I don't know how many times I've been out of the house, away from the kitchen, with a bowl full of food in front of me - without any utensils. Ineke Hans has the solution, small enough to fit in your wallet, for when emergency cutlery is required. #

Hello, I Am A Robot!, a book depicting a world populated by robots...but it looks like the robots are us. Note the inclusion of Vaucanson's "digesting duck," otherwise known as the least appealing toy duck ever. #

Published writers always have advice for struggling writers - not always good advice, but it's generally always honest, and in some way about as effective as anything else a writer might try. Take, for example, Pseudonymous Bosch's 'winning' advice. #

Last year was the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and 150th anniversary of The Origin of the Species, so how did the world handle it in the face of increasing Creationist bull-hooey? The National Center for Science Education has compiled the top ten evolution-related news stories of the past year. It's somewhat skewed towards NCSE activities, but it points out some of the bigger events, both for and against evolution's place in the world's knowledge base. My favorite: Project Steve. #

Jim Lehrer, of what I always called "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour", has revealed his rules for journalism. "Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories, and clearly label everything" is one that strikes me as missing greatly from the news pretenders today (especially channels with 'news' in their name), and it also seems to me that these are parallel with the expectations The Daily Show demands from the news programs they lambast nightly. Via. #

Today may be Zamenhofa Tago - 'Esperanto Day', in honor of Esperanto inventor LL Zamenhof - but film-lovers have an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an entirely new language. In James Cameron's new movie Avatar, the aliens speak Na'vi, an artificial language invented by linguist Paul Frommer. The actors in the film were not required to be fluent (they learned their lines phonetically), leaving Frommer as the only Na'vi speaker on this planet. You can join his exclusive club with a dictionary and a system of grammar, and if you end up on a distant planet inhabited by giant blue creatures, you'll be set. See also: Atlantean, the Divine Language, and, of course, Klingon (among many, many others). Update: Language Log has a nice consolidation of the technical aspects of Na'vi by Frommer. #

In 1927, Frank Hutmacher, a Russian-German immigrant, married Veronica Nuss and spent the next three years building a home made of stone slabs, clay, rocks, and what little wood there was available. The Hutmachers and their children continued to live in the earthen home until the late 1970s. In 1979, the property was added to the National Register of Historic Places because so few earthen homes of its kind survived so long, but time and the elements have continued to wear on the farm's buildings. In recent years, however, efforts have been made to restore the structure, using historical construction methods in hopes of keeping this rare surviving example of Ukrainian stone architecture intact. #

The MIT Media Lab, my favorite MIT department, has done it. DARPA challenged the internet to find ten red balloons, each numbered and identified with a DARPA sign, scattered around the Untied States on December 5th. Entrants had until the 14th to report the winning GPS coordinates, but MIT had them in within nine hours (a bit longer than I predicted). Their ingenious plan was to try to include people instead of firewalling out false positives and blocking spies - and paying cold, hard cash for successful hits, a'la MLM. #

The stock markets are usually intangible, you pass around money and imaginary chunks of property and companies, and maybe you've traded in gold but you have never held it in your hands. That is, until some poorly-written software and a gentrified pier conspire to deliver 28,000 tons of actual coal to a commodity futures trader. Via. #

Justin Timberlake - in a NPR t-shirt? Speculation runs wild on how such an event could come to be. #

Keeping the power on in a war zone, which in turn keeps the sewers flowing and water pumping, is an exercise in herding cats and MacGyveresque engineering. Owned by the Palestinian National Authority, GEDCo is the Gaza Strip's local power source. Some power comes in from nearby Egypt and Israel, and Gaza must rely on those countries for diesel fuel for the generators, but - for obvious political reasons - Gaza can't trust those sources, and must find a way to keep the lights on with what they've got. #

Patrick Bateman knew the value of a good business card in the eighties - but then so did the gangs of Chicago. It was a more refined time when gangs identified each other by exchanging cards, emblazoned with amateur art and colorful nicknames, betraying an overlapping interest in violence, smoking pot, racism, dissing other gangs, and unicorns. Via. #

