unreasonable.org

Brendan Gregg, from Sun's "Fishworks" team, demonstrates how shouting at a disk drive causes vibrations that cause latency (i.e., slows down the process of accessing stuff from the disk). Wild.

Majel Barrett Roddenberry has left us.

Majel played the Enterprise's first officer in the original pilot "The Cage" (later recut with a frame story as the TOS two-parter "The Menagerie"), then Nurse Christine Chapel in the original series. Then in TNG she played Councilor Troi's mother, Lwaxana, as well as providing the ubiquitous computer voice in TNG and later series. In fact, she has recenntly finished voice work on the forthcoming Trek movie.

She and Gene Roddenberry married two months after the final episode of Star Trek was aired. (According to Memory Alpha, they were in Japan and has a "Shinto-Buddhist" wedding!)

After Gene's death she did a lot to preserve the Star Trek legacy, and also worked as executive producer on two shows based on ideas from his archives, Earth: Final Conflict and Andromeda.

Here's why the American Century is over: while our "best" minds are busy Twittering about what they had for lunch and playing Guitar Hero, Chinese farmers with little education are building armies of walking robots. How do you say "Bite my shiny metal ass" in Mandarin?

This is just beautiful, makes me feel maybe this crazy bunch of monkeys might just work it all out after all. Yves Rossy, a Swiss pilot, flew across the English Channel on his homemade, jet-propelled, personal "wing" aircraft. The thing looks like a real-life "Buzz Lightyear" jetpack.

Sweet.

Sci-fi made real: a man who's been paralyzed for 20 years, walking thanks to a robotic exoskeleton. "The device, called ReWalk, is the brainchild of engineer Amit Goffer, founder of Argo Medical Technologies, a small Israeli high-tech company. Something of a mix between the exoskeleton of a crustacean and the suit worn by Robocop, ReWalk helps paraplegics - people paralysed below the waist - to stand, walk and climb stairs."

I didn't watch much of the Olympics, partly because the events I want to see never get covered, partly because I'm still uneasy about the whole Beijing hosting thing. But two bits worth noting:

• During the opening ceremonies, the Microsoft Windows "Blue Screen of Death" made an appearance. Ha, ha. "Perhaps this is simply Microsoft's idea of 'product placement', as the BSOD is one of the more recognizable features of Windows, and perhaps transcends all language barriers," quips macenstein.com.
  

Arthur C. Clarke was the author of such science fiction classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Childhood's End, and was the first to proposed the idea of placing communications satellites in geosynchronous orbits (where they always appear in the same point in the sky). He passed away today at the age of 90. An amazing man, he will be missed.

In his honor I think I'm going to re-read my copy of The Lion of Comarre & Against the Fall of Night. (I like the original Against the Fall of Night a bit more than the expanded and revised The City and the Stars, but both are good. Beyond the Fall of Night, however, is a great disappointment, contradicting the original not just in theme but in plot, and Gregory Benford should be ashamed of the hack job he did on his half.)

An interesting story at ABCNews.com: "The Thai government said Tuesday it was investigating claims that supposedly celibate Buddhist monks have been using a U.S.-based social networking Web site to flirt with women."

However, the headline of the article is "Zen Flirting?" Which prompted me to send the following note:

While I'm sure the author of the "Zen Flirting?" headline (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=4385254&page=1) meant no disrespect, the form of Buddhism practiced in Thailand is not Zen. Indeed, in some Zen schools it is not uncommon for monks to marry.

Mentioning Zen in a connection with the Theravada Buddhism found in Thailand would be rather like headlining a story about some scandal in the Catholic Church with a pun about Billy Graham.

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, this story of a remote-controlled robot armed with a water cannon that its creator, Rufus Terrill, claims has helped prevent break-ins and drug deals on his block and stopped vandals from trashing a local day care center. Others suggest he's a vigilante who's harassing the homeless.

Over at Edge, Kevin Kelly confronts the economics of the digital age:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

Well, what can't be copied?

...

From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free.