Friday, October 24, 2008
I was testing out Inquisitor in Safari (which I highly recommend and which now available for Firefox and IE—you’ll never go back to regular seaches.) and I started out by typing a boring “Hello”. The results were boring: Hello Magazine at the top. Then I followed it with “kitty” (it’s my subconscious, don’t ask) and the updated results were not particularly interesting either, so I got a little intense and typed “inquisition.” It was probably primed in my memory from thinking about Inquisitor, but you gotta admit, “Hello kitty inquisition” is a pretty good search term. The result you ask? The Warhammer 40K, Hello Kitty Sisters of Battle brigade. If you never played big tabletop games as a kid, you may not want to know, but for those of us who were into the miniatures, this is downright hilarious. I would just love to see some ubergeek pwned by the Sisters of Battle. Pink tanks… oo-rah!
Monday, August 18, 2008
I’ve never had this particular problem with Google, but I bet if I keeping using it as much as I do, it won’t be long.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Despite the fact that “Semantic Web” has been trending down (at least in Google searches), it seems like more web sites devoted to it are popping up these days. I’ve been messing around with Twine for a fews weeks now and it seems pretty useful, although it definitely can’t accomplish what they claim. [^1] A new one that I stumbled into, via KurzweilAI.net is Powerset. My 30 second review is that I tried searches on two pretty obscure subjects that I’ve been reading about lately, the St. Petersburg factor[^2] and kriegsspiel. Basically, I got the same search results at wikipedia, powerset and google—no immediately discernible differences.
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Tuesday, March 18, 2008
I found a fairly significant advancement in the development of CSS over at Blueprint CSS on Google Code. The major benefit here would be the standardization of this site’s XHTML and CSS, as well as the ability to “widgetize” the theme–something I’ve not been able to pull off before because of the CSS layout. It’s exciting and I’m happy to be doing it, but I’m also too lazy to do it somewhere in a development environment and then move it here. I’m just going to do it here. It shouldn’t take more than a few days anyway. In the meantime, some strangeness may happen, but that’s okay. Let’s just call it avant-garde design–kay?
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Google calculator is great fun. One of the things that it does that I have found invaluable is conversions; meaning, you can find the value of a pound in grams simply by typing “1lb in grams.” One that I thought of today, after encountering an article on Wikipedia about Moore’s Law was converting various unit measurements into the width of atoms. In the entry on Moore’s Law it is mentioned that IBM has recently engineered a process for printing circuitry that is only 29.9 nanometers in width. Elsewhere I discovered that an atom is roughly 130 picometers in width. ((Of course, when you get down to this level of specificity, atoms vary greatly in width, but this measure is fine for fun.)) So, if you want to know the width of these IBM printed circuits in atoms, you just type “29.9nm in pm” and you’ll get a result, 29,900, in picometers that you then divide by 130. So the new chip circuitry is roughly 230 atoms across! So how about your finger? Well, mine is roughly 150cm across, which, by my calculations is 1.15384615 × 1010 atoms across, or about 11 and a half quintillion atoms across. ((Anybody feel free to check my math or disagree with these results!)) And a quintillion in pennies is this much.