Ten years is a long time on the internet, isn't it? This blog turned ten two months ago - and Derek's Big Website of Wal-Mart Receipts is now ten years old, too. I uploaded everything shortly before leaving on Thanksgiving vacation, 1999, started sending out emails and submitting to 'best of the web' sites, and within a week or so hits started coming in. It didn't change a whole lot in the big picture of the world (although there's rumors that Fark was influenced), but in those pre-blog days of "websites", 1998 - 2000 was a wellspring of independent wierdness. #

Today's airline bombing fears are driven by political and terrorist acts, but most early aircraft bombings had something else in mind: insurance payouts. The Albert Guay incident in 1949 and UA flight 629 in 1955 were both planes brought down by explosives placed by murderous relatives interested in a big payout; sadly, both succeeded in killing their target, but in both cases the culprit was brought to justice. Suicide-for-insurance is also believed to have played a part in several airline bombings. #

Kottke has posted a cool caricature map of Europe circa WWI - what he doesn't explain is that the poster is part of the book Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld, a young adult steampunk title that came out last month from Simon Pulse. The map linked by Kottke is very true to the style - caricature maps are a real thing, and you can see more here. #

Ogeorgeism: a euphemism for marital infidelity, used only once in history by my measure. I'm enjoying the archives of the Fargo Argus, a long-defunct, wittily-written newspaper from this area. In June 1880, the Argus wrote, regarding the infamous Christiancy divorce, "The minister accuses his wife of ogeorgeism, while she returns with the accusation of cruelty." The etymology of the word seems lost to the ages. For a thorough documentation of the Christiancy divorce story, also from Quondam Washington: part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5. #

Lignum Vitae: The Wood of Life. Merlin's staff was rumored to be made of this wood, a fact not lost on Harry Potter afficianados. As a hardwood, it is highly decorative in furniture; as an oily wood, it is a self-lubricating bearing for shipbuilding. #

Mythopoeia: the act of creating, usually through writing, a new mythology. JRR Tolkein was the first to coin the term, in a poetic response to C.S. Lewis. Tolkein is also cited as a shining example of the mythopoeic genre of fiction: The Lord of the Rings is at once derivitive of medieval mythology, but unique in its character as a fully-fledged mythos complete with creation myths, varying scales of deities and mystical creatures, spiritual good and evil, magic, and mysteries of the universe. Being mythopoeic pretty much guarantees falling under either the 'fantasy' or 'science fiction' (see Star Wars) umbrellas - while the best of the mythos-manufacturing genre are acknowledged and rewarded for their skills by the Mythopoeic Society and their annual Mythopoeic Awards. #

In 1867, the purchase of Alaska was ridiculed as "Seward's Folly." Russia had been trying to unload it on some unsuspecting buyer, and Canada was nowhere near far enough west as to make it worthwhile to them. Now, a hundred and fifty years later, was Seward right? Nope, not really. Sure, the gold rushes and oil and population growth have resulted in tax revenue, but according to a new report out of the University of Iowa, the U.S. Government has, since we got Alaska, spent way more on Alaska than we've gotten out of it. Palin cracks aside, it's good to know that we're not getting our money's worth for Alaska - but, really, tax money isn't a profit-gaining prospect for a country. If anything, the report should be a gauge for correcting spending imbalances, rather than calling a whole state a failure; Seward wouldn't approve. #

The University of Waterloo's Department of Applied Mathematics occupies a stark and geometrically striking building, built in May 1968, called the Math and Computers Building, or "MC". The design wasn't utilitarianly beauty-free: according to apocrypha, the architecture was intended to look like a slide rule from the side - but also, to protect the valuable computers inside, the walls are designed to collapse outward in the event of a nuclear strike. Via. #

I always buy cameras at a thrift shop if it has film in it; I, sadly, have yet to get a camera with viable pictures. I've bought secondhand digital cameras with pictures still on them (here's a few), though. The blog I Found Your Camera, however, hopes you'll send them in, because maybe, just maybe, the original owners are still looking for them. If not, at least we can all be voyeurs for just a few minutes, enjoying the vacations and holidays of others - and, unlike the olden days of being trapped for hours of vacation slides at Uncle Phil's, you can leave whenever you want. #