Weird books for tinkerers and mad scientists

Grok Headline matches for Weird books for tinkerers and mad scientists

Weird - really really weird - to see
Belle de Jour in a top ten of most
powerful people in UK New Media.
Slightly crack-fueled dreaming for that
particular journo tonight, I fear

Weird - really really weird - to see
Belle de Jour in a top ten of most
powerful people in UK New Media.
Slightly crack-fueled dreaming for that
particular journo tonight, I fear 07/13/2004 08:23 AM
at least according to the woefully misinformed

media.guardian.co.uk/top100_2004/index/0,14656,1247481,0 0.html
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Hybrid-Car Tinkerers Scoff at No-Plug-In
Rule

Hybrid-Car Tinkerers Scoff at No-Plug-In
Rule 04/02/2005 12:52 AM
The idea of making hybrid cars that can be plugged in to wall outlets is supported by a diverse group of interests, from neoconservatives to utilities.

Google Maps Tinkerers Make Demographic
Data Come Alive

Google Maps Tinkerers Make Demographic
Data Come Alive 06/17/2005 03:51 PM
Greg Sandoval, AP Technology Writer, writes: “Tracking sexual predators in Florida. Guiding travelers to the cheapest gas nationwide. Pinpointing $1,500 studio apartments for rent in Manhattan. Geeks, tinkerers and innovators are crashing the Google party, having discovered how to tinker with the search engine’s mapping service to graphically illustrate vital information that might otherwise be ignored, overlooked or not perceived as clearly. “It’s such a beautiful way to look at what could be a dense… Direct and Related Links for 'Google Maps Tinkerers Make Demographic Data Come Alive'

The New York Times > Books > Will
Eisner, a Pioneer of Comic Books, Dies
at 87

The New York Times > Books > Will
Eisner, a Pioneer of Comic Books, Dies
at 87 01/05/2005 04:28 PM
this one by Sarah Boxer

nytimes.com/2005/01/05/books/05eisner.html
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The New York Times > Books >
Books of The Times: The Pastiche of a
Presidency,Imitating a Life, in 957
Pages

The New York Times > Books >
Books of The Times: The Pastiche of a
Presidency,Imitating a Life, in 957
Pages 06/20/2004 03:35 AM
NYT BRUTAL BOOK REVIEW FOR BUBBA .. As you can see here .. review

nytimes.com/2004/06/20/books/20CLIN.html?ei=5006&en=b1de08dbc 243a997&ex=1088308800&partner=ALTAVISTA1&pagewanted=print&position=
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Hey, Your Library's Books Are in My
Google. No, Your Google Is in My Library
Books.

Hey, Your Library's Books Are in My
Google. No, Your Google Is in My Library
Books. 12/19/2004 03:36 PM

So the big< /a> news is about Google and libraries. I don't feel the need to comment on this right now, as you can find plenty of other places for that. However, here are a few angles I haven't seen discussed elsewhere in the library blogosphere.

• Librari es and the Internet
  
  "More broadly, the Internet can profoundly improve the relationship between libraries and society. For example, there are two major libraries in my town -- a college library, and a public library. My library card works in both places. I used to favor the college library, because there was open WiFi access there -- which meant, among other things, that I could use LibraryLookup from my laptop to find books in the stacks. Recently, though, the college shut down its open access point. And from an IT administrator's point of view, I can understand why. Not long after, the public library installed an open access point. So now it's my favorite spot, and lately I notice other mobile professionals congregating there too." [Jon Udell's Weblog
  (Click over to read Jon's story about getting locked in the library, too!)


• "A quick calculation using the figures above suggests an average scan rate of 3200 volumes per day (assuming 365 days/year for 6 years) at the University of Michigan site alone." [Tito Sierra on the WEB4 LIB mailing list]


• "An even quicker calculation shows that they will need to digitize 2.25 books _a_minute_, 24 hours/day, 365 days/year to digitize 7 million volumes in six years." [Roy Tennant on the WEB4 LIB mailing list]

It's times like this when I wish Karen Coyle had< /a> a blog.

