ExTechOps

Today* the latest collaboration of the Brothers Houpt has hit the scientific newstands! The boffins at the Houpt-Lab are proud to present:
Circular swimming in mice after exposure to a high magnetic field
by T.A. and C.E. Houpt
Paper and PDF can’t really show the effect directly, so here is a video of a mouse swimming immediately after [...]

Boing Boing recently noted the satirical McSweeney’s piece “Leaping off the Page” by Ben Greenman that proposed a 3D typographic system, 3*TYPE, which would allow simple prose to meet the challenges of the Avatar-inspired 3D revolution. However, where would satire be without farce? So taking things to their natural extreme, I present “HTML in 3D!” [...]

Recently Comedy Central yanked The Daily Show and The Colbert Report off of Hulu. I started watched these shows on Hulu because it provided RSS feeds for the full episodes, while Comedy Central has only ever had segment/clip feeds. Luckily, the shows’ sites have feed-like AJAH pages that are easily massaged into a true RSS [...]

I finally got around to converting Lynxlet from Ye Olde CVS repository into Subversion. By default the cvs2svn tool uses the customary trunk/branch/tag naming. I’ve never much like this naming scheme, in part because “tag” breaks the botanical morphology theme (shouldn’t it be trunk/branch/leaf?)
Since Lynx are carnivores, I decided mammalian anatomy would be more appropriate. [...]

Once the Singularity arrives and we have all been uploaded to androids, we will surely dream of electric sheep. But how will we take care of these virtual flocks? Luckily, “The Sheep Enterprise” from 1950 explains everything one needs to know about raising and maintaining sheep, electric or otherwise.

The Sheep Enterprise: How to establish and [...]

My good friend Ken Bowen is launching a web project on new year’s day: a blog named “Written in Glory”  at 54th-mass.org. “Written in Glory” is a historical reenactment/reproduction of the year 1863 using the letters and memoirs of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of free black men that was created to fight in the American [...]

If you place an old hollow-core door out on the sidewalk, with a “Free Hollow-Core Door” sign on it, then every pedestrian that passes and reads the sign will gently knock on the door.

My first reaction on seeing the BBC’s map of CCTV camera density was: Well, they are certainly keeping a good eye on the Danelaw!

(Thumbnail maps from the BBC and Histoire de l’anglais)

I released a simple iPhone and iPod Touch web app called “Blistering Barnacles!” (BB) — a homage to my favorite Tintin character, Captain Haddock. I submitted BB to Apple’s Web Application Catalog, which produced a small flurry of hits. Here are some of the numbers. In total about 770 unique visitors ran the app, about 460 [...]

Seen in Ithaca.