Rough Drafts

“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

Amazing photos of Chernobyl today, by a Ukrainian woman who likes to bike through the area on her 147hp Kawasaki Ninja.

Note to Google: Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to launch Gmail on April 1. Note to Slashdot, BoingBoing, Engadget, and nearly every other tech blog: Running fake stories for April Fool’s Day might seem funny to you, but none of these stories were actually all that funny. Worse, they had the unfort

NPR : Study: Pricing Less Competitive Online A study by MIT finds that the Internet, where customers can easily comparison shop, is actually less price competitive than traditional store retailers.

Sorta: NPR guides us to the budding Appalachian phenomenon of hick-hop. Holler 2 the hood, y’all! Somewhat more successful: this collaboration between Dirk Powell and DJ DanjaMowf.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone, but cnet reports that the rise of moblogs is being driven in large part by risque photos of pretty young things. (Sometimes with octopi.) After some bloviating by the analysts about how the real future of camphones are in the real estate business (yeah, right) the sto

Xeni Jardin posts a link to these videos of the DARPA Grand Challenge, the recent robot race across the Nevada desert. It’s entertaining to watch the robots weave their way out of the starting gate, bump into things, or merely stop moving, sit for a minute, and then start smoking. But the amazing th

Too stupid for words: Virgin Mobile unveils the left-handed Sony Ericsson LH-Z200 mobile phone. The number pad looks like this: 3 2 1 6 5 4 9 8 7 UPDATE 4/1/2004: It’s an April Fool’s joke.