-27; it first flew on May 20, 1977. But despite all the efforts of the designers and engineers of the Sukhoi Company, it was worse than the American jet."

• 2009-10-27

  Two Eurofighters at low altitude
  Good photo of two RAF Typhoons at Cadiar Pass.

• 2009-10-25

  F/A-18 vs. F-16
  Comparision between them by a test pilot. Interesting is for example the differences in how their flight control system works on page 4.

• 2009-10-25

  Swedish libraries have now started to use the Dewey Decimal Classification system, after 87 years of the Swedish SAB (text in Swedish) system which is based on letters and have more main categories than DDC, but is otherwise similar.

  Only a few of the larger libraries have already converted.

• 2009-10-23

  Warwickslade Cutting: laying the railway
  Very interesting example of modern use of temporary railway track. Lots of photos of it being built.

• 2009-10-21

  Fossils Push Back Earliest Complex Animals 40 Million Years
  Fossil embryos shown to be bilaterally symmetrical by using synchrotron radiation microtomography.

  This is not completely unexpected, but it's a remarkable find anyway.

• 2009-10-20

  Bag Check
  Comic about the logic of some security check rules.

• 2009-10-20

  The Kev Cam
  Videos of paragliders, filmed by a trained vulture.

• 2009-10-14

  Monkeys Fall Into 'Uncanny Valley,' Just Like Humans
  "Monkeys are freaked out by almost-but-not-quite-real depictions of themselves."
  So it's not just a human psychological reaction which is interesting. For now there are only guesses what the evolutionary advantage of it is.

• 2009-10-12

  The story of the Gömböc
  "A Gömböc is a strange thing. It looks like an egg with sharp edges, and when you put it down it starts wriggling and rolling around with an apparent will of its own. Until quite recently, no-one knew whether Gömböcs even existed."

• 2009-10-08

  A fan driven model train
  Large scale, with 45 mm gauge. Lightly built and using a computer cooling fan. Text in Japanese.

• 2009-10-07

  Bird Cam Captures Albatross, Killer Whale Rendezvous
  "Instead of randomly scanning the open ocean for prey, some birds appear to fly alongside killer whales and scavenge for scraps left by the mammalian predators."

• 2009-10-07

  New ring detected around Saturn
  It's faint and diffuse, which is no surprise, but it's also 50 times larger in diameter than any of the other rings. And what's really surprising is that it's in a different plane.

  With the discovery the mystery of Iapetus' one side being much darker than the other, as it passes through the ring and picks up particles. Said particles almost certainly coming from Phoebe.

• 2009-10-06

  Video: Laser Gunship Blowtorches Truck
  Showing the effects on the target in this test of the Airborne Tactical Laser earlier this year.

• 2009-10-06

  Nice video of the Mig-29KUB landing on a Russian carrier
  Also take off. From a Russian news TV programme, so it's in Russian with no captions.

• 2009-10-04

  Supermassive Black Holes Bringing Universe Closer to Death
  "A new calculation of entropy upholds that general result but suggests that the universe is messier than scientists had thought - and slightly further along on its gradual journey to death, two Australian cosmologists conclude."

• 2009-10-03

  The Velocity of Money
  Economics article dealing with supply of money and how fast it moves around.

• 2009-10-03

  The Model Railways Shunting Puzzles Website
  "Layout design and operation providing sustained insterest for small layouts."

• 2009-09-30

  Bridge to Nowhere
  Beautiful autumn photo of abandoned railroad trestle in Alaska.

• 2009-09-29

  When Going Gets Tough, Local Currency Gets Going
  A few places in Britain has started to issue their own money. But it's exchanged for regular British pounds and thus backed by it, which makes me wonder what good it will do. As a reminder to just shop near home?

  Doesn't have to be done that way though. Villagers in Thailand create their own money.

• 2009-09-28

  How to Truck 66 100 ton Antennas to 5000 m Altitude
  Large radio astronomy telescope components built at a more hospitable altitude brought up to the telescope site by a special transporter.

• 2009-09-28

  Very good Saab SK 37E Viggen photos
  Text in Korean. But I think it's general Viggen information and not about the photos specifically.

  The SK 37E was the ECM version, used as an aggressor for training.

• 2009-09-25

  Butterflies Use Antenna GPS to Guide Migration
  Sort of misleading title, but very intersting that the clock which help monarch butterflies navigate is situated in their antennas.

• 2009-09-24

  Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine
  Not quite like the Doomsday Machine mentioned in "Dr Strangelove", but not totally unlike it either. Online since 1985 it's not wholly automatic and interestingly part of the motivation for it is to deter own commanders from launching first strikes.

• 2009-09-21

  Model Railway Scenery Links
  "Use these links to take you to various sites for all the information you should need to create realistic looking scenery."

• 2009-09-20

  The Brennan Gyro-Monorail
  Really far out concept, which also seems to have worked in practice, even if not exactly practical.
  Since it's the War Department which financed the experiments I feel sure the intention was to allow very simple and quick laying of temporary tracks. That is to say, something which was better than horses and carts and that time's primitive lorries, rather than an alternative to normal railways.

• 2009-09-19

  NC-130B: The six engined Herk
  Fitted with two jet engines to provide lots of bleed air for a boundary-layer control system. Didn't improve STOL performance as intended.

• 2009-09-18

  Cavalier Mustang History
  A P-51 conversion conceived as an executive business transport aircraft in 1957. More information.

• 2009-09-17

  LEGO Mindstorms Sudoku Solver
  A robot which doesn't just solve sudoko, it also writes the numbers on the paper.

• 2009-09-17

  A day in the life of Atlanta Airport, June 1956
  Good and interesting photos from the Life photo archives.

• 2009-09-12

  Andersson Aviation History Site
  Some very interesting articles.
  "Artiklar på svenska" means "in Swedish", but it's not translations of the same articles. Of interest not only to Swedes, so if you're interested in aviation history, do try a translation service.

• 2009-09-11

  Göteborg Aero Show 2009
  A photo gallery.

• 2009-09-08

  Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.
  Long article about placebo responses. Interesting that it is getting stronger, but I'm not surprised at the possible reason given in the article, namely that marketing of drugs is getting more powerful. But I'd have thought it was also that drugs were getting better, but according to this, some once good drugs now don't beat placebo as easily any more.

• 2009-09-07

  Solar-Power Research and Dryden
  "Since 1980 AeroVironment, Inc. (founded in 1971 by the ultra-light airplane innovator - Dr. Paul MacCready) has been experimenting with solar-powered aircraft, often in conjunction with NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, California."

• 2009-09-02

  Airshow photos, Roskilde Aug 21-23:rd.

• 2009-09-02

  1922 Stanley Steamer
  Video of a car in Jay Leno's garage. Interesting to see how it is to drive such a car.

• 2009-09-02

  Into the Mushroom Cloud
  "Most pilots would head away from a thermonuclear explosion."
  But not these, as their task was to fly into the cloud and sample it. On returning to base, they had to exit without touching the outside of the contaminated aircraft.

• 2009-09-02

  Oil Rocks
  "An offshore metropolis of semi-abandoned oil extraction platforms in the Caspian Sea."
  Fascinating that what's basically a group of oil platforms and support could grow together.
  Another photo of a larger building in this discussion thread.

• 2009-09-01

  For the Best Stargazing on Earth, Send Robots to Antarctica
  A really good place for telescopes, Ridge A, has been found. But it's not a good place for humans.

  It's not unique in that, already telescopes are often at inconveniently high altitudes so that astronomers work with them remotely. And some work with them remotely from other continents. But that doesn't mean the telescope building itself is completely unmanned.

• 2009-08-31

  Göteborg Aero Show 2009
  Some photos.

• 2009-08-29

  Lost Creek Railroad - Text in Dutch, very good photographs, both of finished layout and under construction, which shows the process very well. Lost Creek is a good example of a really small, but more than a diorama, layout.

• 2009-08-27

  Stealthy Sukhois
  "I asked him if any production aircraft had been modified, and he responded that "about 100" Sukhois had received RCS-reduction mods."

• 2009-08-24

  Arrow of time no longer double-ended
  An explanation for why time has a direction.

  It seems rather obvious, so I think it's actually a good explanation. We'll see if someone comes up with a refutal.

• 2009-08-21

  Walking in Circles
  There's now empirical evidence that people really walk in circles when they do not have reliable cues to their walking direction.

• 2009-08-21

  This week I got the catalog from the large Swedish furniture maker.
  Instead of looking for furniture (which I don't need any new right now), I look through the catalog to look for photographs. It looks like it's full of them, but in acutality since a couple of years ago 25%+ of them are computer renderings.
  A reasonable guess is that coaches people sit on are photographs and product images against a plain white background are renderings; But there's a lot in between.

• 2009-08-20

  Pterosaur Runway Shows How Flying Dinos Landed
  Illustrated with the fossil tracks and stick figure drawing of how the small flying creature landed.

• 2009-08-19

  DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show
  In itself not so surprising, unless you figure in they can do it just by having access to the profile in a database.

• 2009-08-17

  Swedish state railways RC class engines - in Lego
  Of course not exact, but you can easily see what they're supposed to be.

• 2009-08-16

  Review of Noodler's Red-Black ink
  One of my favourite bottled fountain pen inks.

• 2009-08-14

  Early toolmakers were "engineers"
  "We found that as early as 165,000 years ago, but definitely 72,000 years ago, people are doing more than just using fires for cooking, heat, light or protection."

• 2009-08-13

  Small Layout Prototypes
  Good article with examples of locations which can be adapted to model form without very much selection and compression.

• 2009-08-13

  Today's new pen is called Fjäder, meaning feather. It's a lightweight assymetrical ballpoint pen. Mine with a stand.
  Photo without the stand.

• 2009-08-11

  Secret Space Shuttles
  Article about secret and partially secret missions.

• 2009-08-11

  How to put together a Ballograf ballpoint pen
  Rendered video of the parts of an almost-Epoca being assembled in the correct order.

  And just as I was going to photograph mine to show how it's done. It's a really clever mechanism.

• 2009-08-11

  Photos: Shuttleworth military pageant
  Veteran aircraft in the air.

• 2009-08-09

  Photo: Steam train in southern Sweden
  Caption doesn't say, but I think it's a pretty new photo.

• 2009-08-09

  Dala-Järna Airshow 2009
  Photos from an airshow this weekend in Sweden. Text in Finnish.

• 2009-08-08

  Tilt-Shift Video of Swiss Landscape and Trains
  Neat way of putting the focus on the main subject.

• 2009-08-07

  Temporal Anomalies in the Bill & Ted Films: The Excellent Adventure
  A pretty sharp analysis and interesting and entertaining read.

• 2009-08-06

  MTAB Doubleheader
  Unusual combination of northern Sweden iron ore trains with double 2xDm3 and one with Dm3 + Iore.

• 2009-08-06

  Golden Valley Route - A modular Model railroad in HO scale
  Planning and building the modules. Photos and good descriptions.

• 2009-08-04

  Domestic dog origins challenged
  African village dogs have as varied DNA as east Asian dogs.

• 2009-08-03

  The Mig Factory
  Photos of aircraft being built.

• 2009-08-02

  Airshow photos from Hedlanda Aug 1:st.

• 2009-07-29

  F-35 flight simulator video
  Demonstration for journalists. Well described how it handles in VTOL mode.

• 2009-07-29

  Longmoor Military Railway
  British railway which only existed to train military personell in how to build and operate a railway.

• 2009-07-27

  Gripen airshow photos
  From RIAT. First photos I've seen of Gripen burning dumped fuel. (The vent can't be controlled manually, I think.)

• 2009-07-23

  Tågregistret
  Photos of Swedish locomotives and motor units the latest two decades. The goal is to have one photo of every individual. Text in Swedish, very brief information about the photos.

• 2009-07-17

  Have Drill, Have Doughnut, the MiG Projects of Area 51 and Groom Lake
  "In the late 1960's, the U.S. Navy, Air Force, and a number of U.S. federal agencies undertook a program at Groom Lake to evaluate the MiG-17 to help fight the Vietnam War during a period of anti-Vietnam War protests and the North Vietnamese MiG-17s and MiG-21s having a kill rate against the U.S. air assets was 9:1."

• 2009-07-13

  Richard Feynman explains how a train stays on the tracks
  Not the flanges, but we already knew that, didn't we?

• 2009-07-12

  Open a Banana Like a Monkey
  "I'm posting this video in the hopes that it will help other people discover the joys of peeling a banana. I had never known about this method until recently."

• 2009-07-12

  World's First Self-Irrigating Desert Plant Discovered
  "Ecologists had been puzzling over the desert rhubarb for years: Instead of the tiny, spiky leaves found on most desert plants, this rare rhubarb boasts lush green leaves up to a meter wide."

• 2009-07-12

  Hybrid marking instrument and writing ink composition
  Interesting patent. Long and technical read.

• 2009-07-12

  Wagonways
  About the evolution of what became our normal railway track.

• 2009-07-12

  Swedish passenger trains have become better at keeping times this year. The simple reason seems to be that there's less freight to move so the tracks aren't as crowded.

• 2009-07-12

  I've been trying out the Uni Kuru Toga mechanical pencil with automatically rotating lead for some days.

• 2009-07-10

  I've started writing about which ballpoint refills fit in what pens.

• 2009-07-08

  The Ace in the Hole
  Job interview at a company where the hiring manager thinks he has a really good idea.

• 2009-07-08

  If you read this blog, you may have gotten the impression I was starting with narrow gauge in 0. I had that impression too, but I've realised I can't reasonably start with another scale, which of course was intended as sort of a compromise.

  I'll keep on in 1:87 and 1:22.5, but in slightly different directions.

• 2009-07-07

  James May's Top Toys: The Train Set
  10 min video about model railroading. A bit about its history in Britain, a bit about operating versus collecting. And the quote: "They never grow up".

• 2009-07-07

  Thrust SSC sonic boom video
  The so far fastest land vehicle. Note that the "boom" is not when the car breaks the sound barrier, it's done that quite a bit before. Reason behind a supersonic boom is that noise generated over a period of time reaches you simultaneously, so everyone standing by the track will hear a boom, but at different times and locations.

  In aircraft (OK, cars too, but supersonic cars are really rare) you can produce a boom by flying in a inward spiral at a bit less than the speed of sound and a super boom if you do it supersonically.

• 2009-07-07

  Analyst: US loses in IAI-Gripen radar story
  More opinions on what it might mean that a certain radar won't be offered with Gripen to India.

• 2009-07-07

  A Zoo in Vienna
  Which for a limited time does not look like zoos usually do. The animals share their environment with simulated ecological problems as an art installation, like a hazardous waste drum among the fish.

• 2009-07-06

  World's largest bird house
  Photo, from the side, so not very revealing.

  It's 11 m high, built of steel and wood weighing 4000kg.

  Installed next to a natural guillemot nesting place on Stora Karlsö as part of a research project, to make it easier and safer to study the birds "at home".

  400 nests and passages inside for people, with windows into the nests.

• 2009-07-06

  Plants put limit on ice ages
  "Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been remarkably stable over the last 20 or 25 million years despite other changes in the environment. We can look to land plants as the primary buffering agent that's held CO2 in such a narrow range during this time."

• 2009-07-05

  Dornier Do-X in Lego
  Built in minifig scale. Looks as much like the real aircraft I imagine is possible in Lego.

• 2009-07-05

  Daisy Beach Railroad
  "A Garden Railway of a Different Colour".

  Photos, history, how to build and make things.

• 2009-07-04

  Diema DL 6
  Building a small locomotive in 1:13.3 scale.

  Text in German.

• 2009-07-04

  Ant mega-colony takes over world
  I knew about the super colonies, but had no idea ants from different continents could behave as if they belongend to the same colony.

• 2009-07-04

  Noisy Lead - Lead Composition
  Pencil sound, so it's about graphite, not real lead.

  Pencil lead used to be called "plumbago", which means "like lead".

• 2009-07-03

  AeroVironment flapping-wing nano-UAV
  Flies sort of like a colibri.

• 2009-07-03

  Giant Model Railroad Is an Analog SimCity
  Well, not literally, but the writer apparently finds some similarities when visiting Walnut Creek Model Railroad Society.

• 2009-07-03

  Narrow Escape
  "One man's approach to building and maintaining his 7/8" scale narrow gauge railways in the garden."

• 2009-07-02

  Arizona Gravel Company
  A small 1:35 scale layout.

• 2009-07-02

  The Extiction Oscillator
  Some researchers have found a 62-million year cycle in biodiversity, as in mass extictions the appearance of lots of new species.

  It's tied to our solar system's movement through the galactic plane, to one side of it. Very likely there are more cosmic radiation on that side. Article reasons and doesn't say that's the simple explanation though.

• 2009-06-30

  The Astounding Curta Mechanical Calculator
  Good demonstration which explains in general both how to use it and how it works.

• 2009-06-30

  First 'anti-stab' knife to go on sale in Britain
  Kitchen knife with not only a rounded dull point, but also kind of a notch to make it snag.

  As Britain has very strict anti-knife laws, I'm not surprised to see it sold there first.

• 2009-06-29

  New livery for Czech railways
  Light and dark blue and white. Text in this document in Czech, but the photos show the new colours on some rolling stock.

  They also use the same colours on their web site.

• 2009-06-28

  Soyuz emergency landing zones - the "Ugol Pasadki" story
  Where they were and how it was found out.

• 2009-06-28

  15 Cool High School, College and University Building Designs
  Mostly real buildings, but a few proposals too.

• 2009-06-27

  Super Puma investigation reveals major survivor location snags
  It turns out that emergency locator beacons have a power save/anti confusion feature which if more than one are close together will turn one into a master and put the others in standby. With the assumption it doesn't matter which one becomes master.

• 2009-06-26

  'Misty caverns' on Enceladus moon
  An artist's impression of a sunset on Enceladus. Nasa's Cassini spacecraft has obtained strong evidence that Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus retains liquid water.

• 2009-06-24

  LocoMotives: Steamin' Hot Prototype & Concept Trains
  Real trains, prototypes, concepts and visions from the past of what their future would be like.

• 2009-06-23

  Daneville photo gallery
  Layout of Pelle K. Søeborg. Very good photos and modelling.

• 2009-06-22

  Ee 922 001
  Swiss modern electric shunting locomotive.

• 2009-06-22

  Vietnam Gallery
  Mainly photos of locomotives.

• 2009-06-21

  VVVF2100's Youtube channel
  Japanese railway videos. Lately several cab movies.

• 2009-06-20

  Salekhard-Igarka Railway
  Abandoned and dismantled railway in northern Siberia.

