Rough Drafts

Beautiful photos of a Gunkajima, an abandoned island off the coast of Japan. (via BoingBoing)

If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist, right? That’s what Rumsfeld must be thinking: He’s banned camera phones in U.S. Army installations in Iraq. A total ban on camera phones in the military is coming up next, the news reports say. You can slash at the waves but you can’t hold back the tide…. […]

You probably don’t get many telemarketing calls on your mobile, do you? That’s partly because it’s illegal–but more importantly, there’s no directory of mobile phone numbers that unscrupulous marketers can use to target their campaigns. Well, you can kiss that precious bit of anonymity goodbye: the

Impressions from E3: The coming year will be pretty interesting for mobile gaming. The Nintendo DS (dual screen) is a somewhat goofy concept, but there are a lot of games in development and some of them look pretty cool. I got a chance to play with a few of the new games and was fairly […]

Video games are now a $20 billion industry, making them bigger than Hollywood (as measured by box-office revenues, anyhow; the film industry actually makes more money from videos and DVDs than they do from movie theaters). No surprise, then, that the average age of video gamers is going up–it’s now

Good advice from Jim Henley: “Start by slavishly imitating poets you admire.” And if you’re writing science fiction, be sure to avoid these overused plots. (both links via BoingBoing)

Intel’s Dothan CPUs (Intel Pentium M processors 735, 745, and 755) use Intel’s new numeric nomenclature and have dropped the clock speed designations from their names. When asked about the new names, Intel vp Anand Chandrasekher said they’re designed to reflect qualities of “goodness” that Intel chi

“Working at Google, an engineer told me recently, is the nearest you can get to having an unlimited amount of computing power at your disposal.” Simson Garfinkle explains the hidden power of Google’s server farm, which reportedly tops 100,000 machines. (free registration required)

This guide to insultingly bad movie physics explains why ricocheting bullets don’t spark, how shattering glass can cut you (even when you’re riding a motorcycle through it at top speed), and why it’s a bad idea to hang around exploding spaceships.

My Taijiquan teacher, Mark Chen, has written a book: Old Frame Chen Family Taijiquan. It’s a terrific introduction to the principles, techniques, philosophy, and history of Taijiquan (aka Tai Chi Chuan). It is also the best-written martial arts book I’ve ever read. Mark’s approach is very concrete,

Spotted just outside Santa Rosa, a hand-lettered cardboard sign tacked to a telephone pole: Martha Stuart for President!

There’s this guy on my block who is always walking around, grumbling and growling and laughing to himself. He’s tall, his hair is wild, and he walks around with his eyes cast down, mostly, sometimes pulling on a cigarette as he grumbles along. He’s such a permanent fixture of the neighborhood that I