I don’t usually get lathered up about nanotech, but this 1/1 millionth scale version of fallingwater— from 1996—is pretty cool

A little taste of the Toscanini’s vibe. Unmentioned is that they also have the best espresso drinks in Greater Boston.

The lone researcher. “lone tinkerers…who cobbled their contraptions together in small, cluttered labs and garages, gave way to drab ‘researchers’ — anonymous drones working in teams for big companies, tweaking products to be marketed by the suits.”

Drainspotting: just what it sounds like. The Wabash tie-in to this is that my sophomore year when Andy Ford became president, someone sent him a photo of a drain cover made by the Ford Meter Box Company of Wabash, IN.

If you’re a little tired of all the Reagan hagiography, the perennially cranky Christopher Hitchens has this in Slate. Dear Old Wabash gets a passing mention.

Stories in BBC and a more nationalistic schtick from The Register commemorate the 50 year anniversary of the death of Alan Turing. Via Slashdot.

I have had many IM conversations that inadvertantly look a lot like this.

A map.

I’m still surprised TV news, which I’ve mostly written off, actually broke this story.

They all think he’s a righteous dude.

Wow. It’s so cartoon-villain-y that I almost have trouble believing it. Maybe there’s another tape of them tying Nell to the train tracks.

One of the good things about the Boston Globe is the Sunday Globe’s Ideas section. While I hesitate to recommend this for a variety of reasons (like the last line: “we should affirm the shared humanity that transcends our differences and binds us all together”), this is worth reading.

Ever safety-conscious, Robert McNamara had “Permissive Action Links” installed as safeguards to an accidental or unauthorized launch of Minuteman ICBMs. However, according to this account,

What I then told McNamara about his vitally important locks elicited this response: “I am shocked, absolutely shocked and outraged. Who the hell authorized that?” What he had just learned from me was that the locks had been installed, but everyone knew the combination.

The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the “locks” to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard… SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at 00000000.

For what it’s worth, despite being 25 years old, the 1977 essay on terrorism that follows that is worth reading, too.

Found some excellent humanities-oriented uses of the web & RSS via Boing Boing this morning.

First, DaVinci’s notebooks, a page a day.

Second, and much more elaborate informationally, the The Diary of Samuel Pepys. It’s heavily hyperlinked, allows user annotations, and follows roughly along with the entry Pepys made 343 years ago on the current date. Judging by the large numbers of comments from people following along, it seems to have a wide readership. The comments are of varying quality of course; some ask and answer good questions on the text, others… “I wonder whether Sam’s breeches and finery dried out enough for today’s affairs.” Though, I guess that, too, is part of the charm of reading the diary of someone long dead.

If I thought my diary entries were going to be so heavily read in 343 years, would I burn my diaries or make them juicier?