• 2009-06-18

  Wings that waggle could cut emissions
  "This has come as a bit of a surprise to all of us in the aerodynamics community. It was discovered, essentially, by waggling a piece of wing from side to side in a wind tunnel."

• 2009-06-18

  Rats play odds in gambling task
  It's not new that rats can be better at "playing games" than humans. The interesting thing here is that more serotonin makes them better att judging odds and more dopamin worse. Which seems to be the same as in humans.

• 2009-06-05

  Altruism's Bloody Roots
  "By favoring acts of battlefield selflessness, Stone Age warfare might have accelerated the development of altruism."

  So the argument is that groups with altruistic individuals are better at winning fights. Makes a bit of sense in the meaning that a soldier who already has children but dies in battle providedes for a better future for his children than if the tribe lost the battle -- as in being more likely to have grandchildren than otherwise.

• 2009-06-05

  The Air Force Pimps Its Rides
  Two ... "upgraded" cars used as recruiting aids.

  I'm not too hot on the exterior, but I'd sure like some of the interior details in a car for me.

• 2009-06-05

  Ian's Gn15 pages
  Mainly a look back at past Gn15 layouts and rolling stock.

• 2009-06-03

  Magnetic Bullets, 'Liquid Solids': Door-Blasting Goes High Tech
  New technologies for breaking doors open.

• 2009-06-03

  Two trains, four steam engines, Sweden May 31:st 2009
  Two trains running in parallel between Göteborg and Halmstad as a special event.

  Good photos.

  A video of the same event, both trains running through a tunnel.

• 2009-06-02

  Weathering of a Shay
  Text in Swedish, but good pictures.

• 2009-06-02

  How To Write Unmaintainable Code
  Funny. And perhaps also instructive.

• 2009-05-29

  The Tramways of Yucatán
  "Yucatán state had approximately 4,500 km of tramway track, more than all the other Mexican states combined. It was a colossal network, unequalled by any other in the world."

  Good overview with text and photos.

• 2009-05-26

  Coaling tower built of Lego bricks
  Looks very good.

• 2009-05-25

  X to F: F-35 Lightning II And Its Predecessors
  A side-by-side comparison of the X-35 Joint Strike Fighter prototype with the F-35 Lightning II production aircraft.

• 2009-05-23

  Gn15 Adaption of KÖF II
  Interpretation of what it would might look like if built for 381 mm gauge.

  Text both in German and English.

• 2009-05-21

  Viggen Birdstrike Scene from Movie
  Starts with nicely filmed low altitude air to air combat training. Then it's emergency procedures and stuff in Swedish, but at around 5:30 you can see the approach and landing on a road strip.

• 2009-05-20

  Gratzer's spiroids in flight
  Not a new invention, but a first release of a video of these winglets in flight.

  Looks rather like a good idea if you visualise how the air flows. But if it's that good and there're no problems they should have been installed on more aircraft I think.

• 2009-05-20

  Library of Congress Aviation in Palestine Early 20thC
  Nice photo collection.

• 2009-05-20

  Højblokka / puls
  "With this project we looked for a reinterpretation of the urban block typology in combination with vertical multiplication and urban density. The site is situated next to Oslo Central Station and had been formerly occupied by the postal headquarters."

  Architecture proposal which didn't win. But still very interesting ideas.

• 2009-05-20

  9 Ways to play with your minimal layout
  "Carl Arendt presented this clinic at the March 2009 Jamboree of the National Model Railroad Association Mid-Central Region/Division 2, in Pittsburgh USA. Its purpose was to acquaint the audience with some ways to enjoy running trains on minimum space layouts, starting with the simplest ideas and building up to some complex operating methods."

• 2009-05-18

  Streetcar in sunset
  Stockholm, near S:t Essingen stop.

• 2009-05-18

  Figoni & Falaschi
  "Figoni's automobile designs were flamboyant, graceful and gorgeous, carefully sculpted with the eye of an artist with an inherent appreciation for air flow."

• 2009-05-18

  Human noses too cold for bird flu
  "An Imperial College London recreation of the nose's environment found that at 32 degrees Celsius, avian flu viruses lose function and cannot spread."

• 2009-05-17

  Railcare T68 diesel loco at Kiruna
  It's a Vossloh Euro4000 freight loco.

  A bit more information about the type.

• 2009-05-15

  Attacking the Food Supply
  Overview of confirmed cases of malicious food contamination since 1950.

• 2009-05-15

  Eight photos of trains in the Stockholm area
  Photos from different places.

• 2009-05-15

  IKEA Turns Japanese Monorail into Showroom
  Unusual patterns and colours for a train interior.

• 2009-05-15

  Rules for Time Travelers
  "But time travel isn't magic; it may or may not be allowed by the laws of physics - we don't know them well enough to be sure - but we do know enough to say that if time travel were possible, certain rules would have to be obeyed."

• 2009-05-13

  Old Photos of Taiwan Railways
  Many different kinds of railways.

• 2009-05-10

  Marshalling in Gothenburg
  Freight switching in Sweden. A bit too much wind noise, but otherwise the video is good with a bit of action.

  Features a T43 diesel loco.

• 2009-05-10

  Photos from museum railway at Mariefred
  May 1:st this year. First day with traffic.

• 2009-05-09

  Wings of Sweden
  Video of the history of Swedish military aviation in five parts.

  Part 2, 3, 4, 5.

• 2009-05-08

  U.S. Military Training Gliders
  Overview of the types which have been used.

• 2009-05-07

  Bridge with really narrow loading gauge
  No, I don't think it's used for trains. It's an interesting contrast to this bridge's extremely wide loading gauge.

• 2009-05-06

  Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman, No. 1
  36 page issue of comic book.

• 2009-05-05

  The First 30 Years of Aviation in Afghanistan
  Very good historical article. Part 2.

• 2009-05-05

  Pilatus Porter History
  "On May 4, 2009 it's 50 years ago since the maiden flight of the Pilatus PC-6 Porter. A remarkable milestone considering that the PC-6 is still in production."

• 2009-05-05

  It's not a tiltrotor ... what is it?
  Bell's candidate for replacing both the AH-64 and UH-60 with an all-new configuration.

• 2009-05-04

  Citroën Prototypes and Concept Cars
  Many interesting examples from a maker which haven't always been very conventional even when it comes to production cars.

• 2009-05-04

  Réseaux Ferroviaires Réunis 1/87e H0e/H0n3/H0n2.5/HO
  Beautiful modelling and interesting designs. Text in French.

• 2009-05-03

  The Stockholm Syndrome
  "Wyatt Cenac travels to Sweden to wake them up from their socialist nightmare."

• 2009-05-03

  The Swedish National Bank's foreign currency reserve consists of 50% Euro, 20% US dollars, 10% Norwegian kroner, 10% British pounds, 5% Canadian dollars and 5% Australian dollars. (The Norwegian indirectly via currency derivates and not as the other directly as mostly bonds.)

  In addition there are 125 tons of gold, which would be about another 10%. (Maybe a bit more, used to be 185 tons of which 60 tons are being sold off gradually.)

• 2009-05-02

  Swedish reconnaissance aviation transformation during the 1950s
  Text in Swedish, but Google gives mostly useful translation. It sometimes misses that "spaning" = reconnaissance and thinks (flyg)"fält" = (air)"field" = "box".

• 2009-05-02

  2 x 2 x Hg2
  Photos of double headed Swedish centre cab electric locomotives class Hg2.

• 2009-05-02

  Time does not exist. Clocks exist.
  Extraordinary clocks and watches.

  Well, special designs anyway. Photos, no technical details.

• 2009-05-02

  Abandoned stations: City Hall
  Very unusual subway station in New York. Situated on a sharp turning loop, intended as a showpiece station, was for entering passengers only.

• 2009-05-01

  Parris-Dunn Training Rifle
  A not a very accurate replica of the 1903 Springfield Rifle.

  Ordered in pretty large numbers by the US Army and US Navy in 1942.

• 2009-04-29

  The 6000:th Boeing 737
  Photo only.

  Delivered to ILFC/Norwegian Air Shuttle on April 16:th.

• 2009-04-28

  Summer photos of ULJ 2008
  Museum railway east of Uppsala.

  Large good photos.

• 2009-04-28

  Riding Car modelling in Gnine
  N scale loco as large model.

• 2009-04-27

  "TIN-PLATE"-Feldbahn in Gn15
  Small narrow gauge built on Billerbahn chassis.

• 2009-04-26

  A new idea for Baghdad security: anti-terrorist trees
  "The principle is simple: plant a row of thorny trees and bushes 80 centimetres (32 inches) apart and weave the branches together. As the plants grow they form a dense and razor-sharp hedge that within three years can reach a height of six metres (20 feet)."

  Some already are in service. But no pictures of what such a barrier looks like.

• 2009-04-25

  Keeping track of trains
  A world wide map of railway networks.

• 2009-04-25

  East Rail
  A representation of the Miami industrial rail scene.

  Good looking layout which isn't very large, well described in text and photos.

• 2009-04-23

  Ants' home search habit uncovered
  According to this study, they're better at finding good nests than many animals (including us) who often make irrational decisions are at finding homes.

• 2009-04-22

  TGOJ TMZ from Hobbytrade
  H0 engine which is touched up and weathered.

• 2009-04-22

  Pictures of General Atomics Predator C
  But not a whole lot of technical details about the jet powered UAV.

  Does not look very similar to earlier Predator models.

• 2009-04-22

  Grand Canal of China
  Very old and impressively long canal.

• 2009-04-21

  Why Minds Are Not Computers
  Long article.

• 2009-04-19

  Strangely decorated Stockholm metro car
  And yes, this is actually realised.

  It's by and for the Swedish national radio, who has installed a number of boxes in it where you can listen to documentaries (you have to have your own earphones to plug in).

• 2009-04-19

  Color Vision: How Our Eyes Reflect Primate Evolution
  Very interesting article.

  I had no idea some in some primate species only some have trichromatic vision. Nor that giving it to mice makes them able to distinguish colours they usually can't.

• 2009-04-19

  Jörgen Edgar's website
  Large collection of hand-made models of small display locomotives and multiple units.

• 2009-04-19

  I've previously written about how the ferret Carina taught herself to roll over as a generalised indication she wanted something and how Rasmus and Dorrit learned from her.

  Now Kimber, who really is very smart but usually don't show it, has also done so, at least for things to eat.

  I was giving them all vitamins and Regnar didn't want his. But Kimber did and rolled over even though I hadn't told any of them to do so.

• 2009-04-18

  Historic Railway Chugs Along On Biodiesel
  Mount Washington Cog Railway has rebuilt one of its steam locomotives into a diesel locomotive.

• 2009-04-17

  Early Monorails
  "Why use two tracks when you can have only one, or no track at all (magnetic "levitation")?"

• 2009-04-16

  Airbus A319-115 CJ D-AVWB
  In a very beautiful and a bit unusual but not extreme livery.

• 2009-04-15

  Ants inhabit 'world without sex'
  Female only species of ant discovered.

• 2009-04-15

  JAS 37 Viggen II
  This was a back-up concept in case Gripen would have been cancelled. Composite wings, all moving canard, fly by wire with regular hydraulic as fall back, P&W F100 engine and radar and EW which was being developed for Gripen.

  Text in Swedish, and it's in a thread about fantasy Drakens.

• 2009-04-13

  Reality surpasses imagination
  This kind of consist would look unrealistic on a layout.

• 2009-04-13

  Can't use Superglue? Try this.
  Haven't yet tried this myself, yet, but using PVA to glue resin would certainly make things easier for me.

• 2009-04-12

  Photo: Yokohama in 1859
  Oldest known photograph of the port town.

• 2009-04-12

  Battleship Yamato in Lego, in 1:40 scale
  Really large, has taken a long time to build.

  Progress photos showing the internal construction.

• 2009-04-12

  Paco House
  A complete home in 3x3x3 meters.

  At first appears to be some kind of design exercise, but it seems to be a real product. Haven't found out what materials it's made of yet.

• 2009-04-10

  Canada's Arctic Sky Spies: The Director's Cut
  About RCAF operations during the cold war.

• 2009-04-10

  The Benz Patent Motor Car
  "Carl Benz introduced the Patent Motor Car in 1886 and subsequently built several units of this three-wheeler, about 25 vehicles in total."

• 2009-04-09

  Photos from the tramway museum in Malmköping
  Photos of running streetcars last summer. Text, but not a lot of it, in Swedish.

  They're running on the tracks of old regular railroad, but with new turnouts and layouts at the stops.

• 2009-04-09

  Titan's Topsy Turvy Topography
  It turns out Titan is more non-spherical than expected. And mountains are often lower than the mean elevations.

• 2009-04-09

  Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated By Spies
  "Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials."

• 2009-04-07

  Sollefteå Modelljärnvägsklubb
  Photos from a visit to a Swedish model railroad club. Text in Swedish, but not much of it.

• 2009-04-07

  US Senate Monorail
  "The shortest and most exclusive railway in the world."

  Used for underground people transport between two buildings 1912-61.

• 2009-04-06

  6,000 Rare, Large River Dolphins Found in Bangladesh
  "The group is the largest ever found—previously, scattered groups of only about a hundred Irrawaddy dolphins each had been found throughout the dolphin's Southeast Asian habitat, which stretches from the mouths of rivers feeding the Bay of Bengal across open waters to Indonesia."

• 2009-04-06

  Volcano eruption with lightning - images
  Chaiten erupting, something which can trigger lightnings in the dust cloud.

• 2009-04-05

  Future aviation concepts
  Artists' impressions of ideas about future aviation.

• 2009-04-05

  Narrow Buildings in Japan and Around the World
  Examples of extreme architecture.

• 2009-04-04

  Indian Railways NDM-5 803 at Sumaoli, Madhya Pradesh, India
  Recent photo of two foot gauge railway packed with passenger inside and outside.

• 2009-04-03

  Contact lens LED array
  And another article.

  Sounds nice, doesn't it? But even disregarding how to power it, obscuring vision with electronics and focusing issues I don't think it is.

  Since it sits on the eye, it will follow the eye's movements which means that whatever it displays will jerk around a lot unless it also has some micro gyros (or something spectacles-frames looking thing doing it optically) to keep track of orientation. Add to that that we have a very narrow field of view where we can read normal size text, which means either just about half a dozen characters (more like three maximum) exactly where we look or a few huge characters/symbols in the peripheral field. In the last case, focusing isn't much of an issue.

  I wouldn't mind spectacles with some kind of display; In that case what is displayed could be fixed relative to your head (sort of like bi-focals) or fixed in azimuth relative to the spectacles but relative to the horizon vertically when that's more fitting so you can look up 45 degrees and see the clock or time table. I'm sure that would be a good enough compass display for orienteering too and better than having a line displayed where you're going to run.

• 2009-04-02

  The godwit sets record for non-stop flight
  The longest documented flight a bird has made is 11680 km, from Alaska to New Zealand in eight days without grounding.

• 2009-04-01

  Earthrise movie
  From the lunar probe Kaguya.

• 2009-04-01

  Beijing, Hebei in row over river water use
  A five year old article. Doesn't seem to have been resolved.

  The lack of water in northern China is terrible. For example, the Yellow River, which is not a small one but very large, did not reach the ocean for 250 days in 1998.

• 2009-04-01

  The (WU)ltimate 33-Part Guide to Abandoned Places
  Another word for abandoned building is "ruin". Most of these featured here are not as old as what we usually think of as ruins. Usually interesting.

• 2009-04-01

  The preliminary figures for March is that 11 persons were killed in traffic accidents in Sweden. Lowest monthly figure since 1940. And of course it has partly economic reasons: People drive a bit less.

• 2009-04-01

  Now we know that it's not OK in Sweden to use gender biased lotteries to select candidates for university education.

  The background is that more women than men seek to become veterinaries. The institute for some reason wanted a more even gender distribution and thus for those one group with perfect grades weighted the lottery in favour of men; To the degree that men were 38 times more likely to get in which is why a group of women sued and this week the court decided.

  The "some reason" is a bit vague, but possible reasons are they think women don't want all different kinds of veterinary work and they are not as strong as men.

• 2009-03-29

  NSB El 18 in March weather
  Photographed different days at the same location.

• 2009-03-29

  The Greenbird - the fastest wind powered vehicle on Earth
  Just set a record of 202.9 km/h as a land speed record.

• 2009-03-29

  Carbon Motors E7 images
  It's billed as the first purpose made police car.

  It's been in development for some time now, as this early article shows, and won't be in service until 2012.

  Will be interesting to see how it's received on the market, because it sure sounds like a good idea.

• 2009-03-29

  Air Buoy Marks Location of Field
  A really strange idea from 1930 for landing an aircraft safely when it's cloudy and you cannot see the airfield.

  I don't even think it was a good idea at the time.

• 2009-03-28

  Steam Car Club
  Lots of photos of and information about steam powered vehicles, historical and a few modern.

• 2009-03-28

  The best photographic accessory I bought in 2008 was probably the second external flash unit. Not that I use flash a lot, so it can't have improved a lot of my photos, but for the ones I use flash the improvement has been great compared to just a single.

  There are a lot of settings, which of course complicates things, but it's worth it to learn to use them and select a few "standard" settings for different situations.

• 2009-03-27

  Swedish 50-öre coin to be abolished in 2010
  The lowest value coin in circulation will be withdrawn. Its value is about 0.045 Euro or 6 US cent.

  Detailed description of the coin.

• 2009-03-27

  X-51A: Jury-rigged for hypersonic success
  Has lots of components from existing systems for reliability reasons. If something goes wrong, it has to be the engine which is being developed, not any other system. There are also large margins in its design.

• 2009-03-26

  Rinspeed Concept Cars
  Interesting cars with usually radical designs, some more practical, some more radical. None intended to be put into production.

  Well described in text and with photos.

• 2009-03-26

  Iterative humour isn't the same as lack of imagination.

• 2009-03-26

  "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black."

  Attributed to Henry Ford in 1909. But you couldn't get a black Model T until 1913, before that they were red, green or gray even if four of the five variants only came in one of the colours. And the during its two last production years black was only available as a special order.

  But for 13 out of 21 years there was indeed only a choice of black.

• 2009-03-25

  Streetcar Models
  Some photos of models in 1:4 scale.

• 2009-03-25

  What we can learn from spaghetti sauce
  A talk (video) by Malcolm Gladwell about choice, that you can't find out what people want by asking them and why it's not a good idea (for a food company) to try to find out the single best spaghetti sauce. Also about this result was arrived at, when market research produced seemingly unusable data.

• 2009-03-25

  Porsche 911T 1970 police car
  Used by the Swedish police in southern Sweden for a few years. There were only one and it was specially bought for use on the then rather new motorway.

  (The "right arrow" icon take you to full size images.)

