This is one of the coolest things I have ever seen. Experimenters burst water balloons in the low-gravity environment produced aboard a NASA Lewis DC-9 aircraft.

If you got the bandwidth, watch the videos... they are all really cool, especially when they attempt to capture all the floating water before they reutnr to normal gravity levels. I just wish they had higher-res videos.

[via ( blogdex )]

We just got back from seeing the 12:01 AM showing of AOTC... It was cool. Yoda rocks in this episode.

Much thanks go out to Scott and the others that got our group their tickets, and did much of the waiting in line for everyone.

I don't have much to say about it, but after work I will stop by my house, play with my son and have dinner with my wife. Tonight is a school night for me, but rather than ditch it completely, I will go for about an hour, and then get my wife and friend and go get in line.

I have another friend who is apart of a group that's been camped out in line since the 6th of this month, he is the one that scored us all tickets for the 12:01 AM showing tonight, and also with tickets for this Saturday to see AOTC in it's digital format. So that should be cool too.

Check out my friend's group's web site. And check out the video of them setting up their camp, it's cool.

What might be the low down dirtiest trick on the web to date is what can be seen happening right now in the file trading world of Kazaa when trying to get the latest album from Eminem, "The Eminem Show".

So far, from several hundred MP3s that I have downloaded, only a handful have been complete and original real copies of the songs. The rest are loops, and fake copies that have obviously been generated by Eminem's record label or an affiliate thereof.

I found one particular Kazaa user that I believe is directly apart of the scam taking place. Here's why:

1) The user had super high bandwidth... I was getting over 100 KB/second... which is pretty good.

2) The user had about 7 copies of every track on the CD, with a filename pattern consistent for every track.

3) Every MP3 available from this user was jacked... Some are just a small portion of the song looping over and over (professional quality)... others, and this is the worst, are the whole song with no loops, but you get 5 seconds of the song with sound, then 10 seconds of dead silence, then 5 seconds of sound again, this pattern repeats until the end of the tracks... Others have just the first 5 seconds normal, and then the rest of the entire file is dead silence.

The 3rd item from my above list is a dead giveaway that this is a scam to get 1000's upon 1000's of fake copies of the songs out on the net so people can't filter the real stuff out. This tactic will even have a greater impact when combined with item 2 on my list, because these fake songs have so many variations in the filenames, it's going to be even harder for users to filter these out.

It might be nice with programs like Kazaa to vote against users, so their files won't show up in search results, or are listed with a different color in the results.

A somewhat related tactic is when a small band will label an MP3 of their song as a popular band, this way they are exposed to a wide audience who hopefully likes what they hear and don't delete the song, but instead goes and downloads more.

While I think these tactics are dirty and low... they are smart. And I mildly support them. I like the idea of small bands trying to get noticed... and I even like the artist/label trying to screw the file sharing communnity by exploiting the method files are shared.

However, I in no way support the people that label pornography videos as popular artist videos. It is horrific to me that I can download a video labeled as Busta Rhymes and end up with a lame porn video. It doesn't make sense to me, with porn as huge as it is on-line, why would anyone think that it would be useful to push the material to people looking for unrelated files.

You have check out this Kung Fu Quotes page. They are all quotes taken from various kung fu movies with poor translation to English.

"Beware! Your bones are going to be disconnected."

[via joel]

So do I.

Wired just posted an article about how computer manufacturing companies are now starting to take into consideration the noise that their machine put out.

Well, for a while now I have been concerned with noticable "hum" that my system puts out.

My home system, which is about 18 months old, is an HP Pavillion system, and the noise didn't seem to bother me until it got to be about 1 year old. I think the noise got to me for a couple of reasons. 1) The computer got moved to the main living room, the same place that we watch movies and television. 2) The fan and it's case inside the computer started rattling and the parts started loosening and at times would get really loud, and then normal, and then loud again.

It began driving me so crazy I was totally willing to just chuck it and buy a new computer. My wife is more reasonable and has since convinced me to just work on replacing the fan for newer quieter parts. Which I am fine with.

One thing somewhat disappointing about the article was is didn't compare current computer systems from the main computer manufactures (Dell, Gateway, HP, etc...).

About 6 months ago I got a new system at work, a Dell Dimension 4300, and when I first turned the system on, I thought it was broken because it didn't make a sound. But the light came on, and then the computer screen lit up with a Dell logo. I was litterally amazed, especially since I was so distraught at home with how noisey my home computer was becoming.

So 6 months later my Dell system is still ultra-quiet. I just got underneath my desk, and with my ear 1 inch from the machine, I could not distinguish noise coming directly from it vesus ambient noice from the room. I had to literally put my ear on the machine casing to hear it humming.

This is why I love my Dell.

I would buy Dell for this reason alone. If the noise factor on my system ever changes I will let you know.

A man modifies an LA Freeway sign with additional driving instructions and calls it art. I'm not sure if I agree that it's really "art".

One art critic called it "terrific" because it shows that art can "benefit people".

The video that accompanies the story is more of an art peice to me than the freeway sign. The sign may get noticed and apreciated, but only as a driving aid, not as artwork to be admired. The video, from what I saw, has no narriation or spoken word, but follows the complete project, from the making of the sign down to the detail of taking color swatches and comparing them to existing freeway signs.

Now... I have a flip-side to my opinion. Because I love products that are design to be both useful, and appealing visually. Target released a whole line of products like this, all designed by Michael Graves.

Every product eccentially was "designed", and I think as of late was designed with the form of the product taken into consideration, and not just the function. Personally, I think my Sony Vaio notebook just "looks cool", same with my mouse. And the Apple studio displays. These products were made with art in mind, but they are still not art, they are products or tools.

I think a the interior decorating of a home can be considered art. So you take the whole collection of these product with a particular design in mind, and you outfit your home to be functional, but with a single "look" in place, and now you have flowing art peice that you surround yourself in.

I might add more into this later... I got to get back to work.

[story via co-working john]