Calculated Spontaneity Does the Robot

Youtube

This is incredible... apparently the program for this is 'simple'... if it is, this company has revolutionized industrial robotics. Scalability isn't all about size - this is scalability of speed, without any reduction in accuracy. Amazing.

Links

Big money. Look, holes. Trends are trendy? Holy crap. Look, politicians dabbling where they shouldn't. Going to start using these tips on lists. Digg clone for design. 40 hours of Illustrator.

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10/21/09: 167 Visits, 307 Pageviews, 47 Absolute Unique Visitors. Average time on site of 2:30.

Random News

Windows 7 comes out on Thursday - I plan on getting it and putting it on my MacBook Pro, likely in VirtualBox form.

Quotes

Inspirational quote of the day from The West Wing:

Bartlet: It was not a space ship from another planet, just another time -- a long since abandoned Soviet satellite. One of its booster rockets didn't fire and it couldn't escape Earth's orbit. A sad reminder of the time when two powerful nations challenged each other and then boldly raced into outer space. What will be the next thing that challenges us, Toby? That makes us go farther and work harder? You know that when smallpox was eradicated, it was considered the single greatest humanitarian achievement of this century? Surely we can do it again, as we did in the time when our eyes looked towards the heavens, and with outstretched fingers we touched the face of God.

Calculated Spontaneity Slides through Doors

Youtube

Anyone else a Seinfeld Fan? Excellent montage of every single entrance by Kramer in the entire series - definitely worth watching, because he is hilarious.



Also, add Wired to that list of technology sites I gave out earlier this week.

Calculated Spontaneity Makes a Tiny Mistake

Interesting enough to deserve its own post: In a completely harmless event, some careless web design engineer somewhere in the world modified a script improperly, leaving out a single period. Unfortunately, tiny mistakes can cause huge problems, and this one did too, removing global access to every single .se (Swedish) website for a night.

Minor mistakes and tiny errors have caused many major catastrophes. The Three Mile Island accident is an example, where several simultaneous minor issues stacked up to cause a near-meltdown. The blackout in 2003, caused by a simple storm-felled tree according to the investigation, is another example of an apparently minor incident going vastly wrong. Though this one wasn't necessarily life-threatening, it still shows how small actions can have major effects, and likely was a major blip in the Swedish economy.

Calculated Spontaneity Builds a Repertoire

Each week I will try to produce some interesting links from a variety of sources and on a variety of topics. There will generally be no real method behind them, but instead they will be interesting things that I have seen over the course of the past week, or maybe just things that I look at regularly that I feel are worth checking out. I'll try to have at least a dozen or so good links every week.

Links

Design is Observed to be Good to the Core[77]. Mike has a pretty good design blog, too. The 2020 Olympics might be the bomb (bad pun). I Digg good comics. TED talks are always worth a listen. Beaches are nice too. Inhabitat and Pruned are a couple of neat architecture blogs. An interesting design process, though the blog hasn't been updated in a couple months. Also, Dyson is sweet.

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Began analytics on October 8th. Updates are to-current-date.

10/13/09: 43 Visits, 73 Pageviews, 12 Absolute Unique Visitors. Average time on site of 1:33.

Roman Mining

My research this semester is through the Classic Civilization department under Professor David Potter. I am studying the climatic and economic effects of mining on the Roman province of Hispania Tarraconensis. I may actually spin the research off into a separate blog, especially after the class ends if I continue to pursue it as a side-interest. Right now, I have too many things going at once. I'll try to make an informative update on the mining project in this post every week as well, just to be interesting. I don't really have anything for it today. Mostly I have been looking at the variety of minerals that the Romans were able to mine and process and the usage of those minerals. The theory that I am working with right now is that mining bred massive deforestation in the Iberian Peninsula in order to heat the necessary furnaces for smelting.

Quotes of the Week

Generally will contain a few quotes of random variety.

Television: One of my favorite wordplays from The West Wing - there are a Lot of them.

C.J.: Is there anything I can say other than "The President rode his bicycle into a tree?"
Leo: He hopes never to do it again.
C.J.: Seriously, they're laughing pretty hard.
Leo: He rode his bicycle into a tree, C.J. What do you want me to – "The president, while riding a bicycle on his vacation in Jackson Hole, came to a sudden arboreal stop." What do you want from me?

Design:

Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent. - Aaron Russell