Quote of the day. From a rest-discuss post about JSR 311: Java™ API for RESTful Web Services [thanks, Hendrik]:

This is like asking Karl Rove and Dick Cheney to write the Democratic Party platform.

“Bionic Seniors: Gerontomageddon”. Robotic suit to assist easy movement for Japan’s elderly—my initial thoughts:

1. I want one.
2. The company is called Cyberdyne and the suit is named HAL. You do the math.
3. “Suit, I need to sit down.” – “I am afraid I can’t do that, old Dave.”

Here’s a picture.

Passion vs. brains. JR on the recent “OMFG! Yahoo! is ripping off digg!!1!!” debacle:

I don’t want passionate users. Passionate users are morons. i want engaged users. i want folks using products because they find them useful, beneficial and interesting. i want folks to tell us what they like, what they don’t like, and what would make their lives easier. i want users that regularly check out our competitors and choose us again. Sometimes we’ll be better, sometimes they will. Blinders only mean you miss the advantages when they happen. I’ll leave the passionate users to the porn sites.

Summing up YouTube. xkcd does an excellent job of taking a snapshot of YouTube in one single comic strip.

It’s art! jr has an iNsight

Apple is not a business. It’s an art co-op.

Project Censored: Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007. Interesting list. I “liked” #2, Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran.

How old is the Grand Canyon? Park service won’t say:

Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees.

Dick in a box. IKEA instructions for making a DIAB.

AG? Nine year old Wired story, still fascinating and mindboggling:

Skeptics had a field day when a scientist claimed in 1996 that gravity could be negated. Now his findings are being investigated in laboratories worldwide.

Solid State Disk Changes The Game [via Simon]:

And, it will change the way your software runs. When there’s little penalty in saving to disk, there’s no reason not to. Your changes are stored as your writing the memo, or playing with the spreadsheet.

‘Take a leap into hyperspace’ is an interesting article about the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics awarding the title “Liquid Propulsion Best Paper” to a team of scientists around Jochem Häuser (Germany) and Walter Dröscher (Austria), who published a paper called “Guidelines for a Space Propulsion Device Based on Heim’s Quantum Theory”, which deals with (hold on to your pants) dimension drives. Well, hyper drives. Well, not even that, but apparently the serious possibility of moving shit around really fast by manipulating forces in eight dimensions.

I don’t understand much of physics of that caliber (who does?), but I find it gripping nonetheless. What I find amazing is that the AIAA apparently deemed it solid and real enough to hand out an award.

Mandatory Wikipedia links: Heim Theory, Burkhard Heim, Walter Dröscher.

Currently reading the “Mars” Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Mostly because I’ve been using public transportation to get to the office the last two weeks, and that gives me almost 2 additional hours of reading time every day. So, a 2000 pages trilogy does come in rather nicely here.

Anyways, I’m 100 pages into book 2, and it’s pretty good. It’s not your off-the-shelf “OMG WE’RE TEH SPACE PEOPEL” scifi.

• Red Mars
• Green Mars
• Blue Mars

Back to work (sadly, I’ve arrived in the office).