• 2009-03-25

  Retro-Futurismus: Hans und Botho von Römer
  Technological visions of the future, from the 1940s.

• 2009-03-24

  The Swedish National Heritage Board's photostream
  Early Swedish photographs. Both of the interesting and the beautiful kind.

• 2009-03-23

  Two trains in Morjärv
  Swedish winter photos.

  To the left two class Tb, which are built to also be snow plows, but used to pull works trains otherwise. To the left a T66 with a container train.

• 2009-03-23

  Extreme Sheep Herding
  Getting sheep to move in formations, making patterns. At night with lights on them.

  Unexpectedly very funny.

• 2009-03-22

  The Stamping Ground Gn15 layout
  Small indoor layout in large scale. Owner also has an outdoor railway in the same scale.

• 2009-03-22

  Dan Ariely: Why we think it's OK to cheat and steal (sometimes)
  A talk (video) about how to remove bandages which hurt, what influences how much we cheat and why intuitions should be tested.

• 2009-03-22

  USS Katahdin
  A US Navy ship built in the 1890's, which had as its only effective weapon a ram. Most ships with rams in the 1800's had it as sort of a backup.

  More reading, but no more photos.

• 2009-03-22

  The Winans Cigar Ships
  A radically different hull shape from what was common in 1850-70, these ships had a mostly submersed very streamlined hull.

  More about one of them, the yacht Ross Winans, photos of a model and contemporary images and drawings.

• 2009-03-21

  Helicopter to recover first stages of Saturn rockets. In flight.
  Empty mass: 200 tons.
  Payload: 250 tons.
  Rotor diameter: 120 m.

• 2009-03-21

  Rocket Scientists Shoot Down Mosquitoes With Lasers
  "We'd be delighted if we destabilize the human-mosquito balance of power," says Jordin Kare, an astrophysicist who once worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the birthplace of some of the deadliest weapons known to man.

• 2009-03-21

  Finches choose sex of offspring
  Female Gouldian finches have a different sex ratio of its chicks depending on the colouring of the male. It also works that way if the males are re-coloured by researches.

• 2009-03-21

  Greener Lights?
  A blog about the EU decision to phase out incandescent bulbs, a growing number of organisations and the wisdom and consequences of this decision.

• 2009-03-21

  Can you have a watch with just one hand? The Defakto Eins only has an hour hand, and I think it looks good.

  I'm almost tempted to buy one. But what stops me is that it's maybe too hard to tell the time with it.

  Now you're thinking that that's just the point of it. But I don't mean you can't tell the time exactly: I mean the 12 o'clock index isn't clearly different. That's OK with wall clocks. In this case, maybe the name and symbol are enough to give a verticality sense, but I'm unsure until I see one in real life.

• 2009-03-20

  10 aircraft, one engine
  Video showing the towing of nine gliders by a single aircraft.

• 2009-03-20

  Messerschmitt Me 262, training film from 1944
  46 minutes of technical details, cockpit procedures, how to fly it, animated schematics of its (particularily the engines) internal workings and footage of aircraft flying.

• 2009-03-20

  USB finger, more details
  Brief description about what you can put inside a prosthetic finger.

• 2009-03-20

  Säynätsalo Town Hall
  An architecturally interesting building, designed by Alvar Aalto.

  Further photos, background and drawings, more reading and yet more reading, with some detail photos.

• 2009-03-20

  Queen of the Road: The Citroën Traction Avant
  "Founded by an inveterate gambler, Citroën developed a reputation for bold engineering that beggared almost every other automaker in the world, building cars that were decades ahead of their time. Let's look at the first great Citroën, the car known in France as "La Reine de la Route" (queen of the road): the legendary Traction Avant."

  About a very good looking car which was advanced for its time.

• 2009-03-20

  In 2008 Iceland was the European country with the highest birthrate, 2.14 children per woman.

  I think 2.1 is the usual value given to just keep population constant.

• 2009-03-19

  Operating System Interface Design Between 1981-2009
  Lots of screenshots, not so much about design philosphy.

• 2009-03-19

  The Sizzling Sound of Music
  "Are the sounds of MP3s the music we like to hear most?"

  At least some people prefer it to CD quality music. In this study, it's students, who perhaps are used to a certain sound.

• 2009-03-19

  The Contemporary Art of Commercial Camouflage
  "One of the most amazing results of this endeavor: it is remarkably possible to hide oneself in plain view in the middle of a well-lit commercial interior space, despite the ubiquitous cameras, customers and employees roaming about the place."

  Accomplished by dressing up in cardboard boxes and the like.

• 2009-03-18

  The Independent Guide To The Lebanese Air Force
  About a not very well known air force, both current and historical information and photos.

• 2009-03-18

  During February 2009, there were sixteen people killed in traffic accidents in Sweden.

  That's the lowest figure for one month since before 1950.

• 2009-03-15

  Three generations of commuter trains used around Stockolm
  In the photo, left to right: X1 from 1967, X10 from 1982 and X60 from 2005.

• 2009-03-14

  Macaques floss teeth
  Video of monkeys who have taught themselves to floss their teeth after eating crab meat.

• 2009-03-14

  Ffestiniog & Welsh Highland Railways
  Photography by Roger Dimmick.

• 2009-03-14

  Summary of the book "Mountain Hangars"
  16 interesting pages PDF summing the book "Mountain Hangars
  The Royal Swedish Air Force mountain hangars, concrete hangars and mountain repair sites.

• 2009-03-13

  Cord L-29 images
  The first US production automobile with front wheel drive.

  More reading.

• 2009-03-11

  Train trip in Vietnam
  Lots of photos. Captions, but not much text, in Swedish.

• 2009-03-11

  Monkey mums bow to pester power
  "A study of rhesus macaques revealed that females were more likely to feed their bawling babies if irritated bystanders lurked nearby."

• 2009-03-10

  Indian police enrol rat recruits
  In order to keep mice away from documents they'd otherwise destroy. The idea to use animals to control animals isn't unusual, but I'd think it would be more natural to use cats or ferrets.

• 2009-03-07

  The Legendary Zero
  A current pilot's very detailed account of its design. Most interesting, as it explains about things I've never read about before.

• 2009-03-07

  Kuala Lumpor Monorail photos
  The captions are part of the images and in Swedish, so it's not practical to use a translation service. But they're brief and the images good.

• 2009-03-06

  FEC 102 Sunday Evening in Hobe Sound
  Freight train, or rather mostly its locomotives, filmed from a car pacing the train on a road next to the tracks. You don't often see trains filmed this way.

• 2009-03-06

  General Electric ES44ACI for Kazakhstan
  Photo of the first locomotive of the type which was recently delivered.

• 2009-03-05

  A painting instruction from Great Central Railway to North British Locomotive Co from April 1905, which I just can't resist sharing with you.

• 2009-03-05

  Early Canid Domestication: The Farm Fox Experiment
  About how foxes in a rather short time can be bred to accept humans.

• 2009-03-04

  Sliding house
  Interesting house with sliding opaque walls, the core transparent like a hothouse. Video.

• 2009-03-02

  Cassini Maps Global Pattern of Titan's Dunes
  "Titan's rippled dunes are generally oriented east-west. Surprisingly, their orientation and characteristics indicate that near the surface, Titan's winds blow toward the east instead of toward the west."

• 2009-03-01

  Laxå Ö
  Photos from a location in Sweden, Feb 28:th 2009.

• 2009-03-01

  The car cemetery
  "Out in the middle of nowhere, on a swamp out in the forest is the amazing scrap yard of Kyrkö, which is somewhat like a cult place for car enthusiasts of the old school. Between trees, partially overgrown or sunken down in the swamp, hundreds of more or less decomposed car wrecks, mainly from the 1950's and 60's, are scattered around."

• 2009-02-28

  FREMO Regionaltreffen in Bad Oeyenhausen
  Photos from a modular meeting.

  Layouts in different scales and different prototypes.

• 2009-02-28

  Deep-sea fish with tubular eyes and transparent head
  "Most existing descriptions and illustrations of this fish do not show its fluid-filled shield, probably because this fragile structure was destroyed when the fish were brought up from the deep in nets."

• 2009-02-28

  Yosemite Short Line
  Group built sectional generic 30" gauge railroad, based on the several 30" gauge railroads in California.

• 2009-02-27

  0n30
  Photos of a beautiful layout.

• 2009-02-27

  Swedish winter on a layout
  Some of the rolling stock really doesn't belong in that part of the country, though.

• 2009-02-27

  Narrow Gauge Operations in Colombia Fenoco
  Photos of relatively large and modern 3 ft gauge rolling stock.

• 2009-02-27

  Mike Rowe Tramway Museum
  Described as a micro-layout, but I think it's a bit larger than that. Anyway, it's well designed and can operate automatically.

• 2009-02-27

  Earliest human footprints found
  1.5 million year prints made by a Home erectus, which shows they walked much like we do.

• 2009-02-26

  CNC lathe pencil sharpener
  Video of a most high tech way of getting a point on your pencils.

• 2009-02-26

  The Rio Grande Southern
  A garden railroad.

• 2009-02-26

  Narrow Gauge Southwest 2009
  photos
  Model railway event held in Shepton Mallet.

• 2009-02-26

  Today I got to try out a Pelikan Ductus fountain pen.

  Really nice, good heft, black with gold trim.

  Nib felt, but doesn't look, like a typical Pelikan nib, but its width was more like a B even though it was marked M.

• 2009-02-23

  Traindriving Leksboda-Leksand
  Cab video, Swedish winter.

• 2009-02-23

  Siftables, the toy blocks that think
  "MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables -- cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands."

• 2009-02-23

  Die Feldbahnsinnigen
  Large layout, 1:22.5, 600 mm and 750 mm prototype.

• 2009-02-23

  Hudson Point & Hawthorne Railroad
  Well described well made layout.

• 2009-02-23

  8 Awesome Cars They Won't Let You Buy
  Interesting or weird concept cars.

• 2009-02-23

  Ninove Terminus
  Small tram terminus in Nm, narrow gauge in 1:160.

  Very detailed.

• 2009-02-23

  Long after the fact, I've now made a web page for my hiking vacation in Andorra last summer.

• 2009-02-22

  Classic Airplanes
  Fine artwork of many different types of aircraft, but no modern ones. Both well known and some less well known types.

  Also a lot written about many of them, but usually in Japanese, sometimes in English.

• 2009-02-22

  Since my H0 layout has been dismantled for some time now, now I've decided to build a new, smaller one. It's going to be in scale 0 on 16.5 mm track.

  I want a shelf layout with some scenery, but focus should be on operation.

• 2009-02-22

  Service Train for Tateyama Sabo Work
  It's a Japanese service railway for erosion control work in an area which is otherwise hard to access.

  Background and a some photos.

• 2009-02-22

  Five Most Evil Robots Ever Invented
  Perhaps not exactly, but it's five examples of robots which were actually built. Or maybe not, I'm still not sure if the last one is real or a joke.

• 2009-02-21

  The Bona Vista Railroad
  Good layout with fine scenery. Also construction history photos.

• 2009-02-21

  Libraries in the metro has now become a reality in Stockholm. Well, rather more like small annexes.

  The first was opened yesterday and two more will open soon.

• 2009-02-20

  Photos from Ängelholms aviation museum
  Located at a former Swedish air force base.

• 2009-02-19

  Hunslet Steam Co.
  They're back in the business of building steam locomotives. I didn't think there was enough demand for that to be a viable product, so surprised me.

• 2009-02-19

  Saudi Arabia appoints first woman minister
  Of course a mile stone, but also just a part of a much larger change withing government, where changes themselves are infrequent.

  She has been educated in USA, which also may be significant.

• 2009-02-18

  Keddie Terminal
  Beautiful N scale layout. Text is in Swedish, "nästa" means "next" for more photos.

• 2009-02-18

  I wonder how come two submarines (Vanguard and Le Triomphant), SSBNs, which has no interest in keeping track of each other, just stay hidden, come to collide.

  I'm reminded of the midair collision between a C-141 and Tu-154 over the South Atlantic in 1997. Also a big space, but they were going to and from the same waypoint and airport, unfortunately at the same altitude.

  That the two subs were at the same depth isn't surprising as they try to find the best layer to keep hidden in. Could it perhaps be that they both kept accurate courses between "waypoints", like an even lat/long position, instead of just randomly cruising around?

• 2009-02-15

  Distributed Braking Container
  Photo of a freight car fitted with equipment to improve braking reaction times for long trains.

  At least I think that's its function, as there can be noticable delays in long trains.

• 2009-02-15

  Which way is up for Eastern and Western artificial horizons?
  Overview of the two different ways of displaying aircraft attitude and why switching between can lead to confusion.

• 2009-02-14

  New built German narrow gauge steam engine
  Molli-Bäderbahn needed a new, so they had one built.

  Photos of it under construction and completed.

• 2009-02-14

  Replacing a crossing in the Stockholm metro
  Mostly photos, some text in Swedish.

• 2009-02-13

  Ju Jutsu demonstration
  Short movie, with sound, from 1931. Both in street clothes, floor is hard.

• 2009-02-13

  Cell phones power financial revolution in Africa
  Sending money by text message, for a very small charge compared to what a bank would ask, has very much changed how people with low incomes can handle money. The cell phone company's outlets are also in places where there are no banks nor post offices.

• 2009-02-13

  Lego Kitchen Crafts
  Somewhat useful items made out of Lego bricks.

• 2009-02-12

  Hayabusa's returning home
  About how the team managed to re-establish three axis control even though the probe's remaining attitude control systems only work in pitch and yaw.

  Roll control is by light pressure.

• 2009-02-11

  15" 0-4-0T for gauge 1
  Very narrow gauge, quite large scale.

  Live steam.

• 2009-02-11

  A Square
  Photos of a tiny parks in South Korea, by Hosang Park.

• 2009-02-11

  Building America's Largest Plane (Jul, 1930)
  Wasn't actually finished, though.

  125 passengers were definitely too much for 1928 or even the rest of the 1930s. Not obviously impractical from a technical viewpoint, though.

• 2009-02-10

  The Model Railway Club Trefoten
  "A narrow gauge model railway club in Stockholm, Sweden, building a swedish narrow gauge railway in scale 1:87 on H0s3 track."

  "Trefoten is recreating a small three foot (891 mm) gauge railway line about 1950."

• 2009-02-10

  The amazing intelligence of crows
  Joshua Klein talks about crows. They're really intelligent, have good memory and can learn to do many tasks, including unexpected ones. Perhaps they can also be trained to do something that's useful to us.

• 2009-02-09

  Vehicle Model Train Layout
  Several Japanese layouts and descriptions of modelling techniques.

• 2009-02-09

  La Vernarède
  Beautiful photos of a small layout in O14. It has lots of detail.

  Note that "suivant" takes you to more pages, some where you can see it under construction.

• 2009-02-09

  Wilbur Wright and his Flying Machine
  Film from 1909 in France.

  Includes a sequence with the first time a film camera on board an aircraft in flight.

• 2009-02-09

  Sir George Cayley
  Aviation pioneer.

  "He was the first to identify the four aerodynamic forces of flight: weight, lift, drag, and thrust and their relationship and also the first to build a successful human-carrying glider."

• 2009-02-09

  Steam Train video
  Short Chinese coal train, on rather rough track.

• 2009-02-09

  Narrow Perspectives
  A collection of photographs featuring narrow gauge railways in the British Isles.

• 2009-02-08

  Wachau
  Dürnstein
  Beautiful photos of scenery on a large layout.

• 2009-02-07

  The Yosemite Valley Railroad
  Both about the prototype and the excellent H0 layout. Very good site.

• 2009-02-07

  Prototypes for minimum space layouts
  Real world railways which uses small spaces or uses their space in a way which can be useful on a small layout.

• 2009-02-07

  Beginner solders brass kit
  9-year old's first try at a brass kit, after only a short introduction on how to solder.

  Text in Swedish.

• 2009-02-07

  Adventure in Miniature
  The layout descriptions are found under Projects.

  Fine layouts and good photos.

• 2009-02-06

  Aikido demonstration video

• 2009-02-06

  Hayabusa is returning from Itokawa
  The probe may bring back some tiny amount of asteroid material.

• 2009-02-06

  Dog gene may aid wolf survival
  "Scientists believe the black wolves appeared thousands of years ago after grey wolves bred with domestic dogs who accompanied Native Americans into the continent 10,000-15,000 years ago."

• 2009-02-05

  Scientists find world's biggest snake
  Lived 58 to 60 million years ago, and all the 28 found ones were around 12 m long and thus massed around 1100 kg.

  Intersting in itself, of course. But it's also interesting that it says something about the climate then.

  Another article.

• 2009-02-05

  Researchers Find Earliest Evidence for Animal Life
  Discovered fossil animal steroids date back to more than 635 million years ago.

  The animals where sponges, living in shallow water. As this was a period when Earth was totally iced over, it is a bit surprising to find remnants of multi cellular animals. More reading.

• 2009-02-05

  From now on, there's no longer a ban on new nuclear power in Sweden, as the anti-nuclear power party in the government coalition has agreed to abolish it. Up until now, there's even been illegal to design new nuclear power.

  We've had 12 reactors, for a population of 9 million, which is pretty much. In fact only France comes even close in nuclear power per capita. Now 10 are used (2 in one plant near Denmark have been shut down), but they deliver more power than the 12 did when they were new due to upgrades.

  However, the compromise agreement only means reactors taken out of service will be replaced. If someone wants to build them.

  It can be noted that the referendum in 1980 had three alternatives, two of which were identical, and none of them for more nuclear power than was already being built, and all three said nuclear power would be phased out, eventually.

• 2009-02-04

  Also Chair transforms into a table
  Good idea for multi-purpose furniture. But it doesn't look very comfortable as a chair, nor as a table.

• 2009-02-04

  Fossil foetus shows that early whales gave birth on land
  "Maiacetus wasn't quite like the whales we know and love. It was an intermediate form between the group's earliest ancestors and the fully marine versions that swim about today. For a start, still had sturdy hind legs that were good for swimming but would have allowed it to walk on land."

• 2009-02-03

  East Asia Builds World's Largest Radio Telescope Network
  Won't look like the one in the article's image, as the 19 antennas are going to be spread out over 6000 km.

• 2009-02-03

  What News Anchors Do During Commercial Breaks
  Walter Jon Williams calls it a News Anchor Commercial-Break Kata, which I think is a good description.

• 2009-02-03

  More photos from the modular meeting in Stockholm
  Lots of inline photos, so it's a heavy download. Text in Swedish (but Google language tools can translate it).

• 2009-02-03

  This weekend I went to look at a large modular model railway in Stockholm. My own photos are here.

