Month: June 2006

Prehistoric Crafting

By AMH

The latest issue of Knitty featured an adorable pattern for stuffed nautiloids, and I couldn’t resist. It’s a suitable pattern for using up scrap yarn, and it is very easy. I liked that you stuff the shell as you go along, because it leaves very little finishing to do at the end. You can even get away with just shoving your loose ends inside after you knot them off. I had a bit of a struggle deciding on the placement for the tentacles, but in the end I’m pleased with how this little guy turned out. For this particular nautiloid, … Continue reading Prehistoric Crafting

Lesson Marketplace

By AMH

There are so many interesting things about the lesson plan marketplace site described in this article. Absolutely, teachers getting tips from other teachers instead of textbook publishers and other major corporations is a smart idea. At the college level, the mailing lists I am on for computing education often field requests for class activities of a certain style or around a certain topic, and they have some associated web repositories. But there are some things that strike me as odd about the auction model. First, I’m just surprised that there isn’t already a free website doing this – whether ad … Continue reading Lesson Marketplace

Convolutions in Informal Math

By AMH

A mathematics instructor makes an attempt to explain why 0.999… = 1 in their blog, and tackles some of the classic explanations as well as many arguments in the comments [via Clicked]. What interested me most was that the writer was frustrated that people can’t accept the arguments, buit buries the real proof of this fact at the end. Instead of laying out from the start the question of what does it mean to say that a repeating decimal is equal to an integer, point out that it has to do with computing a limit, and going from there, the … Continue reading Convolutions in Informal Math

Play nice, Apple

By AMH

This Slate dissection of the new Apple ad campaign says pretty much what I was starting to think about the ads. They’re funny and I enjoy them, but over the past few times I have seen them, I’ve started to feel sorry for the PC guy. I want him to point out, in the ad about having fun, that he’s going to play the latest shiny new computer games that aren’t yet out on the Mac. Or that at least when the cable modem guy shows up to turn on his internet, he’ll know how to get the IP address … Continue reading Play nice, Apple

Nerdvana

By AMH

The editing is a little bit shakey, but Star Trek vs. Star Wars is still good Friday fun [via Vidiotbox]. Of course, about half the geek community would prefer a version with Kirk – it certainly would end differently. We probably ought to start placing bets about which franchise will sic their lawyers on this first….

Soccer Spin

By AMH

In a bit of timeliness, I share Why Goalies Hate the New World Cup Soccer Ball [via Clicked]. I have to admit that the physics behind how a ball spins is one of those things that has just never made intuitive sense to me, and it surprises me that people are able to actually think out the correct degree and speed of spin for a particular situation on the fly, when I struggle to do so with a pencil and paper. At least in hockey there is only one axis of rotation to worry about!

Robot Safety and Ethics

By AMH

Perhaps most surprising to me is that the latest discussion I’ve come across about ethical concerns with introducing robots into non-industrial settings is from someplace as mainstream as the Economist, but it’s actually a nice summary of upcoming concerns [via Slashdot]. The article indicates that there have been many (in the 100s?) industrial robot accidents in the past 25 years, but the concern discussed at a recent European Robotics Symposium is what happens when robots move out of the industrial setting and interact with the general population. Major questions the aticle pulls out include: Should robots that are strong enough … Continue reading Robot Safety and Ethics

Bank Hacking

By AMH

This is a great story of social engineering, wherein USB drives are “dropped” around a bank and employees pick them up and plug them into bank computers [via Slashdot]. This was done as part of a security audit, and what is particuarly interesting is that the employees knew a security audit was being done and knew that social engineering attacks were going to be attempted. The results: Of the 20 USB drives we planted, 15 were found by employees, and all had been plugged into company computers. The data we obtained helped us to compromise additional systems, and the best … Continue reading Bank Hacking

Grammar Geeks

By AMH

I’ve added the Language Log to my daily websurf this week and am enjoying it thoroughly. If you wish you knew more about the picky details of writing, or if you just enjoy discussions/dissections of real-world writing, check it out. There are also lots of fun entries about the entrance of new words into our lexicon, including a recent one about “meh”. Also worth scanning for are their opinions about “fake” profanity.

Big Brother 2.0?

By AMH

This is a well-written discussion of the privacy concerns with Web 2.0, including a nice dissection of how the most reasonable business model for the growing number of social networking style sites is their use as data mining sources for a company’s other operations [via Clicked]. For example, Flickr is perhaps one of the most interesting ones. Search for ‘cat’, and Flickr will record the most popular photo clicked. By associating the colour and picture data within photos with keywords used to search, Yahoo is slowly building a database of human identification. It has often said that the differentiator between … Continue reading Big Brother 2.0?