Oop!

The fascinating world of gyroscopes

Gyroscopes are fascinating things to watch moving, as well as on pictures. Precession is one of the reasons of how gyroscopes work, and its strange behavior can be easily understood in pictures. Gyroscopes are the heart of practical inventions like artificial horizons on planes, boats and spaceships, even the Segway transporter. They can be found also on not-so-popular inventions like the 40's Gyrobus. The amazing Levitron [YouTube video] is a well known gyroscopic magnetic toy that can do really weird tricks. A British inventor and engineer, Eric Laithwaite, was really fascinated with gyroscopes, as one of his lectures for children, Gyroscopes: The Engineer Through the Looking Glass shows. He's the guy that invented the linear motor and the maglev train. But after suggesting that the Laws of Newton could be wrong or maybe not valid for gyroscopic things, an outrageous heresy at the time, he lost all of his credibility. Lots of people worked on the chimera of gyroscopic propulsion since then, based on his ideas. He ultimately filed and obtained a patent for a reaction-less propulsion system [PDF] but, as could be expected, there are no working models yet, for a good number of scientific reasons.

Media Temple is down (Microsiervos too)

All Media Temple hosting activity is down. Has been down for about two hours now (21.00 GMT+2). Full stop. No announcement. Nothing. That includes my spanish blog Microsiervos and many other sites I host there, as well as many other blogs, the well-know Reinvigorate, StopDesign and other sites. It's like a really big black hole there.

We can't access the control panel, nor the Media Temple website either to open a support ticket or ask.

So waiting seems the only option.

Of course we can't send emails neither (well, there will always be Gmail). Everythings seems so crashed there! I don't have any info on what could have happened nor could find anything on the net. Nothing on Google News or the usual electronic magazines. So I tought of other real-time information and tried Technorati for some weblog posts on the matter. But nothing there.

Maybe this will get posted on Technorati and other people could find out about the problem.

I wonder if this is some big network problem related to Katrina damage on the backbones, the Media Temple communications lines or anything.

Media Temple is located in Los Angeles, and is not part of Bell South as far as I know, that was the most affected company in the area.

Let's wait and see.

PD: One of my co-bloggers is wondering if this could be related to the Big One earthquake in California or something… But hey, they promised the building was earthquarke-proof! ;-)

Update: OK, here is a possible explanation for this, a Big Blackout in LA:

Los Angeles blacked out – Blackout hits downtown Los Angeles at 1 pm PDT; the LAPD has been put on mandatory overtime. The «we are fucked" meter ratches up a notch.» [MetaFilter]

Also:

Blackout Hits Large Portion of Los Angeles – Outage is caused by DWP employee who «inadvertently cut a power cable.»

OK, so I wonder what UPS are for. Hello? Anybody?

Update: Everything was back online around 4.00am (GMT+2), about six hours downtime. Media Temple has an explanation of the Los Angeles incident and some «human errors» on their backup power management systems blaming some other people on the building where they are located.

Best paper plane in the world

Relax, it's summer time: How to build the best paper plane in the world.

(Via Lockergnome.)

Star Trek LCARS Screensaver

This is the ultimate screensaver. System 47 changes your computer into a 24th century LCARS (Library Computer Access and Retrieval System), the clean and nice looking Starfleet OS. And it's freeware!

(Via Javier on the USS Virtual Spanish mailing list.)

616

666 as the Number of the Beast is sooooo dead. The new winner seems to be 616:

«New research suggests the accepted devil’s number, 666, is well off the mark. New photographic techniques applied to a third-century fragment (part of a hoard from historic dumps outside Oxyrhynchus, Egypt) seem to reveal the biblical number of the beast is 616, not 666 as we’ve all thought for years.»

(Via Wonderings and the Herald Sun.)

Google Sitemap Generator for Movable Type

Quick hack of a Movable Type template for generating Google Sitemaps.

<?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“UTF-8”?>
<urlset xmlns=“http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84”>

  <url>
    <loc><$MTBlogURL$></loc>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>

<MTEntries lastn=“49999”>
  <url>
    <loc><$MTEntryPermalink$></loc>
  </url>
</MTEntries>
</urlset>

Include it on your Index Templates, naming the output file sitemap.xml. Rebuild the file, register on Google Sitemaps and add that XML file to the indexing queue.

Damn Scientists

They lied to us. This was supposed to be the future.

(Via A Whole Lotta Nothing.)

ReBranding

ReBranding the megacorps.

(Via Domestik Alien.)

Conference: Customer Intelligence

Customer Intelligence. The Attention Economy. By Andreas Weigend, Chief Scientist de MusicStrands. Organized by EmpresaDigitala.net and SPRI. May, 27th, 2005. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao. Some pictures of the conference at Flickr. Full audio recording on MP3 podcasting: Weigend Guggenheim Podcast #1 5.27.05.

“Most of the people are more predictable than what they think”.

“The currency of the future will be attention. And attention will be allocated by reputation.”

Not so ‘elementary’

This search really demonstrates that Sherlock Holmes never said 'Elementary, my dear Watson' in any novel. It's an Amazon ‘search inside the book’ in the Complete Sherlock Holmes (the full works, that is, all the novels) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

By the way, the Amazon team really did a good job with the new visualization of the inside the book pages, it's really fast.

No, it's NOT moving

[Via MeFi] a really weird visual effect [JPEG, 260 KB].

The Great Toilet Paper Debate

One of those great debates of humanity:

(A) or (B)?

Languages and social software

Blethers follows up on a post I made in my spanish weblog regarding Languages and social software:

«I read a post on Microsiervos recently about languages and social software. This is a thorny question - nothing new, admittedly, but one that is especially current with the rise of tools like Flickr, BlogMarks and, to a lesser extent, LinkedIn.

If I were Spanish, for instance, should I tag the photos I post to Flickr in Spanish, in English or both? If I choose just Spanish, I'm automatically limiting the number of people who are likely to see my picture. If I choose just English, I'm capitulating to linguistic hegemony. And if I choose both, I'm giving myself a lot of extra work.

With regard to tools like BlogMarks and del.icio.us, the question becomes even more important, since tags are at the core of how the whole thing works (tags are also very important on Flickr, but you could argue that it can also be used simply as a photo repository). I commented on L'oeil de mouche about how the preponderance of tags in French on BlogMarks may scare off users who don't speak French, to the detriment of what is otherwise an excellent tool.

So, what's the answer? (...)»

I really think the matter is important for the global success of social software.

Music Tags in MusicStrands

Mmmm... ¡Tags! MusicStrands just released a new version, and among other things you can now add tags to your favorite playlists of songs (e.g. music of the 80s). The Top Tracks Shuffle is also new: a Top 100 list of the most popular songs on the playlists of everybody subscribed to the service – you can add those songs to your personal lists easily.

Update (March 8th, 2005): There is a new functionality for searching by username, you just need to know the alias and search for it on the main search box. My username is alvy, so you can take a look at my playlists (some are still in progress). They also told me that there is a promotion of The Forgotten Arm by Aimee Mann (Oscar nominee) so you can hear the full album online, and it won't be on the stores until next month.

(Full Disclaimer: I'm personaly involved with this project as Strategic Advisor of the company).

Icons: the history

The History of Icons at GUIdebook, with ilustrations of the most traditional and funny icons for almost every operative system: from Lisa to Mac OS X and also Windows, NeXT, OS/2, BeOS and Linux.

(Via Slashdot.)