• 2009-02-01

  Underwaterhockey
  "The sport was invented in Great Britain during the 1950's when some British divers were looking for ways to stay fit during the winter."

• 2009-02-01

  Serotonin Causes Locusts to Swarm
  "It took just two to three hours for timid grasshoppers in a lab to morph into gregarious locusts after they were injected with serotonin. Conversely, if they were given serotonin blockers, they stayed solitary even in swarm-inducing conditions."

• 2009-02-01

  Early propellers
  From a Swedish encyclopedia, 1915. Interesting that the first mostly modern-looking ship propeller example is from 1877.

  Image shows oldest preserved Swedish propeller, from 1843. Note it has two sections, joined by a ring, with quite different properties.

  More reading in The Introduction of the Screw Propeller Into Use.

• 2009-02-01

  Photos from a modular meeting
  Arranged by MMM.
  Stockholm Feb 01, Tekniska Museet.

• 2009-01-31

  Model railway photos
  Photos of Swedish model railways. Text, but not much, in Swedish.

• 2009-01-30

  Early Attempts To Contact Aliens
  Proposals for letting Selenites and Martians know there's intelligent life on Earth, before radio was useful to do so.

• 2009-01-28

  Mail by Rocket
  Usually quite impractical (but I suspect one of the listed instances may have been to prove it could be done, in case the sea state made it impossible to land a ship) and mostly just experimental or to show off.

• 2009-01-26

  Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen
  "You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world."" 20 min video.

• 2009-01-26

  No Snickering: That Road Sign Means Something Else
  British place names which may be amusing to some. And not, for those who live there.

• 2009-01-25

  Are modern cars too quiet on the inside? At Chalmers there has been research going on which indicates that situational awareness can be improved by 3D sound of the surrounding traffic.

  At present sensors detect objects and then the real sound is piped into the car, as an auditory icon.

• 2009-01-25

  ZMC-2 Metalclad Airship
  "The skin of the ZMC-2 was made form aluminum alloy plates one-hundredth of an inch thick; and the envelope, just shy of 150 feet long, was the direct container of the helium -- a highly prized, rare and expensive commodity at that time."

• 2009-01-24

  Photos of Japanese railways
  From smaller railways. All text in Japanese.

• 2009-01-22

  White Egret Castle
  Built of Lego pieces. Not a representation of a specific Japanese castle, but inspired by.

• 2009-01-22

  Steam Buses & Trucks
  Photos of examples from different times.

• 2009-01-21

  Tilted Twister
  A Lego Mindstorms robot that solves Rubik's cube.

• 2009-01-20

  New Swedish rainfall record was set in 2008. Mollsjönäs got 1866 mm. The previous record was only a few years old.

• 2009-01-20

  Atomic Rocket: Respecting Science
  The context here is science fiction respecting science and what happens if you don't.

• 2009-01-20

  New technology 'dazzles' aggressors
  Short on technical details, but there's a photo of a "real" laser rifle. There seems to be very little mention of this later on the web, which may mean there hasn't been much progress on it since then.

• 2009-01-19

  Vladimir Putin turns his hand to painting
  But the painting sold doesn't look quite like the one here. Is the critiqued one a work in progress, perhaps?

• 2009-01-19

  Cadillac nuclear powered concept car
  I think it's quite clear this isn't meant to be in any way realistic, but more a design study. Interesting to look at anyway.

• 2009-01-17

  Ultra-Minimalism: 19 Cool Products That Are Almost Impossible to Use
  Some of the items it can be hard to figure out what they are for, since they are so stripped of visual clues.

• 2009-01-15

  Wild Air Photography
  Good aviation photography from British Columbia.

• 2009-01-14

  LEGO Announces Digital Camera, MP3 Player and Other Branded Electronics
  So there will be made electronics which looks like it was built of Lego bricks. With mixed colours.

  But ususually, if someone tries to build something in Lego which looks like, for example, a camera, they try to match the colours so that it doesn't look like it's made of a random selection of bricks.

• 2009-01-13

  Map Reveals the Secrets Behind Place Names
  Not secrets as such, but the article has some linked maps with place names translated into plain modern language. Neat idea, and apparently the atlas sells well. Just a few examples here.

• 2009-01-12

  Researchers identify potential new weapon in battle against HIV infection
  "Increasing the level of the Pk antigen in cells in the laboratory also resulted in heightened resistance to HIV, while lowering it increased susceptibility."

• 2009-01-12

  Feldbahn mit 260 mm Spurweite
  This is a narrow gauge railway built to 1:2 scale. As a model railway it's a gigantic scale, but it's large enough that it's also usable as a very small railway. Text in German.

• 2009-01-12

  In the Shadow of Saturn
  Composite image showing details well. Also beautiful.

• 2009-01-11

  Small Layout Scrapbook issue 81
  Once again good demonstrations of how much modelling can be done in small space.

  This issue's focus is layouts which have been previously featured and what has happened to them since then.

• 2009-01-11

  Mars and Me
  The unofficial diary of a Mars rover driver.

• 2009-01-10

  Tatsutayama 2nd Clay Mining Line
  Some photos of a small layout.

• 2009-01-10

  Why Saturn's rings are so sharp
  It's Mimas which effects the particles which synchronises them with Mimas and each other.

• 2009-01-09

  Meine Gn15 Anlag
  Progress of a small layout. Newest entries at the bottom. Text in German.

• 2009-01-08

  Nigorigo Tramway
  Photos of small 0-16.5mm layout.

• 2009-01-08

  Die Modellbahseite von Alexander Lösch
  Several very good, often small, layouts described. Text in German.

• 2009-01-03

  1:87 HO scale. forest railway model
  Nice Youtube video of Japanese layout.

• 2009-01-01

  Stoney Middleton
  Youtube video about a good looking model railway.

