Check out the scandal of the Victoria’s Secret model with a secret of her own.

This woman has the most unfortunate name I think I’ve ever seen.

Just what the world needs: a Star Trek themed rock band. Oh, did I say ‘needs’? I meant ‘could have gone forever and ever without’!

Accordion Guy points to this “it’s funny ’cause it’s true” post at Bad News Hughes. Be sure to read to the end, because the punch line is priceless.

It terrifies me that my son may have to go through some form of this when he reaches middle school / high school age. And since he has my genes, it’s almost predetermined that there’s some geekiness in there just waiting to come out. Thank God his mom’s cool.

Mercora is a program you can use to build a private community where you can share music amongst your friends. And they claim it’s legal:

“Mercora lets you Webcast music legally and is sensitive to your privacy”

But since they also proclaim (in huge letters):

“Listen To Anyone’s Music!”

I have a hard time believing it.

But hey, it’s cool.

An article at Tom’s Hardware asks “can software replace programmers?” To be honest, as someone that works in the software industry, I’m not shaking in my boots just yet. The company that claims they have developed software that can write software isn’t ready to show it publicly just yet - although you can travel to Munich, Germany if you’d like to try out their technology.

I can’t imagine Microsoft putting so much time and energy into a new development environment like .NET if they had any inkling that something like this was on the horizon.

Great article:

“Most of us go through life seeing the glass as half empty rather than half full. If I asked you to list your problems, it would probably be easy for you. If I asked you to list all the things that were good, that were working, your list would probably be much shorter and more difficult to produce. It’s not that there aren’t many good things in our lives. It’s that we tend to focus on the negative, on the cup being half empty, rather than half full.”

What should one think when one walks into the hallway of one’s office building where one works, and finds an abandoned shopping cart with one unused green garbage bag folded up sitting in it?

Got back from getting coffee, and it was gone. I imagine that even if it was there for nefarious purposes, it can’t be all that easy to make a quick getaway with a shopping cart.

Weird.

Tales of Future Past is a website dedicated to looking back at predictions of the future, and comparing them to where we really are.

“A few years ago, people talked about building a bridge to the 21st century. Now that we’re there, the phrase seems as odd as building a causeway to five o’clock. As Midnight brought in the year 2000 (or 2001 if you prefer), something odd began to sink in. For people of my generation, who had lived through the tarnished promises of the Atomic Age, the Space Age, the Computer Age, and the This That and Another Age, the year 2001 was a gateway. We waited twenty, thirty, forty years and some longer to pass though that gate into a time when spaceships the size of ocean liners plied between colonised planets, where cities were colourful collections of brand new towers without a single old building or blade of grass, where people wore jumpsuits like they were the togas of a technocratic Rome, where robots were our powerful and obedient servants, and where jetpacks were as common as galoshes.

Boy, were we off base. It isn’t simply that the predictions were wrong. No one with half a brain really expected that sort of accuracy. And true, though some marvels did not come to pass, others that were and weren’t predicted did. We certainly live very different lives from that of our fathers and grandfathers. That is not in dispute. But what did not happen is what many expected, though never talked about much. Assuming that we dodged the 1984, Brave New World bullet, our future was supposed to be a sort of technocratic, atomic-powered, computer-controlled, antiseptic, space-travelling Jerusalem that would at last free us from the curse of Eden and original sin. We expected some how, some way that we would be on the road to being freed from the human condition. We expected a sort of bloodless, benign French Revolution with Hugo Gernsback as our Voltaire and Carl Sagan as our Robespierre. And what did we get? The City of Man with Tivo. The fact is, science fiction and popular science had set the bar so high that only the Second Coming with ray guns would have satisfied.”

View this video of a car simulator (Windows Media link) - this thing will blow your mind! It’s a platform that the driver sits on that is on hydraulics about 10 feet in the air, and it moves around significantly in response to the driver’s actions on the simulator. Oh, and I should also mention the three huge flat-screen monitors.

I want one, bad. BAD. REAL BAD.

I love smart ideas. This one struck me as particularly clever - using “kid power” to run a pump by hooking it up to a merry-go-round. What a great idea - harnessing a small part of the boundless energy of children, without any negative impact on them.

If we could think up elegant solutions like this for every problem we face, this world would be a vastly different place.

And I’m excited!