Rough Drafts

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.

“Felons and foreigners can, and do, own computer voting machine companies.” So says environmental activist Lynn Landes, quoted in Kim Zetter’s in-depth expos

MR told me about this full-body improvement on Rochambault (or “Rock-Paper-Scissors,” as most of the world outside the SF Bay Area calls it): Bear-Cowboy Ninja. You start back to back with your opponent. Walk five paces, then whirl around and strike a pose. The cowboy (hands making pistols and firin

I have to thank Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing for posting a link to the L5 Society web site, which features many gorgeous paintings of space stations taken, I think, from Gerard K. O’Neill’s Colonies in Space. I spent many hours poring over and daydreaming about this book when I was a kid, and these

There are some vaguely disturbing Gummi bear experiments happening on my desk right now.

More than you probably ever wanted to know about how to test digital cameras. And still more about digital imaging tests, from Edmund Optics.