Thank David Bradley for Control-Alt-Delete

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

Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia

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.

The Origin of Murphy’s Law

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

Murder in Mexico

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

Romancing the Rosetta Stone

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

Mythology is a Family Affair

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

Media Monopoly: Thomas Edison to Hillary Rosen

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

CIA Assassination Operation In Vietnam Revealed

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