Weird

Weird 11/02/2003 04:18 PM

Reading about it being 71 degrees for the NYC Marathon, I was about to go running today (I did the LA marathon in 1997 and was hoping to do one next year) but was surprised to find the rain just turned to snow and is piling up on the roof and streets. New York? 70 and partly sunny. Oregon? snowing.

That Was Weird...

That Was Weird... 07/17/2004 04:40 PM
I just posted a new item, and suddenly there were 22 comments under it -- all from another posting from more than a week ago. I deleted them, but this is just bizarre.

weird referer

weird referer 01/07/2004 04:31 PM

Recently (but I just noticed it today) I started getting HTTP referers that are a variation of the following: "XXXX:+++++++++++++++++++++++" (the number of plus signs varies). A google search with appropriate terms quickly turned up discussions like this one that suggest that the referer is someone using an anonymizer or internet security product of some kind. Without that information it smells like an attempt at an exploit of some kind... but of what kind (and if so, I've never heard of it)?

Anyone knows about this? Has anyone else seen it? I'm curious. :)

Weird Cats

Weird Cats 05/20/2004 01:13 AM
Feline medical curiosities. Polydactyly, conjoined-kitty-fu, "freaks of face," cleft palates, and plain old huge. (Not safe for after lunch).

Weird science

Weird science 12/31/2004 04:43 PM
It didn't take long for politicized debate to get roiling over the nature of the tsunami disaster -- some of it rather murky. Steven Milloy of the Cato Institute and Junk Science.com is now blasting environmentalists for "shameless exploitation" as they "surf the tsunami tragedy" in order to bring attention to the problem of global warming. Milloy wants to give the impression that he's navigating through truer waters, but clearly he's looking to ride the wave in a direction of his own:

Weird-o SMS behaviour

Weird-o SMS behaviour 02/05/2005 09:13 PM
Outi sent me yesterday a sweet text message about mice. True to the nature of these beasts, that SMS started multiplying: for some reason, T-Mobile (yes, I'm in Germany) has decided to deliver that message to me eleven times within the past 24 hours. Even though it has been sent only once.

It seems that every SMS sent from Finland is replaced by this same SMS message - so if you've tried to contact me, I have only seen a message about a mouse from Outi. Sorry. You gotta try and resend, if you had anything to say (or just email me).

Weirdosity++.

Weird Swing Bug

Weird Swing Bug 06/22/2004 11:54 PM
We ran into a weird issue with Swing today at work. The small class below reproduces this. 1 import javax.swing.*; 2 import javax.swing.event.TreeModelEvent; 3 import javax.swing.event.TreeModelListener; 4 import javax.swing.tree.DefaultMutableTreeNode; 5 import javax.swing.tree.DefaultTreeModel; 6 7 public class Blah extends JFrame implements TreeModelListener { 8 9 private JTree tree; 10 11 public Blah() { 12 setSize(150, 150); 13 setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE); 14 DefaultMutableTreeNode root... (294 words)

News of the Weird... NOT!

News of the Weird... NOT! 01/02/2005 09:23 PM
Though not the web institution of Jim Romenesko's Obscure Store or as overexposed as Dave Barry's Blog, Chuck Shepherd's NEWS of the WEIRD is a fairly good source for news stories that are... well... WEIRD. And Chuck's the only one who has collected a list of stories that "now occur with such frequency" that they are NO LONGER WEIRD. Quite a resource for judging how our society has changed in the last umpteen years.

In semi-related news, Barry is semi-retiring his weekly column, but we still have AutoDave, the automated Dave Barry column generator. Still, I suspect he did it just to upstage Dan Gillmor's farewell column, as he gives up the old-media columnar life in favor of "Grassroots Journalism".
To Dave Berry, 'Grassroots Journalism' is writing about the brown patch in your lawn directly over the septic tank.

The Weird Als of Finland

The Weird Als of Finland 06/30/2004 06:07 PM

Finland has a dance called the humppa, but it's spoken of with the same disdain that disco gets in the US these days. It's for the geezers. I have been told it is something like the German polka only without the lederhosen, which is good since I'm half German and, after a few Straßenfests where people jump around in lederhosen with buckets of beer in their hands barely able to stand up, much less dance, the costumes just don't really add much to the overall aesthetic. I had a biology professor, a Bavarian who was really into opera singing, show up for a lecture in lederhosen and dance a polka for us while we sat there speechless. Everyone thought he was nuts, but I just thought he was hopelessly homesick and I couldn't imagine him doing that dance without the full costume in his usually disheveled professor uniform. I have been spared, so far, the spectacle of drunk Finns hopping around much like drunk Germans to goofy music. So far.

While we were off at the lake for Juhannus, my ear picked up something that sounded a lot like Viva Las Vegas but....not. I was informed that it was a group called Eläkeläiset [the pensioners] who are the humppa song gods in Finland and, well, everywhere else people like to humppa. I fried a few neurons just thinking about an Elvis tune done in humpaa/polka time. I can't describe their music except to say that they are the Weird Al Yankovics of Finland. Sample the Peljätty Humppa [2.2mb] and try to guess the song they are covering and be very, very afraid. It's like Ethyl Merman singing a disco version of No Business like Show Business [yes, she really did...], as it's so bad that it transcends the badness and is irresistibly brilliant. I must have more of their music. The guys actually have a regular band, Kumikameli, but I can't really tell the difference between the samples on that web site and the humppa music so it may be just a nuance only a Finn can hear. :) The lyrics are very clever and, unsurprisingly, the music is popular with the polka loving Germans. There even seems to be an OpenBSD-Humppa connection which does help explain a few things about OpenBSD. Weird Al has done a polka album so perhaps it is time he teamed up with Eläkeläiset and did a humppa album. Disturbing thought. *zot* There went another neuron.

Weird Presents Anyone?

Weird Presents Anyone? 12/25/2003 04:20 PM

Weird color problem

Weird color problem 01/05/2005 10:26 PM
Mark Frauenfelder: (Click thumbnail for enlargement.) Anyone know why the body copy shows in gold in IE on OS X? It seems fine on Safari and Firefox. Please email me if you know the answer. (Also, thanks to everyone for your great design suggestions. As you can see, I've incorporated quite a few of them.)

Found, one weird buoy

Found, one weird buoy 01/05/2005 06:31 AM
David Pescovitz: This giant buoy washed ashore in Cocoa Beach, Florida and nobody has any clue where it came from or who it belongs to. From Florida Today:

"There's no identifying marks on it, so I don't know where it came from," said Jeff Galliher, petty officer with the U.S. Coast Guard at Port Canaveral. "It's just a buoy base with a tower coming out of it."

Link (via Fark)

Weird 'net problem

Weird 'net problem 11/26/2002 07:26 PM
My Internet connection went down for a little while, and when it came back up, all outgoing SMTP and WWW...

Weird Fields winners

Weird Fields winners 04/04/2005 01:18 PM
David Pescovitz: Undergrad Dan Yuan's image here was first runner-up in MIT's annual Weird Fields contest where students generate psychedelic visualizations of vector fields. (Last year's winner here.) The patterns in Yuan's visualization remind me of the background of a Tim Biskup painting.

To help students understand electromagnetic force fields, Professor of Physics John Belcher and colleagues at the MIT Center for Educational Computer Initiatives developed a computer applet into which students put the mathematical expressions that describe a given field. "It then pops out a visual representation of what the field looks like," he said.

Link

UPDATE: As the MIT press release and BB reader Tom Zeller point out, the Weird Fields visualizations bear a striking resemblance to sections of Gustav Klimt paintings. Link

Message from Weird Al Yankovic

Message from Weird Al Yankovic 04/14/2004 03:48 PM
Comedian/musician "Weird Al" Yankovic lost both his mother and father this weekend in an accident involving carbon monoxide poisoning. He's posted a message on his website expressing thanks to fans for their kindness and support in his time of need, and he corrects errors in media coverage on the tragedy. Condolences, and much admiration and respect to Al and his family. Link

Top Tip: W2K weird popups and blocks!

