André Venter: Everything else

Medlogs

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 19:26:40 GMT

A weblog aggregator for medical weblogs. Medserve, another aggregator, has medical RSS and scroll boxes available. [John Robb's Weblog]

Robert Hooke

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 17:59:14 GMT

"... is one of the most neglected natural philosophers of all time. The inventor of, amongst other things, the iris diaphragm in cameras, the universal joint used in motor vehicles, the balance wheel in a watch, the originator of the word 'cell' in biology, he was Surveyor of the City of London after the Great Fire of 1666, architect, experimenter, worked in astronomy - yet is known mostly for Hooke's Law ... "
More at Robert Hooke's Micrographia: a digital facsimile. 'In it we are introduced to the living cell; to microscopic fungi and the life story of the mosquito; we find the two contrasting theories about the origin of the lunar craters posed for the very first time ... ' [MetaFilter]

Find Out About the Future of Science

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 17:40:39 GMT

[Slashdot]

The Birdhouse

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 16:29:11 GMT

Ben Kerschberg's Blog on Mental Health:

Ben Kerschberg is a graduate of Yale Law School and the University of Virginia. Since graduating from law school, he has clerked for a federal court of appeals judge, practiced law, and worked as an industry analyst for a public software company in Silicon Valley... He will spend the next two years as a Fellow at Yale Law School, where he hopes to write a book about the manner in which American society stigmatizes mental illness.
Ben Kerschberg knew at age seven that he would one day attempt suicide. ... It was not an idea he toyed with. He just knew. And he was right.
In (his book) Piercing The Veil, Kerschberg takes us with unflinching candor on a journey that begins in his sophomore year of college, when he suffers the first of a series of repeated and calamitous nervous breakdowns precipitated by daily suicidal ideations. His lifetime battle with his inner demons culminates, at age 30, in a failed suicide attempt and hospitalization in a psychiatric institution. His astonishing tale opens the eyes of those who have never suffered from mental illness and empowers those who have but feel that their truth must be bottled, corked, and sealed with wax. At times disarmingly funny, but more often poetically tragic, Kerschbergâ€™s account breaks onto the scene with a powerful voice that will leave people reaching out to their friends and loved ones.

The weblog is a labor of love, doing a good job covering mental health-related media items. I haven't looked at the book but it is available for free download here. [Follow Me Here...]

Student Challenges Basic Ideas of Time

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 15:21:09 GMT

A bold paper published in the August issue of Foundations of Physics Letters seems set to change the way we think about the nature of time and its relationship to motion and classical and quantum mechanics. The work also appears to provide solutions to Zeno's paradoxes. (Via Kurzweilai.net. More inside...) [MetaFilter]

Lone Genius Blogger circa 13th century

Mon, 28 Jul 2003 18:32:11 GMT

Mechthild of Magdeburg was a beguine mystic who kept a vernacular diary of her spiritual revelations that was widely circulated by copying out in longhand. She was a blogger in a time before printing and postal service, much less electronic networks, existed.

She journaled her experience including visionary insight into spirituality, love songs and responses to critics who reacted inamicably to the notion of a woman writing about anything, much less faith. She wrote from her 30s until the time of her death.

Her writing is collected in the book 'Flowing light of the Godhead', which contains 267 passages ('posts') from a few lines to a few pages long. What we call blogging is actually a very old form... [www.gulker.com - words and pictures from Silicon Valley]

Fri, 30 May 2003 13:24:38 GMT

Might Mars Contain Life? [Slashdot]

A Supernova In Red/Blue Plaid, Please

Fri, 30 May 2003 13:24:32 GMT

[Slashdot]

Wed, 28 May 2003 16:51:30 GMT

Investigating Artificial Black Holes [Slashdot]

Wed, 28 May 2003 16:51:09 GMT

The Changing Definition Of 'Kilogram' [Slashdot]

Wed, 28 May 2003 15:50:23 GMT

Moyers Reflects on Journalism, Memorial Day. Bill Moyers: On Candor in Journalism. Every Memorial Day I think about what these men did and what we owe... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Wed, 28 May 2003 12:37:52 GMT

Multi-Kulti-Blogging. Blogs Opening Iranian Society?. Iran's restive youth are using Farsi-language blogs as an outlet to express repressed creativity and sexuality. But the Islamic government is slowly catching on. Michelle Delio reports from the BlogTalk conference in Vienna. [Der Schockwellenreiter]

Tue, 27 May 2003 15:03:15 GMT

BitTorrent Blamed for Matrix2 Downloads [Slashdot]

Tue, 27 May 2003 14:24:44 GMT

Musik hören. Die MP3-Serversoftware Slimp (OpenSource) funktioniert ähnlich wie das Sharing mit iTunes, allerdings plattformübergreifend für Windows, Linux und OS X. [Der Schockwellenreiter]

Fri, 23 May 2003 17:29:41 GMT

The Inquirer: HP adds Trusted Computing Module to PC range. It looks like their TPM is on a daughtercard like IBM's. They propose an interesting and maybe even useful use for TCPA: using 802.1x and client certificates (stored in the TPM of course) to prevent unauthorized machines from connecting to corporate networks. [Hack the Planet]

Fri, 23 May 2003 17:29:07 GMT

Impress PC Watch has a cool graph of graphic chip complexity over time; no wonder they have a power problem. [Hack the Planet]

Fri, 23 May 2003 17:27:31 GMT

New Scientist. Claims of "unexpected and stunning new physical phenomena" are rare in the abstract of a reputable scientific paper. But the latest report by photonics crystal pioneer John Joannopoulos and his group at MIT, soon to be published in Physical Review Letters, does not disappoint. [Daypop Top News Stories]

Fri, 23 May 2003 17:26:00 GMT

Wired News: Web 'Shaman' Fights His Demons. BUDAPEST, Hungary -- People and their ideas are like the World Wide Web, billions of bits of data that are far more useful and interesting when they connect, according to Tim Berners-Lee, the man who in 1980 conjured up what has become the Web. [Daypop Top News Stories]

Fri, 23 May 2003 17:24:59 GMT

BBC NEWS | UK | How does Dyson make water go uphill?. Inventor James Dyson, he of the bagless vacuum cleaner, has stolen the headlines from the gardeners at this year's Chelsea Flower Show with his "Wrong Garden". [Daypop Top News Stories]

Fri, 23 May 2003 17:24:31 GMT

Giant Titan Update
World Record! And the flower has opened. Der Botanische Garten Bonn meldet Weltrekord für Amorphophallus titanum! Here's their webcam. [Andrea's Weblog]