Inside of a Dog, It's Too Dark to Read

I was told that the Caledon chat-channel in Second Life went all frothy over collectively discovering that 'Gears' was an available surname (when you create an account, you have to choose from a list of surnames the company generates, then add your own given name). One of the names suggested to go with gears was 'Antikythera', which didn't ring a bell.

Chalk it up to bad mental file management - 'Antikythera' was saved as 'ancient Greek computer so there'. You might remember there was quite a bit of excitement when people noticed, after nearly a century of it sitting around, that this was actually a sophisticated astronomical calculator of a sort the Romans couldn't be bothered with because they were, y'know, Romans (at least they built good roads). The Device uses several cleverly-calculated gear interactions to reproduce specific astronomical phenomena - positions and eclipses and such - to come up with calendar and position figures. Here's some of the sorts of numbers involved - and mind you, the Greeks built the machine, but the Babylonians did the observations! ( Cut for lots of extreme lay geekishness )

I realised this morning I'd forgotten to mention the 5+ typhoon 'Nabi' (here, lookit this guy!) who's currently got Saipan in his sites; also, chiroho linked to an act that can only be described as evil -- around 1000 Shia pilgrims in Baghdad died, mostly the elderly and children, from a bridge stampede provoked by a rumour of a suicide bomber.  The bomber, of course, never needed to show up.  Panic did all the work.

Do these creeps, causing harm like this, still dare call themselves 'Muslim'?  They're hypocrites of a neo-con order if they do.


On to what I think is good news, even if it's gadgety and trivial for most, 'cause it'll be expensive for years when they get it all together, but still:

This linked picture is of a 'global'.  It was a prop in the near-future setting of the Roddenberry-based TV series, Earth: Final Conflict.  The global combined the features of a mobile phone, a video camera, a GPS and a streaming video display.  The whole unit snapped together into an elegant extended oval, and was opened horizontally, like the picture shows, to display the screen and activate its features.

I had gadget lust.

This picture, provided by Engadget.com, is a prototype rollup display... bearing a striking resemblance in size and general structrure to the global.

[has small-electronics fit of joy]

They are so close.