Top Tip: W2K weird popups and blocks! 02/17/2004 01:15 PM
I just reinstalled W2K and it all seems to be working just dandy, but I get about 100 of these pop ups per day saying 'WARNING: This message confirms your computer is vulnerable to attacks' and 'see www.MessageHackShield.com to fix this' or some site like that (there are several different ones as well as several different sized popups).

Weird sticker on my DSL modem

Weird sticker on my DSL modem 07/12/2004 07:15 PM
I just got my Yahoo! DSL self-install kit in the mail, and the modem has a red sticker on it that reads:

"ATTENTION To maximize connection speed, leave this modem on for 10 days after DSL installation is complete. Please Note: You can use your DSL service during this time. It is not necessary to leave your computer on, only the modem."

Why do I have to leave the modem on for 10 days? Is something inside it fermenting? Email me if you know.

six apart people have weird names

six apart people have weird names 08/18/2004 02:47 AM
makes me feel right at home

Weird Science & Bad Photoshopping

Weird Science & Bad Photoshopping 01/16/2004 11:02 AM
Top 10 impossible inventions that allegedly work. Includes such conspiracy-nut favorites as a system for sending power wirelessly, an anti-gravity device, the cloudbuster and an electronic telepathy device. [Snagged from Disinformat ion.]

Weird Financial News

Weird Financial News 01/16/2004 11:05 AM
Did you know West Virginia was auctioned off?

Weird and wonderful - the year's top ten

Weird and wonderful - the year's top ten 01/06/2005 09:48 PM
Manchester Online Jan 7 2005 1:48AM GMT

Weird science for the dedicated gearhead

Weird science for the dedicated gearhead 09/24/2004 01:29 PM
National Post Sep 24 2004 4:49PM GMT

Great, weird illustrator: Louis Moe

Great, weird illustrator: Louis Moe 05/06/2004 12:53 PM
Awesome early 20th century illustrations by Louis Moe. Here's a picture of a mosquito-man sucking the blood from a willing victim. Link (via Cipango)

Why Smart People Believe Weird Things

Why Smart People Believe Weird Things 06/21/2004 08:54 AM
On Cognitive Dissonance
"As a behavioral psychologist, I have studied people's reactions to contradiction and inconsistency. We are capable of convincing ourselves of something, and the more evidence that builds up to contradict us the more we believe it.

For more than 40 years, social psychologists have studied the phenomenon of "cognitive dissonance" - what happens when people have pieces of information on the same subject that are inconsistent. The presence of contradictions is psychologically unpleasant, and people do whatever it takes to resolve the inconsistency."

Many in the field posit that tension between contradictory thoughts and feelings are what constitutes consciousness. It doesn't seem to me this qualifies as it appears to be highly dysfunctional and not a natural and normal tension. What say you who are more qualified?

2003 weird news highlights

2003 weird news highlights 01/03/2004 05:56 AM
wacked-out .. wacky

story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&ncid=757&e=1&u=/n m/20040101/od_nm/odd_dc
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amazon's weird pi-based A9 discount

amazon's weird pi-based A9 discount 09/17/2004 04:40 PM
i guess pi is to amazon as e is to google

Deep night weird-o commenters

Deep night weird-o commenters 02/01/2005 09:48 PM
Odd. Outi seems to have again attracted some weird-o commenters, who seem to be interested mostly in just mocking her. It makes me wonder why there are no weird-o commenters attracted on this blog, even though this is relatively popular for a Finnish blog (something like 800-1000 page views a day, not including RSS aggregators). Four possible reasons come to mind:

1. I am male (most weird-o commenters seem to haunt young women)
2. I am boring (technobabble, not too radical opinions, and little personal life; not much to mock me about)
3. I publish the internet address of every single commenter, so you can't be anonymous to the general public (go to Recen tChanges, then click on the "Main_comments_XXX" entry, then "More Info..." to find this information). Transparency rules.
4. Writing in English raises the barrier of commenting somewhat

I don't know. Perhaps I should just go more for the social porn aspect of blogging... *grin*

(In order for this blog entry to be not completely void of any actual content, take a look at the Committee to Protect Bloggers, a web site which lists and informs about bloggers that have been jailed or harassed for blogging.)

