I mentioned Stumbleupon a few weeks back, and here's another site for finding cool stuff: Digg.com. It's mostly for tech news, but it's set apart from sites like Slashdot because it is totally user moderated. Any user can submit a story, which then shows up on the digg all page. If you like a story, you just click the link next to it that says "+digg". The page doesn't even have to reload, you just see a quick visual effect letting you know that your digg has been recorded, and you can keep reading. Once a story has been dug 15 times, it's promoted to the front page. I've found a lot of interesting stuff at this site. You can hit the front page for a quick look at the most popular news stories, or if you have time you can sift through the most recent submissions and help decide what should be promoted. Take a look at my profile page to see what I've beein digging, what stories I've submitted and read my comments. I also added a "recent diggs" section to my sidebar at Danny's Blog Cabin. There is an RSS feed for my diggs. If you register there, let me know what your username is.

Another cool thing about Digg.com is that it was created by Kevin Rose of TechTV fame. His other current projects include This Week in Tech, the podcast featuring the old TSS gang, and Systm, an online TV show that launches on Monday. I hope that these projects can be successful enough for Kevin to be able to quit his job with G4.

After reading about the history of the Wilhelm Scream, a movie sound effect that has been reused in dozens of films, I found a page about other movie sound cliches. That lead me to some pages about movie cliches in general. I am hereby inventing a game: Movie Cliche Bingo. To make a game card you randomly place some movie cliches from the lists onto a 5 x 5 grid. Put on your favorite movie (or a really cheesy one for faster games) and mark your card as you spot cliches in the flick. I even made the first card for you.

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." --Dwight D. Eisenhower (R), November 8, 1954

The bit about the Texas oil millionaires almost makes this seem made up, but Snopes confims that Ike did write this. They go on to say that he was a Republican generally in favor of smaller government, but he did feel that Social Security was worth the expense.

(via Snopes.com)

In somewhat related news, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist buys some $295 shoes from a store that's in the same building as the offices of Americans United to Protect Social Security. And, what do you know, they meet him at the door with a rally protesting the privatization of Social Security. Wonkette.com has pictures.

(via Wonkette)

I've got my brother Mike set up with his own brendoman.com weblog. Check it out and leave him a comment. You can find pictures of him here. Stop in at his new site and leave him a comment. If you RSS, then you may want to subscribe to his feed.

Tonight my father-in-law called with a math problem for me. He built a water tank out of six-inch pipe to go on top of his horse trailer. This will be much more stable and wind-resistant than the 55 gallon barrel that he had been strapping up there. He was trying to figure out how many gallons of water it would hold. He has 396 inches of 6 inch pipe. I thought back to my geometry days and somehow remembered the formula for volume of a cylinder: pi(r*r)*h . pi9*396 = about 11196 cubic inches. Thank you, Mac OS calculator. I brought up the Dashboard widget for converting units of measure. Alas, it doesn't convert cubic inches to gallons. Then I remembered that Google added a conversion feature recently. I figured it was a long shot, but I typed in 11196 cubic inches in gallons in the Google search window. Brilliant! 48 gallons. I gave Joe the answer and he said that was about what he expected. Thanks, Google. But that's not all. I came back later to see if I could have done the whole thing in Google. I tried (3*3)pi * 396 cubic inches in gallons. Wow. Very impressive.

Another company has started selling tickets for a sub-orbital space flight. After reading that article I started wondering why they don't just enter an orbit around the earth. That would be a more exciting trip and it would last longer. If you're paying 150,000 dollars, then you don't want the trip to be over in just a few minutes or hours. So I did some research into the difference between orbital and sub-orbital flight. As usual, Wikipedia had a very good article on the subject: Difference between sub-orbital and orbital spaceflights. Turns out that the lateral velocity of the ship is the big difference. Here's an excerpt:

The difference between the lowest speeds required for orbital and sub-orbital space flights is substantial: a spacecraft must reach about 18,000 mph to attain orbit. This compares to the relatively modest 2,500-3,000 mph typically attained for sub-orbital crafts.

The important difference in energy requirements between a sub-orbital spaceflight such as that required for the X Prize and for an orbital spaceflight is that no lateral or angular velocity is required for the sub-orbital flight. The energy required to get to 100 km or even 350 km altitude is dwarfed by the energy required for the necessary lateral velocity of orbital space flight.

In terms of energy: accelerating a spacecraft to orbital speed requires about 31 times as much net energy as just lifting it to a height of 100 km (together 32 times).

Mike has uploaded some photos from his visit over the weekend. There's some very good stuff. He made a whole album with pictures of Dixie, my parents' new dog. His new camera lets you stitch photos together into a panorama. And, of course, he has some good ones of Emma.

The new version of Microsoft Windows, code-named Longhorn and due out in late 2006, may have fewer Blue Screens of Death. But it will have a new feature to fill that gap: Red Screen of Death. I, for one, can't wait.

Someone predicted this back in 2000, but they thought it wouldn't show up until 2016 (one year after IE 6.0 is released for Mac OS).

(via Slashdot)

We had some nice rain here over the weekend, and my garden is coming right along. Most of my greens have sprouted and are filling in nicely. The carrots seem to be doing well, too, even if only four out of the eight seeds that I planted have come up. So far I haven't seen any sprouts in the square planted with nasturtiums, unless this is not a weed. The birds have enjoyed eating my basil and parsley. Since my cat wasn't keeping them away, I had to install an owl decoy, which I happened to have in my garage. Dad had this in his hangar to keep birds from building nests in his plane, but it didn't work. And one day we were down there with Emma and she said she wanted to keep it. When she asks dad for something, she always gets it. So she carried it around our house for a few weeks like it was a baby. Then it went into the garage until now. It seems to be helping; the two remaining basil plants may just survive.

Blender settings from 180 years ago