Make your child's art into a steel masterpiece

Here's a company that, for $99, will take your kids silly artwork and turn it into a permanent steel sculpture:

Home Page: "Transform your child�s or grandchild�s artwork into a steel masterpiece for the home or garden. A complex picture or a simple circle is a treasure to preserve forever. "

Church-Going and Voting Behavior

Virginia Postrel, a libertarian I respect has these thoughts about the election results: Dynamist Blog: Church-Going and Voting Behavior

Quotes a Harvard doctoral paper on why Republicans and Democrats have become so divided on religious values.

Crawling out of the woodwork

They're crawling out of the woodwork, these out-of-touch Democrats who just can't understand how they lost. Ethan Zuckerman is a guy somewhere in Massachusetts who has never met anybody who voted for Bush.

Compare this image (from USA Today):


with this one (from this one from Civic Space Labs):



So many Democrats I know like to look at this and chuckle, but I ask: who is the real extremist here? The USA Today map is the real America.

George Lakoff

He's mostly known in the linguistics community, but George Lakoff is also now promoting himself as a liberal blow-hard, one of those guys who can explain everything and is never wrong.

He believes that liberals and progressives don't know how to frame the national debate. He's so sure of himself that it never occurs to him that maybe the so-called conservatives are winning because they're right about something more fundamental than "framing". Human beings are genetically programmed for what Steven Pinker calls the Tragic View, and conservatives get it but liberals don't.

Bush's Mandate

Note that today's election results show that George W. Bush won about 58 million votes. That's the most, by far, of any President in history.

Combining with his 2000 total of about 50M votes, that means that over 108M people in two elections went to the polls and said yes to Bush over any other challenger. Compare that to Ronald Reagan's lifetime total of 97M, or Bill Clinton's 92M.

In spite of the record turnout, John Kerry's 54M votes won't even match the number that Ronald Reagan got 20 years ago, when the population of the United States was much smaller.

Online Chess game

My friend Brian Coleman sent this link to an online chess game called Thinking Machine 4.

I have no idea how good it is, but the cool part is that it shows graphically what the computer is thinking about before it moves.

Augmented Reality

Slashdot points to this:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/31/180247

pershino writes "Augmented reality is gaining real world application to take us backwards. The BBC has a story about a European Union-funded project providing tourists with computer-augmented versions of archaeological attractions like Pompeii."


The Augmented Reality Homepage
A bunch of links to VR-type views of various historical sites. Might be interesting for kids.