And hey, Adam wrote chapter 13! Nice!

Michael Mitzenmacher talking about the Taylor op-ed from an engineering/CS perspective.

There's a whole community of people (apparently) who are doing engineering *in cellular automata.* That is, they seem to be taking a compositional approach to building *really large* structures which move coherently ("spaceships," I guess), and they have a system for measuring their speed. This is ... insane. I guess it make sense though -- once you see the little movers, you want to build bigger ones out of smaller pieces, right? It has a strange similarity-of-feel to the synthetic biology folks -- I wonder if the CA guys have similar "parts databases?"

I was going to say, "So, ripping off Arthur Ganson gets you a link from Kottke and thousands of hits on YouTube, now?" But then I realized that this "dreaming machines" guy *is* Arthur Ganson. Dude! The concrete drill is awesome, but he also has about a dozen sculptures that are even cooler.

"Anderson gives no examples of this approach to science being replaced by something else." -- this could be a game, "find the best one sentence response to Anderson's article."

Via LtU. Machine code for maching tools (CNC routers).

The Propeller chip makes it easy to rapidly develop embedded applications. Its eight processors (cogs) can operate simultaneously, either independently or cooperatively, sharing common resources through a central hub.

The book is rough, and pseudocode/book-implementations are in C++ (!). But still, possibly, remarkably useful.

"Models are only models, toy-like descriptions of idealized worlds. ... For that reason, because models are unreliable guides ... and because you don't know which is the right one .. [and if you have to use one] it's always good to use more than one."

What's the difference between packing and stacking, John? Like, two letters and one dimension. If you haven't read this yet, you need to.

Open-source RFID beacon design.

Building a computer out of toys, with plastic balls. Excellent.

Including basic explanations of a lot of the parts and pieces. Pretty neat to browse.

A new yorker article on the antikythera mechanism. Opens with the annoying text-version of the NPR intro-trope ("street sounds... and a brief description"), but worth reading overall.

Bridges into the 21st century.