Piling hay on a haystack. Good succinct metaphor.

#9 greglondon and #11 pox, the only problem with removing the oxygen from the CO2 leaving only carbon, is that it takes even more energy.

Solar-powered CO2 scrubbers could be put in deserts and two things would not be problems:

1) You wouldn't need long transmission lines.
2) They would operate unevenly in day vs. night, summer vs. winter, cloudy vs. clear.

Dude, that's IT: Google should put it's next server monolith in the middle of a desert, solar-powered, with only a fiber cable back to civilization.

"We’re going to help out in any way we can with fighting the law."

I fought the law and the law wrong.

Next we'll be hearing, "Wait-- I wasn't really sincerely retracting my retraction. I was just approached by some Christian groups in the area and they said they'd boycott me if I didn't retract the retraction."

"And I didn't mean 'blog-lo-dites' in a bad way-- not really!"

"Splunge!!"

How do those mechanical things WORK anyway? That's essentially a transmission with 3999 different gear ratios, accurate to 1 part in 5000. How can you do this with gear teeth? Lemme see...

10 gears running at 0x, 1x, 2x ... 9x? No, 10 gears on the same shaft with different numbers of teeth.

Each digit of the price can be set to mesh with one of those 10 gears.

Successive digits geared down by 1:1, 10:1, 100:1, 1000:1.

Add them together with differentials.

Maybe the gear reduction happens between differentials, like ((d0 /10 + d2) /10 + d3) /10 + d4. (/ = reduce, + = differential.)

Have I got it? What does the thing LOOK like?

WE NEED STEAMPUNK GAS PUMPS! GASPUNK!

The similarity between democracy and spam is deeper than I thought.

Chinese is written top-to-bottom; most (all?) alphabetic languages left-to-right. I wonder whether these studies have figured out to what extent that (rather than the different symbols) accounts for the difference.

Things to write on glaciers:

THE MOVING FINGER

NON-ATTACHMENT

SISYPHUS

Her piece, "Walk the Dog," (lemme see on iTunes it's here) which is cool all around, has this variant of the quote:

"Well you know language is a virus from space,
and hearing your name
is better
than seeing your face."

Does anyone else's old computer grind to a halt just because there's an embedded YouTube (Flash) video on the page (not even playing)? I am having trouble scrolling or hitting the back button. My CPU meter is steady around 90% when I pause typing here.

Can we have a no-embedded-video version of BoingBoing, please?

--Steve
(600 MHz G3 Mac, OS 10.4, Camino.)

I guess when I read Temple Grandin's Thinking in Pictures, the distinction between wanting to kill an animal and wanting to cause it suffering was a little novel at first, but then it was obvious.

Anyone who would like to be welcomed into an alien mind should read Thinking in Pictures. The book reviewed in the link above, "Animals in Translation," looks more narrowly focused.

Incredible! Any time you follow a link to a feature at Edge, you instead get a page full of, "AND NOW! Edge, the wonderful Website full of incredibly important people saying amazing things, is about to bring you what has been described as <description>, <TITLE> <further description>"... followed by what looks like content but is only a preface: someone important <photo> waxing warmly but informedly rhapsodic about (say) an article and its author, and then, "AND NOW, the thing you've all been waiting for, Edge's <TITLE>..." (oh and I forgot to mention the fur coat of advertisements surrounding all this), followed by a tiny-print link to the first page of the actual thing which you have to look hard for because it doesn't appear important at first.

But this time they've outdone themselves. First, a list of glowing one liners, then a list of press coverage, then a list of contributors (is that the content? wait...) then a long list of multiple-paragraph quotes from various distinguished publications (starting with boingboing) including logos and... photographs?... all just mentions of this very page we are reading, then a thing called "Index"...oh okay that's the annotated links to the actual content this time.

I didn't actually, but print-preview says it would take 68 letter-sized pages to print this book-jacket table of contents page alone.

It could be made into a monster
If we all pull together as a team.

1) I wonder why they don't just use twisted pairs to transmit AC over long distances. (Twice as much wire, true.) Maybe you could set up a scheme with transformers where every 100 miles or so the current reverses phase, viz:

... -----    ----- ...
         )||(
         )||(
         )||(
      +--    --+
      |        |
    -----    -----
     ---      ---
      -        -

[cut and paste that into emacs if you're not seeing it--the "pre" tag doesn't work right here.]
2) Wonder whether those final few places in NYC will get AC-to-DC converters added in front of the DC-to-AC converters, just because it makes the conversion process more systematic than taking the existing converters out.

You can get to the video through this link.

Okay, Google, good idea for one step in the right direction. In addition, I hope that the low-level phone-network drivers are open. Treos have an infamous problem because their phone driver periodically freezes all applicatons for 30 seconds.

Also, please start some momentum for giving me control over how received calls are handled within my, er, phone host, so I can choose my own voice mail, call screening, call recording, call logging, etc. software since that, and the integration (hah!) between that and the phone's software, are other areas where progress is stuck.

Monopoly 2.0: any problem you can't route around.