1. Cool new blog (new to me): How To Split an Atom

Steven Spalding’s blog about the Web 2.0 culture, and how to survive in it. A cool blog that bounces around from subject to subject...I like that sorta place.

If you get nothing else out of it remember that at the end of the day, just like espresso, reading How To Split An Atom will at least make you look smarter.

2. Cool Web Thing: XMail Harddrive

Use your gmail account as an online harddrive. This is pretty cool. Check out the how to vid from Billy Nye (any relation to Bill Nye the Science Guy?)

3. Cool Real World Thing: The wings to the new Boeing 787

The engineers involved with the design are curious about its capabilities. They have an interesting question that will probably never be answered. An intriguing perplixiton?

Can the wingtips of the new carbon fiber wings TOUCH above the fuselage without breaking?

Not that I ever want them to...but...holy indestructability Batman! [linky]

4. Extra Cool Thing: Ornithopters

As in extraordinary. The slow fly ornithopter:

I wanna build one! Looks like you can get yourself some over here: Free Flight Ornithopters. Or build one from scratch: [linky]

1. Cool blog

If you haven't read RoughType by NIcholas Carr well...you should...Always insightful. He writes about the topics that I wish I had thought of first. Sometimes I do think of them first but usually not.

Definitely a daily reader

2. Cool Web Thing: Fractal World Gallery

Are you tired of the average wallpaper? do you want something different? Then go over here. These are incredible. Fractal World Gallery

I read a book series by Tad Williams a couple of years ago called: Otherland. I don't know why exactly but these fractal pictures remind me of those books.

3. Cool Real World Thing

So to jump back to a post from a few days ago [linky - SR71] I went and found a couple of videos of the SR-71 Blackbird. video. It looks like something out of Star Wars.

4. Cool Science

Ruben's Tube: real live sound visualation with flame.

1. New blog discovered: Sci Fi Tech 

Better than Gizmodo with a 100th the traffic.  Go and enjoy.  Where else are you going to find the transparent car.

2. Cool Thing:

I don't know what it is about this, but it just looks really cool.  It kinda reminds me of the steampunk keyboard.  Wouldn't the set just make your workspace ultimately cool.

This would make you the coolest kid on the steampunk block. The envy of your wire rimmed glasses wearing, top hat sportin' crowd.

3. Cool Website: The size of things.

So this grew out of my last "4 things" post while I was trying to dig up the original source for the size of our world email I got [linky] I found this which shows the size of things ranging from the univers down to the smallest of the small, the quark.  All in flash pretty cool. [linky]

4. Cool Tangible Thing: Fastest Sailboat in the World

47.6 knots! That's about 60 Miles per hour, in a sailboat. Albiet a state of the art hydrofoil sailboat but a sailboat nonetheless.

And it did this in 25 knots of wind.  This can be confusing to some people, "How can a sailboat go faster than the wind?"  You just have to remember that it isn't the speed of the wind but the energy it provides and how it is harnessed that is important.

And OH MY but how the L’Hydroptère harnesses that power!

1. New blog discovered: Lord Matt

Lord Matt is this guy from England. [linky] I like his style, anybody that can self title themselves "Lord" has got it going. His blog is a bit esoteric and chaotic but I think that's what makes it a good one. Don't go changin' Matt. Oh and by the way does wikipedia know you are using their style sheet?

2. Cool Thing: The International Space Station in Second Life.

I've been skeptical about second life up until now, [linky]I mean there are many different online communities out on the web that you can participate in and they have all been niche markets, what makes Second life different? Well now it has its own space station, so that's something.http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17841125/

3. Cool Website: The size of our world

Somebody sent something cool to me via email and whenever anyone does that I feel the need to search for the original source, here it is: [linky]. This is a really neat representation of the different sizes of celestial bodies, running from the Moon and Earth all the way up to Betelgeuse aand Antares. It is interesting to see them laid out side by side.

4. Cool Tool: The Enigma Cypher Machine in Flash.

I'm not sure how useful this is [linky]...unless you want to pass love notes in class...but it is pretty cool none-the-less. Here we have the great ENIGMA machine of NAZI fame from WWII, de-mystified in flash. Made into a toy as it were.

I don't want to belittle the effort of the team that put this flash implementaion together, but still, here it is, on the web for anyone to use. A very fascinating statement about our technology as compared to the generations that have come before us. Accellerating change indeed.

1. New blog discovered:

No Idea But In Things.: No Ideas But In Things is a library of controls, animations, layouts, and displays that might be a source of inspiration for interaction designers. Dan Saffer is the curator.

Title is from this poem: A SORT OF SONG by William Carlos Williams.

It has more impact taken as two lines together:
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!

...and I actually like the line "but in things Invent!" better...but I digress. Go check out the blog, it's cool.

2. Cool Thing:

Space Tether test to launch on March 27. I couldn't decide if I should put this into Big News or Cool thing. But it is a thing so I finally put it in Cool Thing.

For those of you not in the know, the barrier to cheap space travel is our damn gravity well. It takes a huge amount of energy to get something up and out of it. Chemical rockets are the only feasible way we have right now of getitng things up there. Well people are actively working on a space elevator and making progress. In theory this would reduce the cost to put stuff in orbit by a factor of 100.

Well here is another test going up next week. Keep in touch with the latest over here: Space Elevator reference.

3. Big News:

Viacom vs YouTube heh, They got their own verb!.

4. Cool Tool:

After seeing this [linky] and the example of NASA World Wind inside the video I went out and installed it. It's from NASA, it's gotta be cool. Right?

NASA Whirl Wind

So we have Virtual Earth from Microsoft and Google Earth from, well, Google, what does Whril wind offer us extra. Well how about the Moon and Mars and Jupiter, flippin' cool.

1. New blog discovered:

I am going to start this with one blog. At the rate that blogs are created in the world and the associated lower percentage of good blogs made I assume that I will have to add more then one. But for now you get one.

thinkJOSE.com - The flavor of new ideas
Well the first thing that jumps out at you is the design kicks ass! This is a reason why, even though I use an RSS Reader a lot, I still prefer to read some sites in the browser, some designs (like Jose's) are just great. And his logo is pretty cool too, although looking at his pic from his bio I would recommend he put a smile on his face...

But what keeps me coming back (like any good blog) is the content. His posts are often quite incitefull: Spicy Spiral Video.

Keep up the good work Jose.

2. Cool gadget

Ok, not exactly a gadget, but you have to admit this is just cool...A lego Toilet Paper Extractor

3. Big news

I have to come back to the story I reported yesterday, which was Microsoft losing in the patent infringement suit with Alcatel-Lucent.

There is some interesting speculation already brewing on my fourth point in the afformentioned post regarding whether ogg vorbis will get some luvin' out of this verdict.

4. Cool tool

Web Accessibility Toolbar
So I used to use the web dev toolbar for IE but it changed for IE7 and now it's different and bigger and more of a console. It's still neat, but the feature I want to use most often is "view partial source" and I want it easily accessible, and it isn't with the other tool bar.

Well this one has it right where I want it. Good little toolbar.