Having made it through Cryptonomicon, I am pretty interested in this paper version of the famous Enigma machine.  Soon you may see encrypted posts on the site

Papercraft Enigma machine to assemble at home – Cory Doctorow: The Nazis went to great lengths to encipher their secret messages, building mechanical scramblers. The most famous of these was the Enigma machine, which was secretly cracked by Alan Turing and his team of Bletchley Park codebreakers. Here is a functional papercraft Enigma Machine to print, fold and assemble. Link (Thanks, Zed!)

(Via Boing Boing)

 At last, a place where I can find a catalog of all of Oolon Colluphid’s work!  Also listed are Glinda’s Great Book, Bilbo’s There and Back Again and Dr. Jubal Harshaw’s Gossip Gone Wild.  Alas, no excerpts are available.

The Invisible Library – The Invisible Library is a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library’s catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound.

(Via Metafilter)

I just finished up my my second eBook, Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe. Levi has been trying to get me to pick up his stuff for a while but for some reason I found his first novel a little hard to get into. However, EST was incredibly compelling and I am more excited than ever to get to some of Doctorow’s other work, most of which I’ve already downloaded on my Palm. I will not lack for reading material for the next couple of weeks, at least.

One real bummer about the eBook thing, though. I enjoy falling asleep while reading, and if I do that the battery life for the PDA is not happy the following day. Ah well. Not exactly a deterrent to using the thing, but still a little annoying all the same. 

 It was only a matter of time.  Ladies and Gentleman, I give you You Are Here.  I can’t wait to play with this.  Combined with wearable computers my dream of becoming a gargoyle ala Snow Crash is getting ever so close.

People of Earth – Google Earth is out. And it’s free! It’s only for Windows (at least, for now) and it allows you to traverse the Earth using satellite imagery.

(Via Metafilter)

 I work with computer systems for aliving and I understand how user interfaces can be a tad confusing.  But even so, I can’t believe that there is a computer system on the whole planet, particularly in an industry as regulated as stock trading, that doesn’t raise a red flag to the user when they are about to execute a transaction of this magnitude.  A message to computer users…. Do not click the OK button unless you are sure its actually ok.

Somebody’s sure to notice this… (Reuters) – Reuters – A Taiwan stock trader mistakenly bought T$7.9 billion ($251 million) worth of shares with a mis-stroke of her computer, meaning her company is looking at a paper loss of more than $12 million and she is looking for a new job.

(Via Yahoo! Oddly Enough)

 Watch out everyone.  I may renew my periodic obsession with MMORPG’s for a bit with this one.  This could be trouble.

Legend of the Green Dragon – Legend of the Red Green Dragon. LOTGD is "a browser based role playing game, based on Seth Able’s Legend of the Red Dragon."

Create a character, flirt with Violet the bar wench, flirt with Seth the Bard! Survive through the worst in the forest outside of town! Host your own game!

(Via Metafilter)

 You had to see this coming.  Not to put to fine a point on it but the Bush administration is smoking something good and I want some.  Not so long ago VP Cheney was saying we were almost done suppressing the insurgents.  Now they could be there for years and oh, by the way the U.S. isn’t sure it will stick around to finish the job.

I realize hindsight is 20/20 but the administration seems to have rose colored hindsight.  There were a significant number of folks who knew before the war started that we would be there awhile and be ineffectual.  And to think Bill Clinton was hounded for months over a daliance that killed exactly zero people.   

Iraqis put on brave face after Rumsfeld comments (Reuters) – Reuters – Iraqi leaders put on a brave face on Monday after Washington said it would be up to them — not American forces — to defeat an insurgency that could last a decade or more.

(Via Yahoo! Top Stories)

 Oh the delicious Irony!

Grokster decision in .torrent – Cory Doctorow: Here’s a link to a BitTorrent distribution of the decisions in Grokster, today’s Supreme Court decision that established a new copyright thoughtcrime: "inducing" your users to infringe by failing to employ restrictions that you believe will reduce copyright infringement. BitTorrent is a P2P software application that was not designed to reduce infringement. Many BitTorrent users use it to pass around infringing copies of movies and music. Many also use it to distribute Supreme Court decisions. Torrent Link (Thanks, Thad!)

(Via Boing Boing)

The Guardian gives us the Top 25 Saddest Songs.  I can’t agree with all of them.  Pink Floyd never made me sad.  Dark and moody perhaps, but never sad.  However, at #2 was a track I was scarred by as a kid:

2. The Shortest Story Harry Chapin (1976)
The most misguided song ever written, the ghastly The Shortest Story features the late songwriter/activist Harry Chapin adopting the persona of an African baby who dies of malnutrition. From the infant’s viewpoint, we hear about his hunger pangs, weeping siblings, and how his mother’s shrivelled breast cannot produce milk. He finally expires while sickly birds "crawl across the sky". The song ends with the portentous clang of a tubular bell, the banshee of musical instruments. Though it was meant to instill awareness about world hunger, The Shortest Story is like 50 tons of nuclear waste dumped in the middle of a park to show how bad it is to drop litter.

 I cried everytime I heard this track on my dad’s turntable.  I cried the first time I heard it (I think I was 6).  When I dried up I went and asked my dad what the lyrics were about.  Then I cried some more just thinking about it.  For some reason I listened to it about once a week all summer until it lost its tear-inducing effect.  To this day I can’t hear it without getting choked up.

 A very interesting project.  In short, you enter a search term and the program queries Google Images and returns the results as a seizure inducing movie.  I need to play with the movie controls a bit to understand them, but the images are certainly compelling.

One Word Movie (onewordmovie) – Beat Brogle, Philippe Zimmermann – One Word Movie is an on-line platform which organizes, based on user-supplied terms, the flood of images on the Internet into an animated film. A word turns into images, images turn into a movie.

(Via Unmediated)