The most important idea you will read about all year.

To paraphrase from Stephen Hawking: mankind must figure out how to spread out to the stars, or we will face extinction.
Damn, but he's right again.
Reported by: the UKPA, HuffPo, Fox News, MSNBC, cnet, and Ubergizmo, from an interview at BigThink.

Somehow, I find this strangely irresistible.

The School Time Jet-Powered School Bus.

The patent infringement suit from ACME Products will be along any moment now.

BP Completes Cementing Macondo Oil Well From Top

Sorry.  Couldn't help but electronically shouting it.  Full Story.

Old Humor

A retiring friend was cleaning out his office last week and stumbled across a dusty, stained photocopy of 56 B.C. and All That.  So of course someone has put it on the web, in multiple places by multiple people as it turns out.  Which somehow made me think of the old Laws Concerning Food and Drink.
Yeah, it's old humor.  I wouldn't mail these around (it would be uncomfortably close to a sort of Glurge Lite), but they really are funny.  If you haven't read them in a while, or never heard of them in the first place, well, there are the links.

Time Travel Roundup

Just when I was thinking Robert Heinlein had all the weirdities of time travel crammed into one story, his great short All You Zombies --, along comes the movie Primer, which introduced a few more.  And now, there's some new research showing that maybe this Grandfather Paradox thing sort of works itself out automatically.  Interesting stuff.
BTW, Primer trailer here.

MacPaint Source Code

Apple has made the source code to MacPaint available through the Computer History Museum.  There's also an article about it over at Business Week.  All pointed out by Slashdot.  Download the source and look at it.  It's beautiful stuff, well-written, almost self-documenting, clean, and tight enough to have a credible graphics editor fit in far less than 128k. Amazing.

Pixiecross?!? Pixiecross.

Coverage of the 2010 Pixiecross World Championship at Downieville can be seen here.
Personally, I think the guy in the wolf suit adds the right air of professionalism to the race.