Weird and Wonderfull in the Shark Tank

Weird and Wonderfull in the Shark Tank 03/13/2003 10:15 AM
If you are bored, like me, check out these weird and wonderful stories from the lives of it professionals in...

Weird weather 'set to continue'

Weird weather 'set to continue' 08/09/2004 03:25 PM
The unseasonable weather that has wreaked havoc across the UK recently will continue well into the week.

I have a question about weird powerbook
behaviour: ...

I have a question about weird powerbook
behaviour: ... 03/13/2003 10:22 AM

I have a question about weird powerbook behaviour: it's making strange noises. Like, really strange. Every keyboard or mouse event seems to generate a very, very quiet click from inside the machine; moving your finger around the trackpad sounds like a geiger counter.

It's not the audio system -- turning the speaker off doesn't stop it happening. I don't think it's software-related, either (certainly my iBook didn't make these noises, and neither does the desktop G4 in the next room). It doesn't sound like the drive seeking. It might be some kind of electrical interference directly tweaking the speakers, but I don't particularly want to start opening up the laptop and snipping wires to find out. Anyone got any ideas? It's driving me nuts -- I get paranoid when computers do things I can't explain ...

Update: I found other Powerbook owners complaining of the same thing at Powerbook Zone, so it's not just my imagination. Weirdly, the noises stop when the machine is running on battery juice and the CPU is throttled back. So it appears to be something related to the CPU cooling system ...

Discuss

6:36 AM | Charlie Stross

weird News.com roundup on bl0gs

weird News.com roundup on bl0gs 08/10/2004 03:39 PM
i kind of don't understand what they're doing here

Weird cocoon-car art spotted in Turkey

Weird cocoon-car art spotted in Turkey 04/14/2005 10:49 PM
Xeni Jardin: Spotted by a metroblogger in Istanbul:

"blue beetle wrapped in threads. the sign on the rear pane reads: 'please do not touch or remove the threads. this is an art project by japanese artists visiting our country and will be here for about a week.' spotted in kadikoy with no admirers of art around."
Link (Thanks, Sean Bonner)

Weird little subliminal Sony/Centrino ad
on SpikeTV?

Weird little subliminal Sony/Centrino ad
on SpikeTV? 09/05/2004 11:56 PM
Xeni Jardin: BoingBoing reader Jeremy says:

I was watching Spike TV at my girlfriends place when I noticed something flash by right before the station went back to its presentation of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Since my girlfriend is lucky enough to have TiVo, I rewound it and discovered that there was an ad there for Sony, with a little Centrino symbol in the lower left hand corner. It lasted less than a second and I noticed it happen several times throughout the evening. Searches of the net brought up nothing on it so far, but I thought bOING bOING readers might dig up some answers.

So, what is it? Uber-sneaky advertising hijinks, or the hallucinations of yet another cracksmoking, TiVoing BoingBoing reader who probably also sees visions of the Virgen de Guadalupe in his cornflakes? Submit your answers here: Link.

Reader Tim says, " It is probably just local cable commercials overlapping the SpikeTV network commercials. Of course, I for one welcome our Sony overlords." And reader Steve Portigal says, "I see this happening all the time on TNT, but my assumption has always been it's a slight lack of synchronization in the syndication. I assume that commercials are sold locally as well as nationally, and so some markets get different ads. What I see always appears to be the tail end of another ad, not a whole piece of advertising in itself, and so I assume it's just cruft from what another audience was able to see."
Grok Description matches for Weird books for tinkerers and mad scientists
GrokA matches for Weird books for tinkerers and mad scientists

Weird books for tinkerers and mad scientists

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