• Assymetric Aircraft - Some real, some proposed, some imaginary. See also Addition to the list of Asymmetric aircraft. (2008-12-31)
• Round trip with Endeavour - Photos of a Space Shuttle cycle of operation. (2008-12-31)
• Research team reports how, when life on Earth became so big - ""We were surprised to observe that nearly all of the increase in size occurred in two distinct time-intervals. And what is more, those intervals followed two major oxygenation events," Kowalewski said." (2008-12-28)
• The Little Spaceplane That Couldn't - About the X-20 Dynasoar and why it wasn't as capable as some think it was. (2008-12-16)
• 2000-year-old computer recreated - Video of a working recreation of the Antikythera mechanism being demonstrated. (2008-12-15)
• 12 ships with impossibly large cargo - Photos of ships loaded with oil platforms and the like, with links to further information. (2008-12-09)
• The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway - How the graphic design of signage has evolved. (2008-12-03)
• A look back at the NC2000 - The first electronic camera designed specifically for photojournalists. (2008-12-02)
• If You Liked This, You're Sure to Love That - About the problem of algorithmically determining which movies someone will like. One major problem is that some movies are highly polarising. (2008-11-26)
• Rockets help build bridge higher than empire state building - One way of getting cables across a very deep gorge. (2008-11-25)
• The differences between seals and sea lions - How to tell them apart. Wikipedia article on sea lions. (2008-11-24)
• All Streets - Map of all streets in the lower 48 United States. No other features at all. Density of roads shows both density of population and geographical features roads aviod. (2008-11-24)
• Antarctic Ice Fish - Interesting animal in that its blood doesn't have any red blood cells at all. Only group of vertrabrates which doesn't. The blood thus is more like salt water with antifreeze proteins than "blood". The reason this works is because really cold salt water can transport enough oxygen.
  Of course these cold adapted fish can't live if it's not near freezing. (2008-11-14)
• In Sweden, the number of deaths due to traffic accidents are decreasing steadily.
  But the total number of lethal accidents, including traffic related, are on the increase. Now it's around 3000 per year, which is 600 more than a decade ago. (2008-11-14)
• Exoplanets finally come into view - "Visible and infrared images have been snapped of a planet orbiting a star 25 light-years away." and "In a separate study, an exoplanetary system comprising three planets, has been directly imaged, circling a star in the constellation Pegasus." More images: Hubble directly observes planet orbiting Fomalhaut. (2008-11-14)
• Simon's good ideas for websites - (2008-11-09)
• In Sweden there are about 9 million people. Today we have 29.3 million telephone numbeers allocated for mobile phone use, out of which 28.6 million are used, so soon we will get another 10 million. (2008-11-07)
• Spontaneous Discharge of a Firearm in an MR Imaging Environment - The magnetic field overrode the safeties. (2008-11-04)
• Human Genes: Alternative Splicing Far More Common Than Thought - "A decade ago, alternative splicing of a gene was considered unusual, exotic ... but it turns out that's not true at all - it's a nearly universal feature of human genes," (2008-11-04)
• Ligature Schmigature - "While ligatures do add a subtle finishing touch for some classic typefaces, and specially designed ligatures (like those shown here from Matthew Carter's Mantinia) are beautiful, they are not essential in most cases." (2008-10-29)
• Jessica Ambats Photography - Very good aviation photos. (2008-10-29)
• Is it safer not to sign the back of your credit cards? - Answers the question, but is more about credit card history. (2008-10-29)
• FE-Schrift - Type face used on German vehicle registration plates. Designed to be hard to change by just adding black tape to the plates. (2008-10-16)
• Foundations of Lighting Placement - Interactive basics in light placement when photographing. (2008-10-05)
• Classics in Lego - Recreations of famous photographs using Lego minifigures. (2008-10-02)
• Team finds Earth's 'oldest rocks' - "Earth's most ancient rocks, with an age of 4.28 billion years, have been found on the shore of Hudson Bay, Canada." (2008-09-30)
• First Picture of Likely Planet around Sun-like Star - "Astronomers have unveiled what is likely the first picture of a planet around a normal star similar to the Sun." (2008-09-16)
• The most luminous event in the universe - About the GRB 080319B gamma ray burster, which even though it was 7.5 billion light years away was visible to the naked eye for a few seconds. (2008-09-14)
• Chrysler Airflow - "The Airflow was the first full-size American production car to use streamlining as a basis for building a sleeker automobile, one less susceptible to air resistance. Chrysler made the first effort at a fundamental change in automotive design with the Chrysler Airflow, which ultimately represented one of the most serious miscalculations in automotive history." (2008-09-13)
• Unique Pidgeon Towers of Iran - And some examples from other parts of the world. (2008-09-13)
• Ancient trees recorded in mines - "Spectacular fossil forests have been found in the coal mines of Illinois by a US-UK team of researchers." (2008-09-11)
• J002E3 - "When it was first discovered it was quickly found that the object was in an orbit around Earth. Astronomers were surprised at this as the Moon is the only large object in orbit around the Earth and anything else would have been ejected long ago due to perturbations with the Earth, the Moon and the Sun." (2008-09-10)
• Victorian Technology - Many examples from an interesting age. (2008-09-09)
• Stunningly Intricate: Curta Mechanical Calculator - "Considered to be the most efficient portable calculator (until electronic calculators came in the 70s)." (2008-09-09)
• Burt Rutan and Scale Composites - Images of and brief descriptions of different aircraft types. (2008-09-05)
• LTI Taxi Previous Models - Brief overview of one make of British taxis. (2008-09-05)
• Eureka Carpark way-finding system - "The distored letters on the wall can be read perfectly when standing at the right position." (2008-08-07)
• World's smallest snake discovered - Averaging 100 mm long, lays a single egg at a time. (2008-08-05)
• Night Vision - Good night photographs. (2008-07-24)
• Hybrid and Mutant Animals - Overview and detailed information. (2008-07-21)
• Crocodile egg sounds signal hatching time - "Here, we present the first experimental evidence that pre-hatching calls of Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) juveniles are informative acoustic signals which indeed target both siblings and mother." (2008-06-24)
• 10 Most Bizarre Species Names - (2008-06-15)
• Can This Fruit Be Saved? - "The banana as we know it is on a crash course toward extinction." (2008-06-09)
• Nick Bostrom's home page - "I want to make it possible to think more rationally about big picture questions." (2008-05-19)
• Boeing 40 - Photos of a restored aircraft and about the aircraft type. (2008-05-15)
• Dazzle Camouflage - Very interesting about the history behind dazzle camouflage schemes, including how they were developed, with many examples of ship photos. (2008-05-12)
• Tales of Future Past - "It wasn't that long ago that we had a future. I mean, we have one now; the world isn't going to crash into the Sun or anything like that. What I mean is that we had a future that we could clearly imagine. The future wasn't tomorrow, next week, next year, or next century. It was a place with a form, a structure, a style." (2008-05-06)
• Where Are They? - "Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing." (2008-04-29)
• Space Shuttle Proposals - What led to its design. (2008-04-14)
• Montech water slope - Interesting solution to replace locks in a canal. (2008-04-08)
• Getting the Pixels Right - Good advice for better photographs. (2008-04-02)
• Japanese historical railrway photos - (2008-04-01)
• Alfa-Romeo concept cars 1953-1955 - Very visually advanced designs. (2008-03-16)
• Garfield minus Garfield - "Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?" (2008-03-03)
• On Feb 14:th the autumn officially ended in southern Sweden. This is because it's not gotten cold enough to be winter there, according to the definition, so the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute has now declared the season to be "undefined". (2008-02-21)
• Secret lives of badgers revealed - "Over two years, tiny cameras placed deep underground recorded the comings and goings of a wild badger family.
  While the animals have been well studied outside of their setts, until now, little has been known about their behaviour while underground." (2008-02-20)
• Mount Huashan Hiking Trail - "You are about to view pictures of what has to be the most dangerous Tourist Hiking Trail in the world. After you see the pictures, I have little doubt you will agree." (2008-02-20)
• Heron of Alexandria - A few of his inventions. (2008-02-06)
• Kite Photography Page - Aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake from an aerial view. (2008-01-30)
• The Wonderful World of Early Computing - Examples from pre-history to electronic computers. (2008-01-28)
• Secrets of bird flight revealed - Perhaps an exaggeration, but a very interesting insight in how birds may have started to use their wings. (2008-01-28)
• What's the Future of Dining? - Interesting inventions: "Top 10 Picks for the "Dining in 2015" Competition." (2008-01-23)
• Shavian Alphabet - "The Shavian alphabet is named after George Bernard Shaw and was devised by Kingsley Read. Shaw saw use of the Latin alphabet for writing English as a great waste of time, energy and paper, so in his will he stipulated that a competition should be held to create a new writing system for English and made provision for a prize of £500." (2008-01-16)
• Untangle - Online game, simple concept, solution not always easy. (2008-01-16)
• Sectional buses - Looks like it could have been useful sometimes, but too complicated to be really practical. (2008-01-08)
• Mundaneum, the Index Card Internet - "When the Mundaneum opened in 1910, its purpose was to collect all of the world's knowledge on neatly organized 3" x 5" index cards." (2008-01-02)
• Old UK Photos - "The idea is to display as many old photographs as we can of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales." "The majority of the photographs are dating from the 1890's and 1900's." (2007-12-25)
• Snow Sculpture Festival - Large snow creations. (2007-12-25)
• Whale 'missing link' discovered - "The whale is descended from a deer-like animal that lived 48 million years ago, according to fossil evidence." (2007-12-21)
• Unique Soviet Snowmobiles - Different vehicles for going over snow. (2007-12-20)
• e 5 users you meet in hell (and one you'll find in heaven) - About IT support, but actually also about people in general. (2007-12-13)
• How Super-Precise Atomic Clocks Will Change the World in a Decade - There are already clocks which have to take into account how the building they're in changes size depending on temperature. (2007-12-13)
• Young chimp beats college students - At a memory test which displayed numbers a very short time. (2007-12-04)
• Secret village to be pulled down - Keeping a village secret for five years, in the UK, seems very unlikely to succed, but it did. (2007-11-05)
• Urban Camouflage - Like looking like a vending machine, for example. (2007-10-25)
• Excerpts from Transcript of the Direct Line with the President of Russia Live Television and Radio Broadcast - (2007-10-23)
• Elephants sense 'danger' clothes - "In fact, we think that this is the first time that it has been experimentally shown that any animal can categorise a single species of potential predator into subclasses based on such subtle cues." (2007-10-23)
• Who has the smallest number of nuclear weapons? - Both China and the UK say they have. (2007-10-03)
• Tact Filters - Some peoples' work in different directions. (2007-09-28)
• Homer Simpson's Rhetoric - Interesting examples. (2007-09-13)
• The Flop Heard Round the World - About the Ford Edsel. (2007-09-07)
• Flies prefer fizzy drinks - "While you may not catch a fly sipping Perrier, the insect has specialized taste cells for carbonated water that probably encourage it to binge on food with growing microorganisms." (2007-09-03)
• Student dig unearths ancient gum - 5000 year old, with tooth marks. (2007-08-22)
• Abbazia of Chiaravalle - modelling project - Building a 1:25 model of a building, using real bricks. (2007-08-17)
• The World's Ugliest Aircraft - A matter of opinion, of course, but there are some interesting types here. (2007-08-14)
• The Mars Landing Approach: Getting Large Payloads to the Surface of the Red Planet - "The honest truth of the matter," said Manning, "is that we don't have a standard canonical form, a standard configuration of systems that allows us to get to the ground, with the right size that balances the forces, the loads, the people, and allows us to do all the transformation that needs to be done in the very small amount of time that we have to land." (2007-07-20)
• Weather observed on a star for the first time - "They resolved details on the spinning star's surface by looking at how rapidly the clouds were turning towards or away from Earth. That revealed that the mercury concentration varies by as much as a factor of 10,000 across its surface, and the pattern of concentration changes as well." (2007-07-02)
• The Ten Most Common Photographic Mistakes - Good advice on taking better photographs. Really good advice. (2007-06-23)
• City Shrinker - Photos of reality made to look like they're photos of models. (2007-06-09)
• Tracks suggest dinos could swim - Wasn't thought to be impossible for them, but this set of fossil bottom scratch marks is the first indication of it happening. (2007-05-28)
• South African extra heavy road transports - Large trucks in multiple and pushing very heavy loads. Mostly photos and some facts about them.%09 (2007-05-26)
• How to Tie the 10 Most Useful Knots - Or at least 9 useful ones. (2007-05-15)
• Hashima Island - Also known as Gunkanjima. Island with coal mines, concrete buildings and not much else. Now abandoned. (2007-05-11)
• Bertha Benz - First person to drive a car a substantial distance. (2007-04-24)
• How the CIA used a fake science fiction film to sneak six Americans out of revolutionary Iran. - (2007-04-24)
• Some common solecisms (2007-04-23)
• How to help someone use a computer - "Computer people are fine human beings, but they do a lot of harm in the ways they "help" other people with their computer problems. Now that we're trying to get everyone online, I thought it might be helpful to write down everything I've been taught about helping people use computers." (2007-04-10)
• The Antarctic Snow Cruiser - 1939 explorer vehicle. (2007-03-12)
• Beautiful new images from Rosetta's approach to Mars - An OSIRIS image of atmospheric structures of Mars and more images. (2007-02-27)
• NASA plan for unstable astronauts - Duct tape and tranquilizers. (2007-02-26)
• Whitespace - A programming language with a unusually restricted character set. (2007-02-19)
• The Best Place To Hide Money: Conversation With A Burglar - Common sense advice, and several interesting comments. (2007-02-12)
• Flops of Famous Inventors - Article from 1930, with some really silly examples. (2007-01-22)
• In Sweden, there's published 360 cookbooks per year. (2007-01-18)
• An Eye for Camouflage - Colour blind monkeys are better at spotting camouflaged insects. (2007-01-15)
• Instruments for Natural Philosophy - Examples of historical physics devices. (2007-01-09)
• The Size Of Our World - Pictorial display of relative sizes of planets and stars. (2006-12-27)
• Did the wood roach cause the Permian aridity, red beds and conifer rise? - "It is suggested that the symbiosis of cellulose digesting microbes with the cockroach, probably in the Permian, caused fundamental ecological changes which lowered soil organic matter, created aridity, helped increase atmospheric carbon dioxide, helped eliminate glaciers, and favored conifers with their inert interior and wood poisons." (2006-12-04)
• The Incredible Automobile Race of 1907 - Account of driving from Peking to Paris. (2006-12-04)
• Tatjana van Vark - Some fascinating devices. (2006-11-30)
• Bear Gallery - Good photos. (2006-11-22)
• A Difference Engine Built with Lego Pieces - And one built of Meccano. (2006-11-20)
• Auditory Seismology - Different kinds of earthquakes sound differently. (2006-11-13)
• Air Transport Facts - From the Aircraft Year Book for 1934. (2006-11-02)
• A new antimatter engine design - Using positrons. (2006-10-31)
• Pictures of the Dymaxion Car - 1930s aerodynamic three-wheeled car. Prototypes only built. (2006-09-15)
• BLDGBLOG - "Architectural conjecture :: Urban speculation :: Landscape futures" (2006-08-30)
• Andy's Early Comics Archive - "A History of Picture Stories : Over 350 scrolldown pages of comics, or comics-related illustration." (2006-08-28)
• Graphical User Interface Gallery - More than just the most common GUIs. (2006-08-14)
• Researchers develop mobile robot that balances, moves on ball instead of wheels or legs - "Traditional, statically stable mobile robots have three or more wheels for support, but their bases are generally too wide to move easily among people and furniture. They can also tip over if they move too fast or operate on a slope." (2006-08-11)
• Flying Machines - Pioneer Aviation History. (2006-08-08)
• The Interstate Highway System at 50 - Long article about the US interstate road system. (2006-08-07)
• Real Hybrid Animals - Mainly photos. (2006-07-27)
• A hoax most cruel - It's apparently possible to get some people to do almost anything just by phoning them. (2006-06-28)
• Classical Aeroplanes - Very good art depicting aircraft. (2006-06-15)
• Variable Physical Laws - "And shortly measurements will be presented in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society showing that another dimensionless constant, called the fine structure constant, is also varying with time."%09 (2006-06-13)
• Abby's Reef: The earliest convincing evidence of life? - "Australian Centre for Astrobiology doctoral student Abigail Allwood reveals in a paper in the journal Nature her discovery of a ten kilometre section of an ancient microbial reef system. She says the stromatolite shape associations and other evidence demonstrates no purely physical or chemical processes alone could have produced the entire ecosystem." (2006-06-12)
• Ian's Shoelace Site - Shoelace Knots - Two recommended and several other types. (2006-04-14)
• High-speed Imaging of Shock Waves, Explosions and Gunshots - "New digital video technology, combined with some classic imaging techniques, reveals shock waves as never before." (2006-04-10)
• The Search For A Domain Name - Some facts about used domain names. (2006-04-06)
• Flying Machines 1906 - 1914 - Early aviation history. (2006-03-15)
• From Counting to Writing - "Thus, "writing resulted not only from new bureaucratic demands but from the invention of abstract counting," Schmandt-Besserat argued in How Writing Came About." (2006-03-14)
• The Wisdom of Parasites - As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it's time for a female to lay an egg. (2006-02-05)
• The Socratic Method: Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling - An example with binary arithmetic. (2006-02-02)
• Ship Elevator - Photos of an alternative to building locks. A ship elevator with turntable even. Photo series showing a lifting, text in Russian. (2006-01-08)
• The Great War in Color - Photos from the 1914-1918 war. (2006-01-05)
• The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity - "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation." (2005-12-29)
• So You Wanna Build A Rocket? - Atomic Rocketships of the Space Patrol (2005-12-28)
• The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute - (2005-12-24)
• Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization - Well written with useful advice. (2005-12-08)
• The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities - Windows oriented. (2005-11-30)
• A. Suzuki's Paper Aircraft Laboratory - Made to look similar to real aircraft. Text mostly in Japanese. (2005-11-22)
• Hyperstition: Intuitive Economics - "By introducing a fiat currency and trade to a capuchin colony, we are able to recover their preferences over a wide range of goods and risky choices." (2005-11-20)
• Museum of Hoaxes - (2005-11-02)
• Live speech-translation technology unveiled - Not really surprising, but interesting all the same. (2005-11-01)
• Why Does God Hate Amputees? - "Christian inspirational literature is full of thousands of stories like Jeanna's and Marilyn Hickey's. But God does not restore the legs of amputees. Whether you are a Christian or not, the situation here appears to be most peculiar."
  "If you don't believe in Leprechauns, what are you? Are you an aleprechaunist? Of course not. You are normal. People who do not believe in Leprechauns are completely normal." (2005-10-31)
• Photos of The Beatles 1950s to 1963 - (2005-10-12)
• The Artistic History of Webcomics - "The key figures are not necessarily the best cartoonists, the most popular (though some of them are), or the most influential. But they serve as "keys" to unlocking the recent past and understanding it better. Their work helps to form a narrative of the past ten years. One of many possible narratives, to be sure, but a narrative we hope is revealing." (2005-10-06)
• Architecture of safety-critical systems - "Safety-critical systems are embedded systems that could cause injury or loss of human life if they fail or encounter errors. Flight-control systems, automotive drive-by-wire, nuclear reactor management, or operating room heart/lung bypass machines naturally come to mind. But devices as common as the power windows in your car are also safety-critical, once you imagine a small child reaching out of the car window at a fast food drive-through to get another packet of ketchup and accidentally leaning on the control switch making the window shut on the child's arm, or worse." (2005-10-03)
• RPS-15 - For when rock, paper and scissors aren't enough. (2005-09-27)
• Ship-sinking monster waves revealed by ESA satellites - "Once dismissed as a nautical myth, freakish ocean waves that rise as tall as ten-storey apartment blocks have been accepted as a leading cause of large ship sinkings." (2005-09-19)
• It's now possible to tell when people were born, if it was after the start of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, by measuring C14 in their tooth enamel. (Within 1.6 years, which can be useful for identifying dead.) This discovery was actually made because a stem cell researcher wanted to find a method to determine when a cell had been created. (2005-09-19)
• Clever Whale Uses Fish to Catch Seagulls - And others learn from his example. (2005-09-13)
• Mt. Nemrut National Park - Monument at the top of a relatively isolated mountain top, with statues and a tumulus. (2005-09-12)
• On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Bot - "In the booming world of online poker, anyone can win. Especially with an autoplaying robot ace in the hole. Are you in, human?"%09 (2005-09-05)
• High-Tech Door Better than Star Trek - "The Tanaka Auto Door opens automatically when you stand in front of it. Even better, it only opens just enough to let the individual person come in." (2005-09-05)
• Urban Legends Reference Pages: Photo Gallery - "Numerous "photographs" circulate on the Internet. Some are real. Some are fake. Some are real, but have been given false backstories." (2005-09-01)
