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Friday, June 17, 2005 What a Goodyear blimp crash looks like. No injuries and the pilots walked away unharmed. Not extactly the Hindenburg. See also: Hindenburg video, colorized with old timey narration and music. Also: Wikipedia entry on the Hindenburg. Interesting. Only 36 people were killed, it was originally designed to fly with helium, and even had an internal smoking room. That's right. People smoked inside a giant flammable hydrogen balloon. @ 04:25 PM CST [Link] Thursday, June 16, 2005 Can technology save the planet? Bruce Sterling wrote this short essay for the Sierra Club. Worth reading. Bruce makes some good points and observations. I wonder if anyone important is paying attention. There's some irony in seeing a writer known for his futuristic dystopias write an optimistic piece about the future. Also: Wikipedia page about Sterling. @ 09:03 AM CST [Link] Nintendo's Miyamoto on the future of gaming. Evidently that future includes such titles as Nintendogs and Mario 128. I guess making fun of Nintendogs is a bit too easy, but someone has the break the "first person shooter" and other cliched game molds. See also: Nintendogs review. Also: The real future of videogames. Oh, go buy an Aibo already. @ 08:40 AM CST [Link] Teddy Ruxpin doll back. Remember that creepy semi-animated talking bear? He's back. I remember that cheesy Devry commercial they used to play on TV for years with a student saying, "I helped bring Teddy Ruxpin to life." Umm, good job I guess. Seems a little pricey at $70 per bear and $20 for two stories. See also: Teddy the toy. Teddy the cartoon series. @ 08:24 AM CST [Link] Wednesday, June 15, 2005 Laugh because it sure beats crying. About 40 percent of Americans say they consider talk show host Bill O'Reilly a journalist - more than would define famed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward the same way, according to a poll conducted this spring. O'Reilly is on the Fox News Channel, offering his often tart conservative opinions, while Woodward has spent a career writing news stories and books. Only 30 percent of those polled said Woodward was a journalist, while 53 percent said they didn't know, despite the fact that Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate story that ultimately led to President Nixon's resignation in 1974. @ 08:54 AM CST [Link] Halfbakery: Sliding scale drinks. I can't decide if this is a great idea or just a really bad "sin tax." @ 08:38 AM CST [Link] Great pshop gallery over at w10k today. Love the time machine. See also: Sciam article on time travel. Don't hold your breath. Of course, if time travel was really possible we'd probably see time travelers all over the place. I mean time. Place/time. Its 140 million BC and I need a nine-volt battery... @ 08:24 AM CST [Link] Sunday, June 12, 2005 After eating McDonalds like four times this week, this is the last thing I should be checking out. Neat little experiment to see how much more mold resistant McDonalds is compared to regular take-out food. A little too much preservatives eh? After a nuclear war, the roaches will be dining on Happy Meals. @ 03:37 AM CST [Link] How to make a million dollars by Marshall Brain. Its actually not about making a million dollars, but about starting your own business. Brain gave this presentation to 200 students at Duke and its worth reading. Although it may sound stuffy, it very much embodies the DIY mentality. Let me emphasize that the idea does not have to be complex. Domino's is not a complex idea: "We make pizza and deliver it to people's houses." How simple is that? Yet it has made millions and millions of dollars. Here are a couple of other examples: * Netflix -- "You send us $20 a month, and we will mail three DVDs to you. When you mail one of the DVDs back to us, we send you another one." That's pretty simple. The genius behind Netflix is that they got rid of all the little niggly problems that make you hate video stores. People liked it. * Southwest airlines -- This is a little more complicated because it involves jumbo jets and the FAA and drink carts and such, but at the start Southwest was a still pretty simple idea. They picked three cities in Texas and flew from one to the next in a circle. They picked people up at one city and dropped them off at the next. That's it. Once that was working, they started adding more cities, and pretty soon Southwest was changing an entire industry. @ 03:20 AM CST [Link] [Archives] Search entries: