The last time I checked out the self driving car research at CMU was in 1985 or so. They had a van loaded with SUN workstations and radar rack on top. They had a cell phone, but kept it off because calls were $1 a minute. We only saw it move a short way, just far enough to threaten their DARPA sponsor who was standing…

It's like the old Star Trek convention. The monitor screens were all more rounded when the episode was set in the past, just like 1950s televisions. Current screens were more square, like 1960s televisions. It's no weirder than the movie switching to black and white for the 1980s in a flashback. Most people associate…

Antheil's Ballet Mécanique was the inspiration for the opera Doctor Atomic.

I gather the mapping is complete and they are going to start dragging the search gear any week now. Apparently you can't drag underwater search gear without proper depth mapping. Who knows what they'll find.

Welcome to journalism, the new stupid.

Does anyone offer a pricing proxy that lets you get prices from websites from various locations? I'm assuming that once it is in the cart, they won't change the price when you log in.

They got tanks and modern warships.

I live in logging country and have to explain that this, not the spotted owl, is what is killing logging employment. Most of the trucks aren't quite as high tech as this, but they have their share of specialized tools and a loader, so one man can do the work of a small team.

I still have my Canon EOS 650, and my 20-something niece has been eyeing it hungrily. Of course, it has electronics in it, so who knows how long it will last, though I bet the light measuring cell will hold up better than selenium.

I haven't seen these since the mid-60s. I assume they got a patent on them.

How does HFR compare with the "uncanny valley"? From your review I get the impression that there is an increase in spatial and temporal resolution not matched by an increase in realism resulting in a sense of things being "off".

Surely everyone is familiar with the old rule, never put anything in your vagina that you wouldn't put in your mouth, and vice versa. Grandma knew, the risks are the same.

I know Viagra can help people with certain cardio-pulmonary problems. I know a young girl who benefited from it, though she may still need a heart lung transplant. It's not clear if it would help otherwise healthy athletes. You might take aspirin for pain if you overdo it, but taking aspirin before competing isn't…

The problem is that since the early 90s, point and shoot cameras, even film cameras like my old EOS 650, took great film photos in P mode. Now and then I'd use aperture or exposure time priority, like when I was shooting from a helicopter, but usually it wasn't worth futzing with the camera rather than experiencing…

Amazing, they're bringing back SROs. (SRO = Single room occupancy apartments.) Bloomberg was yakking about this in NYC. We all watched the 80s, 90s and 00s as all the SROs were condo-ized or coop-ed and wondered where all the people with finite incomes were going to live. Cheat answer: in shelters or on the streets.…

For crying out loud. These are patents. They've patented placing an "a" after a "t" and they're suing the English language. There are patents spilling out on the floor at the lobotomy lab.

It's the old cookie recipe yield - makes 48 cookies, or one big cookie when stuffing oneself. Dieticians live on Mars and study the earth using an 8" refractor to estimate actual portion sizes.

Could it have been destroyed by a volcano in the mid-19th century? Maybe this was Jules Verne's Lincoln Island aka Mysterious Island.

I've been trying to upgrade the contrast on a family members Mac. Movies and TV shows, streamed or downloaded, look like mud. It's nearly impossible to even follow what's going on. (I'm sure no one else has noticed this. Most people are multitasking when they watch movies or TV, so they don't care that they don't have…

The Architecture Machine Group at MIT, the precursor to the Media Lab, did page turning animation in the late 70s using color mapping (for those of you who remember 8 bit graphics). It was pretty amazing to see back then. The text was anti-aliased and gray scale, but they used some of the color slots to do the…