The Monkey King's Domain

Genetically engineered plants detect land mines by changing color

Genetically engineered plants detect land mines by changing color.

Victorian Fax

This fax-by-telegraph machine was in operation at the New York Herald in 1900.

Warren Ellis speaks...

"Thanksgiving: when everyone in Britain gives thanks
for our ancestors having sent all the religious freaks
to America."

Amen to that!

Quote from his Bad Signal mailing list...

You should pay a visit diepunyhumans.com (Warren's blog).

My new belief about software development...

Don't waste your time developing something if it's already done by somebody else.

(Quote slightly modified from the top of PHP-Soft.com)

How to Learn a Language

I've been a linguophile for a long time, and I'm always studying a little bit of some language or another. However, it's only recently that I've finally figured out the way that works best for me, with the help of modern technology. Perhaps this might help those of you who have been planning on learning a language some day.

XML.com: Introducing del.icio.us

You're putting some effort into contributing information to del.icio.us, and it repays you by exposing its data and functionality in several ways so that you can get it back again without asking any favors or getting special access. It has an HTTP API for posting and managing your account. Nearly every useful page has a related RSS feed, exposing not just the human-readable titles and links but also neatly structured machine-readable information on tags and authorship. Finally, for the odd bit of stuff not exposed through an API or RSS feed, the HTML is free of presentational fluff and cleanly marked up with useful CSS classes.

Dragon Optical Illusion

This little dragon appears to be looking at you. But if you rotate the base this way or that the dragon's head appears to turn the other way...

(Link courtesy of BoingBoing)

Wilderness Lodge Resort Logo

The Wilderness Lodge is architecturally similar to the lodge at Yellowstone National Park. The Wilderness Lodge logo mimics the National Park Service’s basic shape. These similarities help give you a good mind picture of what the overall resort experience will be. I enjoy the way nature is depicted in this logo and it definitely has Yellowstone inspiration.

Keith Olbermann blogging about the Ohio recount and irregularities

A presidential vote recount in Ohio seems inevitable today with the announcement from Green Party candidate David Cobb that he and the Libertarians' Michael Badnarik have raised $150,000 in donations to meet filing fees and expenses.

If you'd like to support the effort visit the Cobb/LaMarche '04 website.

Epiphany and the Creative Commons

For those of you whole follow this sort of thing, I've release Epiphany , the short comic originally attached to the end of Touch of Death #3, under a Creative Commons License.

Enjoy!

ODB dead...

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1493725/11132004/ol_dirty_bastard.jhtml

My little Flickr animation

Flickr Animation Test

It runs best if you set it to one second speed.

Blog Spammers

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Suckers have been busy this week! We'll I've grown tired of it and have moved to Haloscan for comments.

Playstation 2: Computational Cluster

The NCSA has constructed a PlayStation 2 Linux cluster as a test bench for scientific computation on "toy" hardware. The cluster consists of 65 compute nodes, 4 user login and development nodes, and 1 prototype node for software installation tests. All the nodes run the Sony Linux distribution for PlayStation 2.

33rd Annual SunTrust South Miami Art Festival

We'll be heading down to the South Miami Art Festival this weekend to show and sell Christine's photography. If you're in the area stop by and say hi! We'll be in booth 115.

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Ten Mistakes Writers Don't See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do)

So the following is a list I'll be referring to people *before* they submit anything in writing to anybody (me, agent, publisher, your mom, your boss). From email messages and front-page news in the New York Times to published books and magazine articles, the 10 ouchies listed here crop up everywhere. They're so pernicious that even respected Internet columnists are not immune.

(Link courtesy of Eyebeam reBlog)

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How Infants Crack the Speech Code

Infants learn language with remarkable speed, but how they do it remains a mystery. New data shows that infants use computational strategies to detect patterns in language, according to UW's Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl in the Nature article "Early Language Acquisition: Cracking the Speech Code" [PMID: 15496861] Interesting excerpt from the article: 'There is evidence that infants analyse the statistical distributions of sounds that they hear in ambient language, and use this information to form phonemic categories. They also learn phonotactic rules — language-specific rules that govern the sequences of phonemes that can be used to compose words.'

(Link courtesy of Slashdot)

America in the 30's

Collection of pictures of America in the 30's

(Link courtesy of Eyebean reBlog)

Growing things with Coke

Indian farmers have come up with what they think is the real thing to keep crops free of bugs. Instead of paying hefty fees to international chemical companies for patented pesticides, they are reportedly spraying their cotton and chilli fields with Coca-Cola. In the past month there have been reports of hundreds of farmers turning to Coke in Andhra Pradesh and Chattisgarh states. But as word gets out that soft drinks may be bad for bugs and a lot cheaper than anything that Messrs Monsanto, Shell and Dow can offer, thousands of others are expected to switch.