• The Copying Pencil: Composition, History, and Conservation Implications - Well written about a nowadays little known writing implement. (2005-08-25)
• Murphy's Laws and Other Observation - Murphy may have been an optimist. (2005-08-21)
• Scientists aim for lab-grown meat - "Developments in tissue engineering mean that cells taken from animals could be grown directly into meat in a laboratory, the researchers say." (2005-08-18)
• Amish Cell Phones - "The Amish are famous for shunning technology, but their secret love affair with the cell phone is causing an uproar." (2005-08-15)
• Open Letter - " You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s." (2005-08-07)
• ...Paper Planes and White Elephants! - Airliners which didn't make it into production. (2005-08-01)
• Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics - (2005-07-25)
• Field report: Courchevel Altiport - Steep runway and unusual procedures. (2005-07-17)
• I read today that the little fire ant, Wasmania auropunctata, reproduces by cloning in separate male and female lines. I'm not clear on how the males do it, but it's interesting that this means their genetics no longer have anything to do with each other. Sexual reproduction in the species only results in sterile workers. (2005-07-04)
• First hydrogen plane tested in US - "Liquid hydrogen stored on board and oxygen extracted from the air are combined in fuel cells. The electricity generated drives the propellers." (2005-07-04)
• The BLAZEMONGER Archives - A Collection of Humorous Articles About The Commodore Amiga And Its Fans (2005-06-01)
• Quest for Performance: The Evolution of Modern Aircraft - Lots of interesting reading. (2005-06-01)
• Pedro Duque's diary from space - A technical point is that he explains that ordinary ballpoint pens work in space and that the Russians didn't use pencils. (2005-05-30)
• Rorschach Inkblot Test, Fortune Teller, and Cold Reading - "Psychologists have been quarreling over the Rorschach Inkblot Test for half a century. From 1950 to the present, most psychologists in clinical practice have treasured the test as one of their most precious tools. And for nearly that long, their scientific colleagues have been trying to persuade them that the test is well-nigh worthless, a pseudoscientific modern variant on tea leaf reading and Tarot cards." (2005-05-27)
• Sonar in Dolphins - "The echolocation is similar to the echolocation of bats, but there are many striking differences that you will find throughout this website." (2005-05-26)
• Flying Snake - "Flying snakes are a small group of species of tree snakes that live in South and Southeast Asia. At rest they appear unremarkable, but on the move they're able to take to the air by jumping from the tree, flattening the entire body, and gliding or parachuting to the ground or another tree." (2005-05-24)
• Molt Taylor's Aerocar Flying Car Automobile - One of the very few which got CAA certification. The other was the Fulton FA-3-101 Airphibian. (2005-05-18)
• Jean Monnet FAQ - Item 12 on the list is interesting, as it describes how came the United Kingdom offered to go into a union with France on June 16:th, 1940. (2005-05-16)
• Bird Lungs - Illustration and explanation of how bird lungs work, compared to ours. (2005-05-13)
• European toilet paper holder - "The symbolism and design of these fixtures has changed over the centuries, but they continue to occupy a central place in bathroom layout as well as in the emergent construction of a specifically European identity." (2005-05-10)
• Space War: Weapons - An overview of could be done and SF concepts. (2005-05-10)
• Fossils illuminate fish evolution - ""The fossil record confirms that the evolution of fish was a step-wise event," explained Professor Aldridge." (2005-05-04)
• Flying circles around the helicopter - Old method for getting stuff safely down to the ground and up from a flying fixed wing aircraft. (2005-05-04)
• Bending Spacetime in the Basement - Low tech gravity detector. (2005-05-02)
• Mice put in 'suspended animation' - Got the breathe 80 ppm hydrogen sulphide. (2005-04-25)
• The First Airplanes - A timeline overview. More in detail: Those Fabulous and Foolhardy Flyers I, Mid-Nineteenth Century Milestones. (2005-04-23)
• Superman Through the Ages! - " ... a fannish production ...". (2005-04-21)
• Gasping for Air: Lack of Oxygen Worsened the 'Great Dying' - Short account of how oxygen levels decreased 250 million years ago and what consequences it had. (2005-04-19)
• "The Alternate View" columns - '"The Alternate View" columns of John G. Cramer are short (circa 2,000 word) essays about cutting-edge science. They are aimed at readers (and writers) of "hard" science fiction, as exemplified by the SF stories of Analog, but are about real science, usually physics or astronomy.'
  I used to read them all, when I read every issue of Analog. (2005-04-19)
• What a Little Moon Dust Can Do - Troublesome properties. (2005-04-12)
• Clocky - "Having the alarm clock hide from me was just the most obvious way I could think of to get out of bed." (2005-03-25)
• 1958 Lituya Bay Tsunami - Brief information about the tsunami which created the waves reaching the highest so far. (2005-03-18)
• Star 'gnome' is nuclear surprise - Star, which is smaller (but more massive) than some planets, discovered. (2005-03-08)
• Rotating Universes and Time Traveling - Also a discussion about what a rotating universe is. (2005-03-07)
• Why do we get grey hair? The scientist who found the gene which makes most white horses white thinks it's not a result of aging, but a sign of aging, as in swowing you've been successful at surviving. (2005-03-02)
• Usenet history - From the early times. (2005-02-28)
• Fuzzy math - Seems that if you don't have words for numbers, it's hard to count. (2005-02-22)
• Friendly foxes are cleverer - "Domesticated foxes show evolution of social intelligence." (2005-02-22)
• 100 years ago, in 1905, there were 177 automobiles owned by people living in Stockholm. (2005-02-19)
• Eugene Francois Vidocq: Convict Turned Detective Magnifique - "It was not until the early Nineteenth Century, however, that a Frenchman - a one-time criminal himself - utilized his first-hand knowledge of his country's underworld to create a whole new, formalized entity called "criminal investigation". In doing so, Eugene Francois Vidocq brought crime fighting to a higher plateau, up from a disorganized and often-negative milieux and into a social science." (2005-02-15)
• Rings around the Earth: A clue to climate change? - "The two also suggest that such temporary rings lasting from 100,000 to a few millions of years may explain some patterns of climate change observed in the earth's geological record." (2005-02-08)
• Early Reentry Vehicles: Blunt Bodies and Ablatives - Historical and technical overview. (2005-02-06)
• Mount Weather - High Point Special Facility (SF), Mount Weather Emergency Assistance Center [MWEAC] and Western Virginia Office of Controlled Conflict Operations described. (2005-01-28)
• The evolution of Mesopotamia - A geological perspective, richly illustrated and well explained. (2005-01-21)
• Why do we have so many temperature scales? - Good article explaining the background and how fixed points are chosen. (2005-01-03)
• Names of Weekdays - From TheScian Science Wiki. (2004-12-29)
• Sam's Laser FAQ - "A Practical Guide to Lasers for Experimenters and Hobbyists." (2004-12-29)
• Lockheed WP-3D Orion - Weather research aircraft. (2004-12-28)
• The Wacky World of Japanese Ice Cream - Plenty of unexpected (well, perhaps not) kinds of ice cream. (2004-12-21)
• Did Vikings really wear horns on their helmets? - Explanation behind this misconception. (2004-12-16)
• Roads Gone Wild - "No street signs. No crosswalks. No accidents. Surprise: Making driving seem more dangerous could make it safer." (2004-12-16)
• The first official horse census in Sweden has just been concluded. It turns out there are 271 000 horses. (9 million people.) This is possibly as many as 100 years ago, when oxen were still used a lot, but less than 60 years ago. (2004-12-08)
• Cro-Magnons Conquered Europe, but Left Neanderthals Alone - DNA and other data suggest a maximum of 120 interbreedings with modern humans during 12500 years. (2004-12-03)
• Earth and Moon Viewer - Impressive site. Among the capabilities are "Images can be generated based on a full-colour image of the Earth by day and night, a topographical map of the Earth, up-to-date weather satellite imagery, or a composite image of cloud cover superimposed on a map of the Earth, a colour composite which shows clouds, land and sea temperatures, and ice, or the global distribution of water vapour." (2004-12-01)
• The Problem of Redundancy Problem: Why More Nuclear Security Forces May Produce Less Nuclear Security - "The article uncovers the dark side of redundancy by focusing on how efforts to improve nuclear security can inadvertently backfire, increasing the risks they are designed to reduce." (2004-11-29)
• How lizards walk on water - The basilisk lizard generates large side forces when walking on water. (2004-11-25)
• A Cryptographic Compendium - Overview, mechanical systems and computers. (2004-11-22)
• Toby's Cryptopage - Cryptography, real examples, some mechanical systems detailed. (2004-11-22)
• How It Works...The Computer - From a 1971 book, including changes in the 1979 edition.%09 (2004-11-19)
• Early Office Museum - "The Early Office Museum%99 engages in research on the evolution of offices and business technology based on original documents and artifacts." (2004-11-18)
• Keck Pictures of Uranus - Really good photos from an Earth based telescope. (2004-11-12)
• Zombie Infection Simulation - Sort of a Java display. (2004-11-11)
• Watch out for made up words in surveys: Funistrada was used in 1974 in a US Army food preference survey to see how careless people filling it out was. I'm sure there are others. (2004-11-10)
• 'Hobbit' joins human family tree - About the discovery of Homo floresiensis. (2004-10-28)
• The Ryugyong Hotel - Gigantic North Korean hotel. Unused and not even on maps any longer. (2004-10-25)
• Saved by a Leatherman - How to do vital repairs on the outside of a helicopter in flight. (2004-10-13)
• Flying the Evangel bush twin - Description of the Evangel 4500 aircraft and story about flying with it. (2004-10-11)
• Historical American Currency Exhibit - A small selection of paper money, with the context explained. (2004-10-11)
• The Soviet Exploration of Venus - Very detailed account. (2004-09-27)
• Pongmechanik - The classic game Pong with an elektromechanical interface and logic. Site in German, but the video is subtitled in English. (2004-09-26)
• Java-Based Games - "I'm a fan of classic games like Pacman, Arkanoid and Lunar Lander, so obviously I'd also like you to try out these awesome games." (2004-09-21)
• Tea In Japan - Overview of the history of tea and tea ceremony. (2004-09-21)
• The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth - Clickable map. Huge amount of photos. (2004-09-20)
• Software That Lasts 200 Years - "The structure and culture of a typical prepackaged software company is not attuned to the long-term needs of society for software that is part of its infrastructure. This essay discusses the ecosystem needed for development that better meets those needs." (2004-09-10)
• ET write home - A variation on the bandwidth of "a 747 full of CDs". (2004-09-02)
• Charlie's Sneaker Pages - A really extensive site, well cross indexed. (2004-09-02)
• Nanotubes may have no 'temperature' - Brief discussion about how few atoms are needed for the concept of temperature is meaningful. No answers, though. (2004-08-24)
• India population 'to be biggest' - Prediction of countries' populations by 2050. (2004-08-24)
• Heinlein's Gay Deceiver - in Lego - Very good interpretation of what this fictional roadable aircraft could look like. I'd always assumed something like this, only larger. (2004-08-20)
• High-flying names a far cry from good old days - On how Japanese names have changed in just a century. (2004-08-16)
• Today we will become 9 000 000 inhabitants in Sweden. We passed 8 million in 1969, 7 in 1950, 6 in 1923, 5 in 1897, 4 in 1863, 3 in 1835 and 2 in 1767. We'll become 10 million in around 2026. (2004-08-12)
• Cell swap could help conservation - And make it easier to arrange blufin tuna ranching. "They implanted tissue from trout embryos into salmon embryos; and when the salmon became adults and mated, they produced trout. " (2004-08-06)
• Monowheels - And other vehicles with insufficient wheels. (2004-07-21)
• Cowboy Photographer: Erwin E. Smith - "Erwin E. Smith (1886%961947) always wanted to be both a cowboy and an artist. As a teenager, he worked on various ranches throughout the Southwest, using his camera to document the cowboy way of life that was fading away before his eyes. From 1905 to 1912, he divided his time between home in Bonham, Texas, art school in Chicago and Boston, and ranches in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, where he made some of the most important photographs of cowboy life on record." (2004-07-21)
• Aviation Humour - Mostly radio conversations. (2004-07-15)
• Pallet Evolved Along with Forklift - "While other forms of unitization predated the development of the palletized unit load, it was the pallet, in conjunction with the lift truck, that was destined to have the most dramatic impact on material handling." (2004-07-09)
• Re-creating the Rainbow Bridge - "Using the design and construction methods of 12th-century China, a team of experts created an arch bridge made of straight logs tied with bamboo." (2004-06-22)
• The Ideal Scientific Equipment Company Catalog - "If you've ever been embarrassed by demonstrations that didn't (or if you've ever occasionally faked results) then you need ideal equipment. No teacher should be without an adequate stock of ideal equipment. We guarantee the textbook results every time. It's easy to use, inexpensive, and it works!" (2004-06-21)
• Lessons from the Wolf - "Bringing the top predator back to Yellowstone has triggered a cascade of unanticipated changes in the park's ecosystem." (2004-06-04)
• "Always carry a rough towel" - No, it's not from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's from Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys. (2004-05-28)
• Firewalking - Entry from the Sceptic's Dictionary. (2004-05-26)
• Incredible parking bill for Richard's forgotten Rolls - Sounds rather strange. I wonder how true this is? (2004-05-18)
• There are now more than 250.000 motorcycles in Sweden, population real soon now 9.000.000. (2004-05-18)
• The Pitcairn Island Photo Album - Photos with captions. Rest of site has more information. (2004-05-17)
• EADS Phoenix - Small scale prototype of a European space shuttle. (2004-05-10)
• Ancient arthropod caught moulting - "Scientists have long believed these creatures shed their hard, outer layers, just like their modern counterparts - such as insects - do today.
  Now, the journal Nature reports the discovery of the first fossilised creature to actually be caught in the act of shedding its exoskeleton." (2004-05-10)
• Aircraft caricatures - Some rather well done drawings. Text in French. (2004-05-10)
• Great Britain - The first iron hulled ship with a propeller to cross the Atlantic (2004-05-08)
• The Elephant Bird - "The eggs that the Elephant Bird laid were larger than the largest dinosaur eggs, and, in fact, I have heard that some mathmetician-types somewhere have calculated that they were as large as a structurally functional egg could possibly be...the largest single cells to have ever existed on Earth." (2004-05-06)
• Unlikely phrases from real phrasebooks - (2004-05-04)
• Atlantropa - "From 1927 until his death 25 years later, Sörgel worked on plans for a gigantic project that was initially named "Panropa" and later "Atlantropa." With the help of a 35 km-long dam in the Straits of Gibraltar, he wanted to cut off the water supply from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, letting the sea gradually dry up until its water level was reduced by some 200 meters. This was supposed to open up 600,000 square kilometers of new land and enable marvellous new capacities for power generation." In Der Traum von Atlantropa there is a small map showing what the Mediterranean would look after a century of lowering water level. During that time, the seaports would consist of floating temporary harbours, with airfields and so on. Since the western part would be lowered 100 m and the eastern part 200 m all coastal cities would have to be remodelled. There were plans that some would get new, lower parts, and some, like Venice, being surrounded by a sea wall with locks. (2004-05-02)
• The Borghild-project - The world's first sex doll was made in Germany in 1941. (2004-04-25)
• New Group Hopes To Break Monopoly On Gravity Theory - ' "There are theories by atheists and secular humanists that try to explain gravity," explains Dr Sternberg, "but they all lead to crazy conclusions no human being has ever seen, like black holes and the so-called "Big Bang". Intelligent Grappling only deals with the visible world."' (2004-04-24)
• Reinventing the Yo-Yo - High tech innovations described. (2004-04-21)
• Giant Waterworld Planets Could Harbour Life - "Picture a giant, blue-white world with a planet-wide ocean hundreds of times bigger than the Earth's and 10 times as deep. According to planetary physicists in France and America, such "ocean planets" could be common - and possibly the best places in our galaxy to find life." (2004-04-20)
• Early Horseback Riding and Warfare in the Steppes - Makes a few points I had not thought about, for example on the use of chariots in warfare. (2004-04-17)
• Sedna has no moon say astronomers - No moon found, but very slow rotation unexplicable without one. (2004-04-16)
• Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons - Interesting how a change in a group of baboons can remain after no individuals from when it changed remains. (2004-04-16)
• The Story about Ping - a review - It was written in 1933, but apparently is about a Unix utility anyway. Or maybe not. (2004-04-15)
• New vehicle only one metre wide designed for cities - CLEVER (Compact Low Emission Vehicle for Urban Transport). "The vehicle is different from previous attempts to create a small urban vehicle in that it is fully enclosed in a metal framework, is stylishly designed and is much safer. Its roof is as high as conventional cars, and it carries one passenger, who sits behind the driver. A prototype CLEVER vehicle will be built as part of this project and, if put into production, it should be cheaper than a conventional car." (2004-04-11)
• Turbo power reaches new heights - "Back in the 1980s, as part of a classified program called Teal Rain, a triple-turbocharged reciprocating engine demonstrat-ed sustained performance at 90,000 ft. Recently the government declassified portions of the program. Today, the engine technology is being incorporated into flight hardware on remote piloted vehicles (RPVs)." (2004-04-11)
• NASA's Chandra Observatory Catches Titan as it Transits Crab Nebula, Casting a Revealing Shadow - The X-ray shadow shows that Titan has an x-ray absorbing atmosphere 880 km high. (2004-04-06)
• Recent Developments in the Study of The Great European Witch Hunt - "Since the late 1970's, a quiet revolution has taken place in the study of historical witchcraft and the Great European Witch Hunt. The revolution wasn't quite as dramatic as the development of radio-carbon dating, but many theories which reigned supreme thirty years ago have vanished, swept away by a flood of new data." (2004-04-05)
• Ghost Town - "A story about a town where one can ride through with no stoplights, no police, no danger of hitting any the living thing..." Photographs from the Chernobyl "dead zone", where the author likes to ride her motorcycle. Discussion about the real story behind the site. (2004-04-01, 2004-05-17)
• Using rats to detect landmines - The large African rat Cricetomys is used to sniff out landmines, and in trials also samples which contain tubercolosis. (2004-03-29)
• History of Television: How BBC came into being - Overview of different aspects. (2004-03-24)
• Star lifting - "Any of several hypothetical processes by which a highly advanced civilization (at least Kardashev-II) could remove a substantial portion of a star's matter in a controlled manner for other uses." (2004-03-24)
• V-Mail - "V, or Victory mail, was a valuable tool for the military during World War II. The process, which originated in England, was the microfilming of specially designed letter sheets. Instead of using valuable cargo space to ship whole letters overseas, microfilmed copies were sent in their stead and then "blown up" at an overseas destination before being delivered to military personnel." (2004-03-21)
• The Nuclear Weapons Archive - A guide to nuclera weapons. Very detailed and extensive. (2004-03-18)
• Light*Mania - Flashlight site, reviews, comparisions, runtime plots. (2004-03-18)
• Hebrew Alphabet - Detailed and interesting. (2004-03-12)
• Time lapse and slow motion movies - Quick Time format. (2004-03-10)
• A Chilling Possibility - "By disturbing a massive ocean current, melting Arctic sea ice might trigger colder weather in Europe and North America." (2004-03-06)
• The Viking Answer Lady - "The Viking Answer Lady website is the offshoot of my personal fascination and love for Viking Age literature, history, and archaeology. Over the years, questions from my readers have prompted me to research a number of facets of Viking life that I might not otherwise have considered looking into." (2004-03-01)
• Frequently Asked Questions About 2004 DW - A recently discovered large Kuiper belt object. (2004-02-24)
• Has text-porn finally made computers 'human'? - Examples of programs which seem to pass partial Turing tests. (2004-02-24)
• Ibrahim 2 Jupiter Missiles, Turkey 1961-1962 - Erecting the Jupiter Missile and Configuring the Site. Interesting photos. For information about the missile, see Jupiter IRBM History Website. (2004-02-12)
• A Way Out of Automated Phone Hell - Judging when to transfer callers to a human by how angry they sound. (2004-02-11)
• The Madness of "OH! Mikey" - Review and images from the DVD, which is about the lives of a typical family of American store mannequins living in Japan. (2004-02-10)
• Virtual Online Steamboat Museum - (2004-01-22)
• Man Lives as "Black" for 50 Years - Then Finds Out He's Probably Not - "But all kidding aside, Joseph's DNA discovery raises a serious challenge to the way American culture seems to insist on a racial identity for everyone." (2004-01-07)
• Panderers in Japan - "Japander:n.,& v.t. 1. a western star who uses his or her fame to make large sums of money in a short time by advertising products in Japan that they would probably never use. %7Eer (see synecure, prostitute) 2. to make an ass of oneself in Japanese media." (2003-12-30)
• The Fastest Man on Earth - "Why Everything You Know About Murphy's Law is Wrong". Long article investigating the true origin of the law. (2003-12-29)
• Extreme Ironing Bureau - "Welcome to the home of extreme ironing - the latest danger sport that combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well pressed shirt." (2003-12-15)
• Atmosphere on a tidally locked world - It doesn't all have to freeze out as a solid on the dark side it seems. (2003-11-20)
• The Museum of RetroTechnology - Some examples of older technology, some oddities. (2002-09-17, 2003-11-12)
• Corner Shot - How to shoot around corners without exposing yourself. An adapter for pistols. (2003-10-30)
• The Alice and Bob after-dinner speech - given at the Zurich Seminar, April 1984 by John Gordon by invitation of Professor James Massey

