Rough Drafts

Remember the John Woo movie Face/Off, where John Travolta and Nicholas Cage trade faces? Well, it isn’t science fiction any more.

Jacques Derrida is dead. The Telegraph has an intelligent and balanced review of his life and work. Derrida’s work had a huge influence on my college education, and it was always clear to me that his own writing was far more precise — and humane — than that of his American imitators. I am sorry […]

Patrick Costello has put up the whole text of his book, The How and The Tao of the Old-Time Banjo, under a Creative Commons license. Patrick is a generous, down-to-earth, iconoclastic teacher of banjo and I am really looking forward to reading his book. You can also order a printed copy here.

There are 11 different ways you can misspell “pedal to the metal,” all of which use legitimate words that Word won’t flag as misspelled: {pedal, petal, peddle} to the {metal, mettle, medal, meddle} = 12 permutations, only one of which is correct.

Researchers studying the behavior of software agents set up a test, called the “minority game,” where agents are competing for limited resources. In each round, the agents make choices, attempting to wind up in the successful minority. When the researchers added the ability for agents to communicate

Paul Graham, in What the Bubble Got Right: “someone who doesn’t expend any effort on marketing himself. A nerd, in other words, is someone who concentrates on substance.”

Dutch artist Theo Jansen makes gigantic, wind-powered, walking “animals” out of steel and polyester sheeting, such as this 2-ton Animalis Rhinoceros Transport. (via Engadget)

I can’t figure this out. With crude oil prices almost at a record-high $50/barrel, you’d think gasoline prices would be shooting up, too. But they’re not. In fact, the price of gasoline remains at historically low levels, when adjusted for inflation. (See graph of gas prices). The Big Picture explai

The molecules making up microtubules, the protein filaments that form the internal “scaffolding” of your body’s cells, are replaced every 10 minutes. Actin filaments in the dendrites of your neurons are recycled even quicker: every 40 seconds. In fact, the entire brain’s composition turns over every

I have to admit I’m insanely jealous: The multitalented Xeni Jardin will be flying on one of Zero-G’s first commercial zero-gravity air flights, 32,000 feet up. NASA has used parabolic flight trajectories to train astronauts in weightlessness for years. Now, Zero-G will begin selling these flights —

Police in Paris discovered a fully equipped movie theater in a large and previously uncharted part of Les Catacombes, underneath the 16th arondissement. A smaller cave next door had been turned into a restaurant and bar. When police returned a few days later, the secret theater’s power and phone lin