Every time a software program locks up and you want to start over, every time you need to change your password or log on or off your computer, you can thank David Bradley. The same David Bradley who saved Bill Gates’ derriere before the Windows operating system became the monster it is today. Bradley is the man who gave the world control-alt-delete
Last night Foreign Correspondent ran an excellent story on the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and the kiwi architect Mark Burry, who’s made it his life’s work to complete the Spanish architect’s vision. The self-effacing Burry works out of an office at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, where he’s adapted aeronautical software for the first time in architecture to help transform Antoni Gaudí’s creative line drawings into solid bricks and mortar.
Gaudí’s drawings for the building resemble an elaborate sand drip castle — it’s no wonder his 30-storey cathedral, which will eventually be big enough for a congregation of fifteen thousand people, couldn’t be completed in his lifetime. The entire plans were in his head, and died with him.
Burry, who says that without question Gaudí was a genius, has been working on the building for twenty-five years. He visits Barcelona only four times a year, but oversees the construction full time from Melbourne via computer modelling.
And he has a deadline — in 1926 after Gaudí died, his successors predicted it would take ten years to finish the job. Now Burry has to have it done by 2007, in time for the 125th anniversary of the first stone being laid.
HotAIR, the web site of the Annals of Improbable Research, is publishing a fascinating series on the Origin of Murphy’s Law. It turns out there really was a Murphy, and the story of his law involves rocket sleds, Chuck Yeager, and Edwards Air Force Base. The article covers all these topics and more, and includes interviews with Yeager, the son of Murphy (really), and several surviving members of the project that inspired the law
There’s a good write up on cinema’s most famous scream over at NPR. It even includes a real audio track so you can check it out for yourself. Now that I know what to listen for, I’ve noticed it in a bunch of video games too.
The BBC has gone public with its intention to find a way to put the entire content of its radio and TV archives online
The lawless Mexican border town of Juarez is no stranger to death. Fiefdom of the infamous narco-trafficante ‘Lord of the Skies’, its fortunes are built on hard drugs and cheap labour. But now an even more ruthless menace stalks its dusty streets.
There is a new word spoken in Ciudad Juarez: Feminocidio — feminocide, the mass slaughter of women. There is no other word to describe what is happening: some 340 young women found murdered since 1992 in much the same manner as Sagrario, and a further 180 or so missing
Industry executives held a ceremony in a Tokyo temple on Friday to express gratitude to pachinko machines for their hard work and profitability in the face of tough economic times. Incense was offered to a golden replica of a panchinko machine and prayers were chanted to the departed spirits of machines no longer in service.
Give Franz Josef Och, a researcher at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, enough parallel data and you can have a translation system for any two languages in a matter of hours. His approach relies on two concepts, gathering huge amounts of data, and applying statistical models to this data — it completely ignores grammar rules and dictionaries — the computer-encoded equivalents of the famous Rosetta Stone inscriptions
Harold Newman, had pursued a hobby — an elaborate genealogy project — trying to link all characters from Greek mythology in a single family tree. Jon Newman wanted to finish it. Now, the Newmans’ combined work has been published by the University of North Carolina Press as A Genealogical Chart of Greek Mythology: Comprising 3673 Named Figures of Greek Mythology, All Related to Each Other Within a Single Family of 20 Generations
Scientists hoping to clone prehistoric mammoths are preparing their first frozen DNA samples in a bid to revive the species
For centuries, researchers have been confounded by the fact that the Incas apparently ruled a mighty empire without any written records. Now Gary Urton, a professor at Harvard University, believes he has uncovered a language of binary code recorded in knotted strings — a writing system unlike virtually any other
University of Perugia researchers have found that artisans throwing pots in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Umbria were practising an early form of nanotechnology. Coloured glazes in pottery samples from the Umbrian town of Deruta exploit the reflective properties of minute metal grains to give them a rich lustre
British Egyptologist Joann Fletcher has announced her team may have identified the mummy of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, the wife and co-ruler with pharaoh Akhenaten and stepmother to legendary boy King Tutankhamun
George Ziemann’s last installments of his series on Thomas Edison, Intellectual Property and the Recording Industry
show that the controllers of the media bullied folk back then as they do now — and it didn’t work; The Industry Evolves, Copyright and the Grand Illusion and Bringing the Past Into the Present
George Ziemann has two excellent articles that explore the early days of the recording and music industry and how their attempts to monopolise their respective mediums in the past failed. The Dawn of Recorded Music and the First Pirates focuses on early collusion in the phonograph industry and Music, Movies and Monopoly on Thomas Edison’s failed attempts to restrain fair trade in the two new media he gave commercial rise to — via Slashdot
Created by the CIA in Saigon in 1967, Phoenix was a program aimed at neutralising
— through assassination, kidnapping, and systematic torture — the civilian infrastructure that supported the Viet Cong insurgency in South Vietnam. It was a terrifying final solution
that violated the Geneva Conventions and traditional American ideas of human morality
Genius will go online next week with the establishment of a new web site of Albert Einstein‘s scientific and other writings. The site is a collaborative effort of the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech and the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The RSPCA plans to build a memorial to the hundreds of thousands of horses, donkeys, dogs and pigeons and other animals that died fighting Australia’s wars
Documents reveal how McCarthy cherry-picked victims he could browbeat into submission
Details of hundreds of thousands of Nazi-era life insurance policies were published on the internet yesterday as part of attempts to call to account companies which did not pay out in the chaotic aftermath of the Second World War
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