  "There comes a time when people at a technical conference like this need something more relaxing.A change of pace. A shift of style.To put aside all that work stuff and think of something refreshingly different.

  So let's talk about coding theory.

  There are perhaps some of you here tonight who are not experts in coding theory, but rather have been dragged here kicking and screaming. So I thought it would be a good idea if I gave you a sort of instant, five minute graduate course in coding theory." (2003-10-29)

• Popular Baby Names - Statistics by the US Social Security Administration. (2003-10-29)
• Himalayan Art - "A virtual museum and international research database..." (2003-10-29)
• Viewing Japanese Prints - Information and examples. (2003-10-29)
• Systems of Time - Good explanation of the different kinds of time in use. (2003-10-27)
• Chris Malcolm -- Humour - "Since it is so difficult to find good reports of imaginary conferences, interviews, etc., especially in informatics-related fields, I append a few here, what one might call "professional humour"." (2003-10-23)
• Evil Genius Hoaxes - High tech pranks. (2003-10-06)
• Stampeding mice behave like fleeing humans - Study finds that doors wide enough for just one mouse results in quicker evacuation. (2003-10-06)
• The Straight Dope - "Fighting ignorance sine 1973 (it's taking longer than we thought)" (2003-10-02)
• On the Units of Time - Scientific and historical information on such matters as what a "day" is, in great detail. (2003-09-30)
• Some Humorous Stories - Collected by Jim Huggins. (2003-09-15)
• Karl Blossfeldt - Urformen der Kunst - Closeup plant photos. (2003-09-10)
• The Planetary Rings Node - "The Rings Node of the Planetary Data System is devoted to archiving, cataloging and distributing scientific data sets relevant to planetary ring systems." (2003-09-04)
• How to Spot Arial - Recognizing a type face. (2003-08-25)
• Insects result of convergent evolution - "Now it seems that their physical similarities did not arise from shared ancestry but from adaptations to a shared environment in a process known as convergent evolution." (2003-08-22)
• The Face of Buddhism and Shintoism in Japanese Art - Lots of photos, but also lots to read. Very interesting an clearly presented. (2003-08-20)
• Vintage Calculators Web Museum - Many interesting ones shown. (2003-08-20)
• Trans Atlantic Model - The model aircraft (less than 5 kg) which has flown across the Atlantic and landed Aug 13:th. (2003-08-20)
• The Greatest Marine Disaster in History ...and why you probably never heard of it. - About the sinking of Wilhelm Gustloff. (Other sources give an even higher number of fatalities.) (2003-08-17)
• Climate History - Maps and diagrams showing how the climate has changed over Earth's history. Site also has maps showing how the landmasses will look in the future. (2003-08-14)
• Zabaware's ChatterBox Challenge - Classic Quotes - "The meeting of human and artificial minds can produce some surprising exchanges! Here is a selection of weird, wacky and wonderful extracts from real chatterbot conversations." (2003-08-11)
• Die Luftwaffe im Modell - Some very good 1:48 aviation modelling. (2003-08-07)
• Fourteen Wild Ideas - Five Of Which Are True! - Interesting and sometimes far out ideas. (2003-08-07)
• Target Pistol Evolution - The Air Pistol - Fascinating older models shown. (2003-07-30)
• Could the eagles have flown Frodo into Mordor? - About a possible plot hole. (2003-07-11)
• Android World - "This site is devoted to androids. An android is an anthropomorphic robot - i.e. a robot that looks like a human. Many android developers call their creations "humanoids" rather than androids. We also have robotics links, robot links, animatronics links, and research links." (2003-06-30)
• Fake "History" That Is Flatly Wrong - No, contemporaries of Columbus didn't think the Earth was flat. (2003-06-30)
• American Museum of Photography - Mostly older photos worth seeing. (2003-06-06)
• Deja Vu: (re-)creating web history - Web history and retro browser emulator. (2003-06-05)
• Joey Skaggs - Multimedia artist Joey Skaggs has been called everything from the World's Greatest Hoaxer to a royal pain in the ass." How he got his hoaxes into the media is an interesting and fun read. (2003-06-05)
• The Museum of Unworkable Devices. - Mostly about perpetual motion devices, but also some artistic illusions. (2003-06-04)
• Red-Haired Barbarians - The Dutch and other foreigners in Nagasaki and Yokohama 1800 - 1865 40 Japanese prints from the NEHA collection. (2003-06-04)
• Small Stories - Online comics, serials and shorter ones. (2003-06-04)
• Coins for Making Change Efficiently - Apparently an 18-cent coin would reduce the number of coins needed to give back change. On the average. OK, I can buy the assumption that all values between 1 and 99 are equally probable, but what about coins the customer already has? I don't see that addressed here. (2003-05-15)
• New Light-Based Computer Runs At Quantum Speeds - Or rather, it performs certain tasks like a database search quickly, by using light interference. (2001-05-16, 2003-05-13)
• Mystery force tugs distant probes - This is about the deviations from the theoretical paths distant spaceprobes Pioneer 10 and 11 which has been known for some time and at first suspected to be some kind of systematic effect like gas leaks. But now apparently NASA has decided they have no idea what the reason is: "We've been working on this problem for several years, and we have accounted for everything we could think of." Interestingly, Galileo and Ulysses are mentioned in the article, but not Voyager 1 and 2. (2001-05-16, 2003-05-08)
• The secret of matter discovered - Why there wasn't equal amounts of antimatter and matter, but more matter which made the Universe as it is today. 20 million Charge Parity violating K meson decays have been observed, so it's now confirmed as a real effect and not just suspected. (2001-05-15, 2003-05-06)
• Miracles You'll See in the next 50 Years - This is an article written in 1950. Not the most accurate, but interesting in some details. (2001-05-15, 2003-05-05)
• Scientists Track Down The Root Of Cloning Problems - "A new study led by the Whitehead Institute traces their origin to two separate sources, reporting that while poor survival rate is influenced by the genetic background of the donor cell, the gross overgrowth of clones results from the actual procedure of cloning." (2001-05-15, 2003-05-05)
• Andrews' Raiders and The Great Locomotive Chase - The story of how The General was stolen and recaptured. (2001-05-14, 2003-04-29)
• Primitive Ways - "This Site is dedicated to Stone Age technology". Some very interesting articles and photos. (2001-05-14, 2003-04-28)
• Fantasy Planes - A collection of mostly rather extreme designs. One or two might have been realistic. (2003-04-25)
• Dmakos Gallery - Graffiti - A photo gallery of miscellaneous pictures. No special theme as to subjects, so there are no photos of graffiti there. The site has other galleries too. (2001-05-14, 2003-04-24)
• New Form Of Nitrogen: A Semiconductor - Researchers have subjected nitrogen to a pressure of 240 GPa, at which it became a solid, and it's possible for it to remain solid even at normal pressure, although at low temperatures. (2001-05-11, 2003-04-24)
• Model Airplane? - This ancient Egyptian artifact is sometimes called a model of an aircraft. This page argues convincingly that it was something else. (2001-05-11, 2003-04-24)
• Quirky Japan - "Japan, behind the conservative grey suits and formal bows, is a country quirkier than you can ever imagine." (2003-04-23)
• Affordable Spaceship - Detailed article about Scaled Composites' White Knight/SpaceShipOne combination. Short on images, but heavy on technical details. (2003-04-22)
• Long Bets - "The purpose of the Long Bets Foundation is to improve long-term thinking."
  Long term predictions and bets. Some very intersting to think about. (2003-04-17)
• The Semantic Web - Article about the meaning of things, as made understandable to computers. (2001-05-11, 2003-04-15)
• Why Engineers Don't Write Recipes - A chocolate chip cookie recipe expressed in a somewhat unuausal way. (2001-05-11, 2003-04-15)
• Puny planets like ours get flung into deep space by their big brothers - An explanation for why some other planetary systems than ours have giant planets so close to their stars. (2001-05-10, 2003-04-15)
• Climate change led to evolution - About the climate change which may have influenced human evolution, but focused on why there was a climate change in the first place. (2001-05-10, 2003-04-15)
• Warp drive underwater - About very fast supercavitating torpedos and supercavitating projectiles for underwater guns. The illustrations don't quite match the text or how I think the torpedo noses should look based on other facts, but otherwise it's a very interesting read. (2001-05-10, 2003-04-01)
• Star 'eats' a planet - "Astronomers finally have evidence that Sun-like stars with planets are guilty of swallowing the planets in orbit around them." "The team says that the only way the presence of lithium-6 in HD82943 can be explained is if the star swallowed one or more of its planets whole." (2001-05-10, 2003-04-01)
• Missile defence, will it work? - An overview of the difficulties with shooting down ballistic missiles. (2001-05-10, 2003-04-01)
• World's biggest plane flies again - The Antonov An-225 is again airworthy and apparently there will be work for it. (2001-05-08, 2003-04-01)
• Columbia research reveals that Gulf Stream is not responsible for mild winters in Europe - "Research suggests that ocean circulation plays less of a role in climate change than previously thought." (2003-03-27)
• Starship Troopers Battle the Bugs! - A cartoon. Perhaps not the Bugs you expect. (2003-03-27)
• Laura Ingalls Wilder, Frontier Girl - About the books and the reality behind them. (2001-05-08, 2003-03-25)
• Photographer to the Tsar: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii - Unique and very high quality colour photographs which documents the Russian Empire around 1907 through 1915. Don't miss! Not just the technology of how they were made is interesting, the photos themselves are, as good colour photos from this period are really rare. (2001-05-07, 2003-03-25)
• Stealth - A PDF document about stealth technologies I found among the Missile Technology Control Regime documents (2001-05-07, 2003-03-25)
• The Simputer - It stands for "Simple Inexpensive Mobile Computer", and is a small, cheap device, intended for the masses in less affluent countries. It's been developed in India. It's got an Intel CPU, 32MB RAM, 16MB flash memory, touch sensitive screen and configured like a handheld computer, with inbuilt modem. (2001-05-04, 2003-03-25)
• 'Tractor beam' technology advances - Using laser beams to move molecules and small particles. (2001-05-04)
• 'Super stem cell' tested in mice - Stem cells can develop into any kind of cell. "This study provides the strongest evidence yet that the adult body harbours stem cells that are as flexible as embryonic stem cells." See also this and this article for more information. (2001-05-04)
• China the Beautiful - Many different kinds of content in this site. I find the paintings and historical maps of interest, but there's lots more of cultural and historical nature. (2003-03-24)
• Iraq Maps - (2003-03-20)
• Psubs.org - Site about personal submarines. Some are really impressive accomplishments. (2003-03-19)
• An Introduction to Forensic Firearm Identification - Extensive site. Interesting to learn how early a weapon was identified using the bullet and paper. (2003-03-18)
• Cover artists, Lois McMaster Bujold books - Really interesting to see how different they can be in different countries. My favourites are the Russian ones by A Dubovik and those by Caza. A definite non-favourite one (although it makes me laugh) is the German one for The Warrior's Apprentice. (2001-05-04, 2003-03-18)
• As We May Think - A 1945 article by Vannevar Bush. Some very interesting concepts, like 'Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.' (2001-05-04, 2003-03-18)
• The highly unofficial CPIP WG - At long last, an implementation of RFC1149! CPIP = (carrier pigeon internet protocol) (2001-05-03, 2003-03-18)
• Astronautix - Space rescue vehicles - Overview with details about orbital rescue devices. (2003-03-17)
• Airbus A340 Website - Information about this airliner. Goes into detail for some systems, has multimedia files. (2003-03-17)
• Atomic Veterans History Project - About participants in US nuclear weapons testing. Documents and photos which don't only show the same things always shown when it's about nuclear explosions, but also people, preparations and effects. (2003-03-14)
• Schadenfreude Interactive - The front page doesn't seem like much (which I think is the intention), but do read the descriptions of the games and staff. (2003-03-14)
• The Luminous Landscape - Landscape, nature and documentary photography. Articles and equipment reviews. (2003-03-12)
• Apollo Lunar Surface Journal - "The Apollo Lunar Surface Journal is a record of the lunar surface operations conducted by the six pairs of astronauts who landed on the Moon from 1969 through 1972. The Journal is intended as a resource for anyone wanting to know what happened during the missions and why." A very good site. (2003-03-11)
• The Belfry Comics Index - A very extensive listing of online comics, with features to help you find what you might like but don't know about. (2003-03-08)
• US Navy Marine Mammal Program - Brief, but still interesting. (2003-03-07)
• The Real Walter Jon Williams Page - "Welcome to the online home of Walter Jon Williams, science fiction and fantasy writer, scuba fiend, kenpo maven, and fantasy iron chef." (2003-03-07)
• Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture - (2003-03-07)
• Traditional Crafts of Japan: Metal - Interesting content. (2003-03-07)
• Seeing guide dogs through society's eyes - Guide dogs in Japan (2001-05-03, 2003-03-06)
• Lofoten Photogalerie - Photos from northern Norway. (2003-03-06)
• World Value Survey - Interesting survey about cultural differences. Unfortunately some links require JavaScript. Some direct links to specific diagrams: Three broad cultural zones, Survival vs well-being, Subjective well-being and democratic institutions (2001-05-03, 2003-03-06)
• Roland Beverly's Ekranoplan Site - Mainly about the building of flyging scale models. (2003-03-06)
• The Flying Kettle Project - "This site is dedicated to the concept and practice of the Flying Kettle in other words, to the promotion of Steam Balloons and Steam Airships." (2003-03-04)
• US Patents: Disc Aircraft - A long illustrated list of strange looking aircraft designs. Some more practical seeming than others. (2003-03-04)
• Eastern Light Nature Photograph - Nature and other photographs, as well as some articles (2001-05-03, 2003-03-04)
• Why Nerds are Unpopular - Long essay, also analyzes related subjects. (2003-03-03)
• Reema's Photo Gallery - Good photos, Hong Kong mostly (2001-05-03, 2003-03-03)
• Birching in the Isle of Man - The form of corporal punishment explained. (2003-03-03)
• Big Cypress Gallery - The Photographic Art of Clyde Butcher - Good nature photos (2001-05-03, 2003-03-03)
• The Official Stanislaw Lem Site - (2003-03-02)
• Physics - gravitational interactions - Orbital dynamics simulations. (2003-02-21)
• Dive Into Accessibility - 30 days to a more accessible web site - Good advice. (2003-02-21)
• Christopher Burkett, photographer - Some good nature photos (2001-05-03, 2003-02-21)
• Early Canid Domestication: The Farm Fox Experiment - Interesting about domestication of wild animals. It can happan in not very many generations, and is at least in this case accompanied by visible changes too. (2001-04-27, 2003-02-20)
• Flight Journal magazine - The "Who Flew First" Debate - Focusing on Gustave Whitehead's design and what it might or might not have done. (Note that some information about the Wright brothers is not quite correct/outdated.) (2003-02-20)
• The Two Crystallographers from Yorkshire Sketch - About how things were in the bad old days (2001-04-26, 2003-02-20)
• New Research Confirms That Natural Selection Is Acting On The Current Human Population - "New evidence suggests that natural selection is leading women to have their first child at earlier ages." (2001-04-24, 2003-02-20)
• 'Genetic changes' triggered Man's artistic abilities - Interesting notion, and it's not too far fetched to be true. (2003-02-20)
• E-paper moves a step nearer - Or rather thin, flexible displays. (2001-04-24, 2003-02-18)
• New Flashlight Sees Through Doors As Well As Windows - It's not really a flashlight, but a small radar device which senses the motion of someone breathing behind walls and doors. Interesting to note that development of it started as a means of checking vital signs of soldiers. (2001-04-24, 2003-02-13)
• Server 54 Where Are You? - An unusual way for a computer to disappear (2001-04-24, 2003-02-12)
• Astronomers find distant "double planet" - Much smaller than Pluto and Charon and farther from the sun (2001-04-20, 2003-02-11)
• What Medieval Witnesses Saw Was Not Big Lunar Impact - What was seen in 1178 wasn't an impact on the moon, as such an impact would have created lots of meteors impacting on the Earth, and nobody has reported that as happening and it would be very noticable, to say the least (2001-04-20, 2003-02-08)
• Girl must sit in office until dye washes out - Apparently, some people see green hair as such a large distraction that other students shouldn't be allowed to see it. The part about "I just don't understand how they can say that their constitutional rights don't start until the ninth grade," is interesting. (2001-04-20, 2003-02-06)
• An Informal Camo Study - Good information on what really works, and why (2001-04-20, 2003-02-05)
• Flashlight Modification and Creations - Interesting examples of what can be done. Some clear improvements, some just interesting. (2003-02-03)
• Diego Garcia - A personal account of the island and life there. (2003-01-31)
• Reno Racers - Good photos of Yak-3 aircraft (2001-04-19, 2003-01-31)
• Nuclear Weapons Frequently Asked Questions - Very detailed documents covering different topics. (2003-01-31)
• Björns svärdssida - Very good sword resource, not only in Swedish (2001-04-19, 2003-01-30)
• UK AFV with composite hull passes field tests - This is what is meant by "plastic armour" (2001-04-19, 2003-01-28)
• K9 partner armor - Body armour for dogs (2001-04-18, 2003-01-27)
• Robot gliders to watch red tides - A use for underwater unmanned vehicles which move by changing their density. (2003-01-27)
• New planets and planetars swarm in space - Or is the latter free floating sub-brown dwarfs (2001-04-06, 2003-01-27)
• Radio gives mighty roar to quiet cars - "A car radio that plays the throaty sound of the classic car of your choice in synch with your driving could make any rusting old hatchback sound like a Ferrari, or even a Harley-Davidson, its inventors claim." Do they really think people would think this would make driving more fun? (2003-01-27)
• Distant supernova shows Universe defies gravity - its brightness indicates that a mysterious force is opposing gravity, perhaps the so called dark energy (2001-04-05, 2003-01-23)
• Al Gore invents the Internet - I know it did not really happen this way (2001-04-05, 2003-01-21)
• My life as a celebrity Scientologist - Pretending to be an artist and checking in at the Celebrity Center in Los Angeles - a Scientology retreat for the rich and famous (2001-04-04, 2003-01-19)
• Virtual imaging brings fossils to life - Making images of fossils by slicing them up very thinly and using computers to create images of the whole fossil (2001-04-04, 2003-01-17)
• Tom Hanks - Where is he now? - A not quite serious alternate history (2001-04-04, 2003-01-15)
• Lunch-mate syndrome - About the dangers of not eating lunch with your friends (2001-04-04, 2003-01-07)
• The Memory Hole - "The Memory Hole demonstrates how powerful a tool the Web can be when it comes to the retrieval and dissemination of information (especially information that certain parties would prefer to suppress)" (2003-01-05)
• EP-3E Aries II - What kind of aircraft it is (2001-04-03, 2003-01-03)
• Modern boys and mobile girls - William Gibson writes about why Japan is an inspiration for him (2001-04-03, 2003-01-03)
• Mole nose its own mind - Maybe the best sense of touch of any mammal (2001-04-03, 2003-01-02)
• Elephants Pick Up Good Vibrations -- Through Their Feet - Long distance seismic communication (2001-04-03, 2003-01-02)
• Water computer - Fluidic logic gates. (2002-12-31)
• SNF Djur & Natur - Vilda grannar - Site in Swedish. (2002-12-23)
• Painting pictures with CSS - A rather unusual way to use Cascading Style Sheets. (2002-12-23)
• Nurflugel - Site about flying wing aircraft. Another is The Wing is the Thing. (2002-12-20)
• Twin Pushers and Other Free Flight Oddities - Small flying models. (2002-12-17)
• Edo: A Virtual Tour - A very good and extensive site about Tokyo (as Edo is called nowadays) and environs with plenty of illustrations. (2002-12-17)
• The Audiophile BS Page - Interesting what some people believe. (2002-12-15)
• Gallery of Regrettable Food - Bizarre examples, from not very long ago. (2002-12-15)
• Ferrets in art history - Medieval art. (2002-12-15)
• Rocketry lectures - A series of lectures about rocketry. Very interesting. (2002-12-15)
• The Illustrated Beowulf - The main points illustrated with photos. (2002-12-14)
• Shuttle Views the Earth: Geology from Space - A selection of interesting photos with explaining text. (2002-11-28)
• Gallery of Phidget Projects - Phidget means physical widget, especially in the area of computer user interfaces. (2002-11-26)
• Your dog has you all figured out - The difference between dogs and wolves. (2002-11-25)
• Did quark matter strike Earth? - About two otherwise inexplicable seismic events. (2002-11-25)
• The Uncanny Valley - According to this theory, close, but not quite, to a human can invoke an emotional response which is more negative than something less similar to us. (2002-10-25)
• Earth's little brother found - "Astronomers have discovered the first object ever that is in a companion orbit to the Earth." More on 3753 Cruithne which is mentioned in the text. (2002-10-23)
• Book-A-Minute - Extremely condensed plots. (2002-10-17)
• The Editing Room Archives - Brief versions of movie scripts. (2002-10-17)
• One-line summaries of SF sub-genres - (2002-10-16)
• Solar balloons - Solar energy powered hot air balloons. Sort of amazing what's doable. (2002-10-10)
• Escher's "Belvedere" in Lego - A feat recreating the image in 3D, with explanation on how it was done. Two more of Escher's images done in a similar fashion, plus more Lego stuff, at Andrew Lipson's Lego Page. (2002-10-08)
• Youth's Educator For Home And Society - 1896 - Interesting insight in times past. (2002-10-06)
• Henri Cartier Bresson - Some of his photos in different categories. A collection if portraits by him. (2002-10-02)
• Computer Museum - Objects from the University of Virginia's Computer Museum. Photos and brief descriptions. (2002-10-02)
• Portraits of Mushrooms from Japan - Beautiful photography. (2002-09-26)
• The Unnatural Enquirer - Contains gems like "Decorate your lair on a budget with EVIL Magazine", "The Programmer's Song" and more. (2002-09-24)
• Tit for Tat - Games theory in the animal world. (2002-09-17)
• Lost in Japan - Photos (including panoramas) and text about a tourist trip to Japan. (2002-09-09)
• Homebuilt airliner cockpit simulator projects - Links to sites belonging to people building simulators as a hobby. (2002-08-23)
• Nuclear Weapons: The High Energy Weapons Archive - A Guide to Nuclear Weapons - Rather good overview, with lots of details. (2002-08-23)
• The Naked Face - Can you read people's thoughts just by looking at them? - Long article about facial expressions. (2002-08-20)
• Scientist says ostrich study confirms bird 'hands' unlike those of dinosaurs - A study discovers that ostrich foetuses have thumbs for a short period, which means birds' fingers aren't the same as dinosaurs'. I'm not totally convinced by the argument that this in itself is proof birds didn't evolve from dinosaurs. (2002-08-19)
• Chinese Unrestricted Warfare - "The following selections are taken from "Unrestricted Warfare," a book published in China in February 1999 which proposes tactics for developing countries, in particular China, to compensate for their military inferiority vis-%E0-vis the United States during a high-tech war." (2002-08-19)
• Death Star To Open Day Care Center - Article in The Onion. (2002-08-16)
• Project Ornithopter - "This website will describe ornithopter research, design, and testing by a team based at the University of Toronto's Institute for Aerospace Studies." (2002-08-15)
• The X-15 versions that never flew - A link collection. (2002-08-15)
• History of Hydraulics: Hero of Alexandria - A few illustrations from a book about his inventions. (2002-08-15)
