There’s an article in the new york times [registration required] observing that the U.S. Department of Energy has agreed to review recent developments in cold fusion research. It turns out the Pons and Fleischmann techniques that had been so widely discredited in the early 90’s are still being researched and are showing promise in the labs. Here’s hoping they’re really on the right track this time.

After years (literally – at least 4) I’ve finally registered my own domain for this site – metamusing.net. In part the name is an homage to the sometimes excellent metafilter.com and in part it’s a simple play on words – meta musing or amusing, read it as you will, if you dig through the content here I think you’ll agree the site’s a bit of both. It will take a while for this to propogate, and right now it’s definitely not working. I’ll mention it here when it does start to work. I’ll probably get mail services going as well, and ultimately I’ll get the other services running on this site migrated over to the new domain. I’ll keep daves-place.dyndns.org active as well, so that no one ends up with broken bookmarks.

When I gave the presentation to the Waynflete school in February I promised them I would keep the materials I created for them online for a month. It’s been a month so I’ve pulled them down and the old homepage is back in place. If you’re looking for the presentation outline, you can find it here.

Blizzard is releasing a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) this year, hopefully this summer. For the first time a MMORPG will be available at launch for both Mac and PC so if you’re a mac user you’re finally in like Flynn 😉 Blizzard seems confident enough about the qualilty of their game that they’ve skipped the NDA that normally accompanies beta tests. Their publi beta test just began and since there’s no NDA, beta reports are already showing up. You can read a great, thorough overview of the state of the game at present. While I was very curious about this game it didn’t seem likely I would go for it. Now I’m not so sure I was right, the game definitely sounds very promising.

Holy shite, I have no idea how I’ve missed this up till now. etree.org, which has been around for ages, added abit torrent section with absolutely tons of excellent concerts free for the downloading. This is all lossless stuff (flac and shn and so on), meaning you can download this, burn it to cd, and crank it to 11 on the ol’ stereo without and fear of the compression-induced blues 😉

As an added bonus, they even have an RSS feed [<-link to the actual feed – open it in your RSS reader] for the concerts. This is great great stuff. And as I mentioned in the title – it's all legal.

Put that office laser printer to work. I don’t know why I find paper models so interesting, but for some reason of late I do. So here’s another collection of paper models you can print, cut out, and build. This time they’re all free, and some of them, like the oil rig, can get rather elaborate. Simple fun for the kids, or the kid in you 😉

Well, not exactly. But the amount of stuff they don’t know versus what they do know (factory workers exposed to some combination of the compounds emitted from a bag of microwave popcorn are getting lung disease) would suggest that at the very least you should be careful with that bag of microwave popcorn and the vapors it gives off when cooking/first opened. There’s an article on cnn with the particulars if you happen to eat popcorn and want more specifics

I’ve mentioned carbon nanotubes in the past, and how they can ultimately lead us to the ability to build a space elevator. Progress was made recently on this front – again in vein of ‘small things that change the world,’ scientists have succeeded in spinning a 100 meter long carbon nanotube by means of a newly discovered manufacturing process. Though the nanotube is missing a number of characteristics that make the material useful, it’s still terrific incremental progress – prior to this no one had been able to manufacture one even remotely as long. It’s also amazing how quickly this science is evolving. I’ve been reading about the potential of space elevators since I was a kid in the ’70’s, but there’s been more progress towards them in the last 5 years than there had been in the preceding decades. Keep those fingers crossed, I may yet manage to get my ride into space 😉

Geez. Someone needs to shout this from the rooftops, or maybe as commercials that run during Oprah and American Idol. Something needs to be done one way or another – the link is to an article on the New York Times website about how obesity will soon eclipse smoking as the number 1 cause of death in the US. It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic – richest country in the world turns into a bunch of disease-ridden lard asses, funeral at 11. I’m starting to think we should have sin taxes for nutritionally useless foods in the same way that we have them on cigarettes – if my tax dollars have to subsidize your triple bypass because you didn’t have enough sense to stop gorging on super-sized ‘value’ meals, it’s time for you to start paying for the privilege of destroying yourself.

Don’t forget to set your tivo. The new season of the Sopranos starts tonight. I’m very psyched. The Sopranos are the reason I ended up getting and HBO subscription a couple of years ago and the reason I’ve stuck with it even though sometimes it seems like a waste of money. Tonight makes it all worthwhile, assuming the show maintains it’s level of quality and doesn’t jump the shark this season. I’ll be compiling a couple of DVD’s of the entire season, so start sucking up to me now if you expect a copy 😉