While reading about the Early Medieval European economy, I run across the memoires of the Andalusian traveler Ibrahim ibn Yaqub. Trying to find out more about him, I check the stub Wikipedia article which however only explains why I cannot find any sources quickly. So I turn to Google, only to be served up the page of the book that started my ( Read more... )

Thomas Friedman has been fretting about it and now the Chinese did it and beat everyone else to the punch on the plugin hybrid. Wonder how much it will cost in the US.

PS: OPSEC would like to remind you that the big problem with plugin hybrids is the strong assumptions they make about the cleanliness of coal-powered electric plants.

For posting from a Kindle7 the LJ page is just way too complicated a page. And the lack of true multi line editing support in the Kindle browser (though not in the notes entering of the book reader) makes this even more difficult.

One of the things that is enjoyable about being an engineer is that problems come in parts that have two flavors: the hard limits and the soft limits. The task of the engineer is to wiggle the soft limits around to make the hard limits bearable (or circumvent them altogether). The more successful the engineers are in doing this, the better they ( Read more... )

There are those, like Erik von Däniken and others, that believe that neolithic and early dynastic building projects require extra-terrestrial intervention. Others, like Wally Wallington, prefer to figure out how people could have built places likes Stonehenge using only the fundamentals of mechanics and physics that were in all likelihood available ( Read more... )

The best way to test a piece of equipment is to use it. So I downloaded a copy of Miyamoto Musashi's Five Rings, a Japanese book on strategy and swordsmanship from the mid 17th century ( Read more... )

This afternoon, we were invited to a party on Means Meadow Blvd.

Since I had never been there before, I used Google Maps' new Street View feature to drive there virtually. Here's how you do that:

1. Get the start and end address established, so that the route gets sketched in.
2. Switch to street view.
3. Keep clicking on the little white direction ( Read more... )

People are more likely now to have a USB port than willing to lug around a battery recharger - that's what the inventors of this battery are effectively arguing!

It is both cool and weird at the same time.

Despite the fact that my camera has more GB than my computer's main memory, or my hard disks until I finished my Masters' degree, it is still almost impossible to ship large files between locales on the Internet. Usually both of the parties have FTP sites optimized for download, but not upload (12KB/sec); or the upload on the FTP site is restricted ( Read more... )

Google lacuna
The omission of information incurred by the fact that Google Books does not contain all of the pages of a book.