• Seeing Around Corners - It's a long article about simulated societies and how that may enable us to learn something about real ones. It starts out with the mystery of why the Anasazi disappeared, continues with some examples of society models and then returns to Anasazi with a model of how that society might have worked in one regard. (2002-08-15)
• Grandma Knapp's '37 Road Trip - Photo journal from road trip in USA in 1937. (2002-08-06)
• The Stanford Prison Experiment - As recounted by one of the experimenters. What happened to the "guards" and "prisoners" may not be very surprising, but note how the experimenters themselves and others "play along" a bit excessively, and that all this happened in only six days. (2002-08-06)
• Email Filtering: Killing the Killer App - How spam have made legitimate mail less useful. (2002-07-23)
• Clownfish know their place - These fish who live in anemones tolerate smaller ones living in the same, don't move between them and stay small so as not to compete with the larger ones. (2002-07-17)
• TCPA Palladium FAQ - A long document about the perhaps forthcoming PC architecture / operating system and its implications. (2002-07-15)
• An Atlas of The Universe - "This web page is designed to give everyone an idea of what our universe actually looks like. There are nine main maps on this web page, each one approximately ten times the scale of the previous one. The first map shows the nearest stars and then the other maps slowly expand out until we have reached the scale of the entire visible universe." (2002-06-28)
• In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash - How, and when, US coins and paper money were stripped of their religion neutral status. (2002-06-28)
• Definitions of Science Fiction - What it is or isn't, but several persons. (2002-06-27)
• The Language Construction Kit - Fascinating read on how to make one up from scratch. (2002-06-26)
• A near-death experience - A defence minister interviews two suicide bombers. One who changed her mind, one who failed. (2002-06-25)
• Newfound Planetary Systems has Hometown Look - I think it's ridiculous to call the planetary system discovered like our own. As it says in this article, there's one gas giant in an orbit ten times closer to the star than Earth is the Sun and one suspected to be almost as close. So finding one planet more or less corresponding to Jupiter is hardly reason enough. (2002-06-14)
• NOAA Ocean Explorer: Sound in the Sea - Ships, earthquakes, whales and a couple of unknowns. (2002-06-14)
• The Santesson Recipe Collection - I haven't tried much of this, but most dishes seem quite good. (2002-06-14)
• Beijing paper falls for gag in American tabloid - Another reason not to trust what's in media. (2002-06-10)
• Faces from the ice age - Images of humans, carved into cave floors, long ago. (2002-06-03)
• Artwork of Saturn and Satellites - It's on a NASA site and related to the Cassini probe. (2002-05-22)
• Fun with Fingerprint Readers - Seems they're not as hard to fool as they should. (2002-05-16)
• Cargo Cult Science - Article by Richard Feynman. "So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land." (2002-05-07)
• Robot cameras 'will predict crimes before they happen' - Doesn't seem quite likely to me that this really works. Has "It works by examining images coming in from close circuit television cameras (CCTV) and comparing them to behaviour patterns that have already programmed into its memory. The software, called Cromatica, can then mathematically work out what is likely to happen next." really been tested? (2002-05-07)
• Bible Quiz, FFRF, Inc - Subtitled "What Do You Really Know About The Bible?". (2002-04-26)
• A Victorian Era Robot History - A fascinating site about robots of the 19:th century you might not know about. Don't miss the page about Victorian airships. (2002-04-24)
• Ant supercolony dominates Europe - Populations across 6000 km recognize each other and don't fight with ants from other nests, as is usual. (2002-04-17)
• Sea Gliders Show Underwater and Off-World Potential - Article about how vehicles can use changes in buoyancy to propel themselves without any external moving parts. (2002-04-11)
• Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century - Lots of information here, on different topics, presented in a quite accessible way. (2002-04-09)
• Great Moments in Science - A series of short essays on different subjects. (2002-04-09)
• Smaller Asteroids Can Be Deflected From Earth With A Paint Job - Seems this might actually make enough of a difference over long time to work. And it's much easier than building mass drivers and the like. (2002-04-08)
• The Cosmic Spectrum and the Color of the Universe - No, not turquiose. Perhaps beige, perhaps more reddish, perhaps blue. It's all a matter of which whitepoint you choose. (2002-04-05)
• Christopher Hitchens On Mother Theresa - An interview in connection with a book (not new). (2002-03-26)
• Possible configuration of ancient oceans on Mars - Images of how Mars could have looked. Sort of, as the colours aren't true. (2002-03-18)
• Augmented Reality: A New Way of Seeing - On overlaying information presented on a wearable transparent computer screen. See also Augmented Reality an article about how a wearable computer could assist the user. (2002-03-15)
• The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business - Examples of rather stupid things which has happened. In quite mixed categories. (2002-03-15)
• Just another day on the river. Not. - Photo series of a tugboat/bridge encounter with a rather surprising outcome. (2002-02-27)
• Evil Overlord, Inc. - The home of The Evil Overlord List and Star Trek parodies. (2002-02-26)
• New Report on Hubble Space Telescope Impact Damage - Article with photos showing the effect of the impacts, some of which may be the results of satellite breakups, some of micrometeroids. (2002-02-15)
• Learn Not To Speak Esperanto - A well thought out critique of the language. (2002-02-12)
• Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works: Books by Jack Vance - A long document about one of my favourite authors. (2002-02-07)
• Listening to the web on the radio - Sort of bringing information on the Internet to people who aren't connected. (2002-02-06)
• Encyclopedia Astronautica - Interesting site about spaceflight. (2002-02-05)
• Sven's Space Place - Interesting space history notes and some more like recordings of transmissions from space. (2002-02-04)
• The Strange Mechanism Museum - This site about unusual designs, projects, prototypes and production. Emphasis is on imagery. (2002-02-04)
• The Story of the Ping Program - Interesting, and it's got reviews for a book with a similar title which should be read. (2002-01-30)
• Stuffed fox teaches wallabies to fear predators - This is a way of training captive born wallabies to survive in the wild. Their offspring seems to take after the parents, which is a first instance of such learning in marsupials. (2002-01-28)
• Japanese Engrish - Site with examples of almost-English texts used in Japan. (2002-01-23)
• Slick birds are wearing wool - Oil damaged birds have been given wool jumpers to protect them while their feathers don't function. (2002-01-22)
• Russian reindeer came to wartime Britain on submarine - Seems like it actually happened. 56 days in a sub with a reindeer doesn't sound easy. (2002-01-18)
• The world's largest city - Before you follow the link, try to guess which one I think of. My guess is that many of you haven't even heard of it. (2002-01-17)
• Combined accelerator and brake pedal could save lives - Pivot to accelerate, push to brake. (2002-01-14)
• Foreign Missiel Development and the Ballistic Missile Threat Through 2015 - A US report about what they think others are capable of and likely to do. (2002-01-14)
• Deadly harbour invader puzzling marine scientists - It's kind of a feral sponge, which doesn't seem rare, but it's previously unknown. (2002-01-10)
• The sun: a great ball of iron? - A theory which says the solar system formed out of a supernova. There's some supporting facts, but it's not a new theory and few seems to have been convinced. What I'd like to know is if this could have any bearing on the missing neutrino problem. (2002-01-10)
• Fake or Foto - A short test where you can judge whether images are photographs or computer generated. (2002-01-08)
• Megway Transporting Human - Maybe not as revolutionary as it sounds. But I guess that's the point, sort of. (2002-01-07)
• New Deep-Sea Squid - It's a new type which doesn't look like the squids we're used to. It's not small. (2002-01-04)
• White Sharks Migrate Thousands Of Miles Across The Sea, New Study Finds - And it's also interesting how deep they swim. (2002-01-04)
• Himalayan Horizon From Space - An unusual low angle photograph of Earth from space. (2001-12-28)
• The Tolkien Sarcasm Page - Lots to read and quite funny. I'm particularily impressed by the board game. (2001-12-18)
• Makapansgat Cobble Analysed - It seems probable that pre-humans, more than 2 million years ago, brought this stone home just because it looked a bit like a face. (2001-12-14)
• Bear-proof suit scares off grizzly - Getting close to bears in this suit apparently doesn't work well. (2001-12-14)
• The Nonverbal Dictionary of Gestures, Signs %26 Body Language Cues - Interesting stuff. (2001-12-11)
• "Bear-proof" suit to be put to the test - After some years, the maker will finally test this suit against a trained bear. A review of a video about a previous attempt to meet wild bears. (2001-12-04)
• Mobile phone system can identify mystery music - Someone has come up with the idea that hashing music can give every piece of music a signature so that playing just 3 s of it can identify it. (2001-11-29)
• A Very Massive Stellar Black Hole in the Milky Way Galaxy - Note that this one is 14 times the mass of our sun, which by far isn't a record. It's that we don't quite know how a single star could form a black hole as massive as this which is the interesting thing. Supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies are formed in a different way. The article has some good information on how data was collected and interpreted. (2001-11-29)
• Hubble Measures Atmosphere on World Around Another Star - It does this by measuring how much of the star's light is absorbed during transit of the planet in front of it. (2001-11-28)
• Tundra Class .45 air rifle - An example of a modern, powerful air rifle. (2001-11-28)
• Small, Mountain Rivers Play Big Role In Ocean Sediment - Seems like small rivers can deliver more sediment to the ocean than even the largest ones. (2001-11-26)
• New tree found in Vietnam - A species which is new to science. (2001-11-26)
• Breathing like dinosaurs - This a an article about research to find out how alligators breathe. They're better at it other reptiles, because they can breathe while they move, for example. (2001-11-26)
• His grasp of spin is chilling . . . - Some comments about an apparently rather well made propaganda video. (2001-11-26)
• Pentagon considers ear-blasting anti-hijack gun - A device which creates a more or less directed sound of 140dB. It's not just for close range, so I think that if it works, we can expect it in other places than airliners. (2001-11-15)
• 1/16 Scratchbuilt Douglas TBD-1 Devastator - Very impressive scale model. (2001-11-13)
• The Lund Wind Tunnel - This wind tunnel is for birds. (2001-11-13)
• First glimpse inside a sunspot - 3D imaging with using the velocity of sound. (2001-11-08)
• Online auction study reveals bidding tips - For example, if there's a photo of the object, it'll fetch an extra 11%, it seems. (2001-11-08)
• The Leonardo Museum in Vince - Web site shows some interesting photos of models of his designs. (2001-11-05)
• X-Ray Flash Fly Photography - Interesting photos showing what can be done if you can get the x-ray source to be small enough. (2001-11-05)
• Images of Afghanistan in 1976-78 - Photos by Douglas R. Powell. (2001-10-31)
• Hosts with the most, ma'am, at your service - About "Lady Clubs" in Thailand. (2001-10-30)
• Megascale Engineering - An overview of some really large projects.
  One of the unfeasable ones is the so called ringworld (because it's not dynamically stable), but as can be seen in the Ringworld Art Gallery it's a quite impressive structure. (Note that when you look down at the surface viewing the whole width of it, the whole planet we live on would be the size of just a very few pixels.)
  An orbital on the other hand is much smaller, but it would be stable, as it's in orbit around the star. You can find a few images where one figures in the "old works" section here: Excession.
  Custom Planets or Move Over Slartibartfast! discusses what might be called extreme forms of terraforming, if the section on supramundane habitats seems interesting (it is!), there's a 2.58MB zip file with the paper Supramundane Planets as GIFs. (2001-10-23)
• Carlos Ententza's You Are Next Diorama - Unusual subject and clever idea. A 1/72 aircraft model used to represent a large r/c aircraft. (2001-10-23)
• Genetic algorithms evolve optimum satellite orbits - "Finding the best configuration is deceptively complicated because, despite the small number of satellites, the number of possible orbit combinations is vast." (2001-10-17)
• Bert and Osama - Theories on how they apparently ended up together on a poster. (2001-10-11)
• The 2001 World Human Powered Speed Challenge - About very fast (more than 100 km/h) bicycles that don't look much like normal ones. (2001-10-09)
• GPS Drawing Gallery - Tracing the routes people have travelled, sometimes forming deliberate images, sometimes showing interesting details of how aircraft have flown. (2001-10-09)
• "The Souvenir Hunters" diorama - A diorama featuring a A6M3 Zero under water and a diver. Very unusual modelling and well done. (2001-10-04)
• Berlin Brigade Paint Scheme - About the background of the distinctive urban camouflage used by British in Berlin. AFV's of the Berlin Field Squadron has additional photos of different AFVs. (2001-10-01)
• George Bush states that atheists are not citizens or patriots - Not the current US president, so this is old news, but it's revealing all the same. (2001-10-01)
• Black hole's wild ride - It's 6000 ly from us and as it's been observed for 43 years its orbit can be determined, which in this case it may tell us something about our galaxy's history. (2001-09-14)
• Tintin et l'aviation - If you've ever wondered what aircraft types that have been in Tintin albums, this is the site for you. (2001-09-14)
• Artificial ants solve network problems - "A fuel firm on Italian-Swiss border is using ant-derived algorithms to work out the best route for its drivers delivering supplies to petrol stations." (2001-09-12)
• Being ugly is attractive too - "Brooks says that previous studies failed to detect idiosyncratic mate choice because they looked at what whole populations found attractive on average." What a surprise. (2001-09-12)
• Ads can alter memory claim scientists - Aparently even advertising can cause people to have false memories. "Adults shown a mock advert in which Disney World visitors shake hands with a Bugs Bunny character became convinced they had done the same as a child." Apparently even of things which couldn't have happened. (2001-09-12)
• Political maps of Europe - The different regions over time since about 2000 years back up to AD 1700. (2001-09-12)
• The Oughtred Society - "dedicated to the history and collection of slide rules"
  Other slide rule sites of interest can be found via Kung's OnLine Slide Rule BookMark. (2001-09-07)
• Nerve chip goes live - A nerve cell-silicon microchip has been built. The trick was to see that the nerve cells stayed in place and didn't grow together. (2001-09-04)
• Walk Like a Dinosaur - A bit on experimental biology where humans are loaded with "suits" (well, really a backpack) to make them similar to dinosaurs, in order to investigate how they could have moved. Not that everyone agrees with the conclusions. (2001-09-03)
• Earth's light show is a clue to finding habitable neighbors - Insightful article about how Earth differs from other terrestrial planets in our solar system, not only by spectrum, but by having the most complicated light curve, as the surface is very different in places compared to the other planets pretty even surfaces. This is also relatively easy to look for when trying to find other life bearing planets. (2001-09-03)
• Astronomers get six-way vision - Gravititional lensing which produces six images of the same object. Gives clues to galaxy formation. (2001-09-03)
• Seal pups' early lesson - They learn to recognize their mother in two days. (2001-09-03)
• Chocolate: Good or bad? - Apparently not an easy question to answer. (2001-09-03)
• The Chess Variants Pages - Fascinating read about lots of different variations on this game. I knew about and have played Tandem Chess, and I knew chess had evolved, but I didn't know there were this many playable variants. (2001-08-30)
• Intimidation, deception -- and that's just the cops - About how the Japanese police handles suspects. (2001-08-29)
• An interview with Berkely Breathed - Long, worth reading. (Found it via this weblog.) (2001-08-28)
• Delhi children make play of the net - About how illiterate children taught themselves to use a computer which was installed in a hole in a wall. (2001-08-27)
• Large world found near Pluto - It's larger than Pluto's moon Charon and seems to have an orbit much like Pluto's (sometimes inside Neptune and at an angle to the ecliptic). (2001-08-27)
• African elephant 'is two species' - It's been known they look different, but apparently it wasn't much suspected they were different species. (2001-08-27)
• Supersonic space shocks caught on camera - The space telescope Hubble images supersonic shock fronts from exploding stars. Interesting since it means computer simulations can be compared with observations. (2001-08-27)
• Super-heavy hydrogen flashes briefly - About the very brief appearance and observation of the isotope Hydrogen-5. (2001-08-27)
• The Tree of Life - "The Tree of Life is a project containing information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their history, and characteristics." (2001-08-27)
• Censorship in action: why I don't publish my HDCP results - "The DMCA makes it illegal to talk about certain security systems. The equivalent law for non-digital protection systems would make it illegal to warn people about a cheap and very weak door lock being installed on their houses because criminals could also use that same information."
  "The DMCA has been called the Snake Oil Protection Act. When a manufacturer makes a defective product, you expect them to fix it. Not in this case. The DMCA protects the manufacturer of a defective product by making it illegal to show that the product is defective. Who came up with this idea?" (2001-08-21)
• The Once and Future Sun - About the evolution of the sun and our solar system. (2001-08-20)
• Planet hunt pays off - Note that what has been found is a solar system which might be similar to ours. There's no indication whatsoever of a planet which could harbour life, it's just that in this place it's not ruled out like it is in other planetary systems found so far. (2001-08-17)
• Knots on the Web - Very comprehensive site. (2001-08-17)
• Active Denial Technology - Using microwaves as a non-leathal weapon. (2001-08-14)
• Game Review of Chess - Written as if it was (or the reviewer thought it was) a new game. In the style of the sports journalist who was sent to review "Othello" and had never heard of Shakespeare - but he wrote he liked the play and thought the author should write more, whereas this reviewer doesn't think much of the game. (2001-08-08)
• This site keeps 24 hour watch - A site about watches with 24 hour dials. (2001-07-26)
• New Guinea Singing Dog Conservation Society - An interesting kind, or rather a subspecies, of dog. I think some of the dogs I see here in the Solomon Islands (on vacation) look quite a bit like them and some sound a bit different too. But I'm not sure they really are that kind of dog or not. (2001-07-20)
• The Limitations of the Singularity - "What limits are there to the speed knowledge and technology can increase?" (2001-06-20)
• thepolarcircle.com - "The one stop source for Polar imagery." (2001-06-13)
• The Inexplicable Objects Archive - Too bad this week's object and inexplicable link were the last. (2001-06-12)
• Titan Arum webcam - One of the very largest and smelliest flowers is about to bloom, something which is very rare outside where it ordinarily grows. (2001-06-07)
• Spiral galaxy stays young at heart - Recent images of M33 indicate its central bulge doesn't contain just old stars, as it should according to current theories on galaxy formation. "This is puzzling to astronomers and, if the same effect is found to be common among other spiral galaxies, it could force a reassessment of ideas about how galaxies formed." (2001-06-07)
• Study Indicates Planet Formation May Be Rare In Universe - "Orion, a giant stellar nursery thought to have spawned roughly 20,000 low-mass stars like the sun in the last 10 million years, also harbors a handful of massive type O and B stars that emit blowtorch-like radiation, destroying most pre-planetary disks in their vicinity." (2001-06-07)
• PSU drops cockroach research lab after bugged neighbors complain - Scientists planned to use an abandoned house to study cockroaches in, in order to come up with better ways to get rid of them. Now they'll do it in a lab instead. (2001-06-07)
• Invisible toy doll makes money out of thin air - It's not just invisible, it doesn't exist, but sell well anyway. "Trading Standards say it is okay to sell the toy, as long as people can see it's an empty packet." (2001-06-07)
• EU governments to give law enforcement agencies access to all communications data - A summary of a Statewatch report commenting on that it may become a requirement in the EU to save electronic communications for seven years. Yes, if you live in the EU, someone thinks all your phone calls should be on file even if you aren't the subject of a criminal investigation. (2001-06-01)
• Great Science-Fiction and Fantasy Works: Overlooked Gems - I don't agree with everything on the list (nor have I read it all), but it seems quite useful. (2001-05-29)
• Rafting the Grand Canyon - A photographic diary. I've been there myself (only we went in aluminium dories) and this one captures the feeling of being there well. (2001-05-29)
• No Rain on Mars Plain - The Red Planet's "coastlines" turn out to be evidence for violent volcanoes or an asteroid impact. (2001-05-23)
• Fishy clue to rise of humans - It seems Neanderthalers didn't eat fish. Fish is good for you, but in this case their problem may have been that ordinary prey will more often run out.
  If I may add something myself, it's that there's no sign at all that any other humans than us modern ones ever went out on the sea out of sight of land. (2001-05-23)
• A New Shakespeare Portrait? - And of course some others. (2001-05-23)
• MOOSE - A 1960's concept, which would have worked, for letting an individual astronaut leave a spaceship in a small (only 215 kg including the astronaut) piece of equipment and return to earth. It works with just a 1.8 m diameter heat shield. (2001-05-22)
• Solving the Mystery of Insect Flight - Article both about the ways insects use to generate lift and manoeuvre and how scientists are trying to figure out exactly what is happening, for example by using controlled scale models and by measuring forces from captive flies. (2001-05-18)
• Child's Play - Interview with toy designer. (2001-05-18)
• The Tramp and the Railroad - Article writtin in 1898 by a writer, who lived undercover as a hobo among them, about how they live and take advantage of railroads. (2001-05-17)
• Suck it and climb - Suction pads which allow a human to climb walls. Improvement over earlier inventions in that they work on walls which aren't totally smooth. But they're powered by compressed air, so the system weighs 30 kg. (2001-05-17)
• Seed search finds vanished plants - People from a seed bank find plants thought to be extinct. But clearly not by everyone: "It is now threatened in the wild and has not been seen in the region since 1954. [...] Finally, on the point of giving up, we asked a local shepherd, who immediately recognised the plant we were looking for and directed us to a very healthy population." It's an important plant, so it's good they found it. (2001-05-17)
• Langford Writings - A selection of miscellaneous articles and oddments by David Langford. Mainly about science fiction and fantasy. (2001-05-17)
• Gallery of Data Visualization - The Best and Worst of Statistical Graphics - Very good. "This Gallery of Data Visualization displays some examples of the Best and Worst of Statistical Graphics, with the view that the contrast may be useful, inform current practice, and provide some pointers to both historical and current work." summarizes well what it's about. (2001-05-17)

If links don't work, you can look for archived copies of the documents.