The Spinning Oracle is a magic trick derived from my Wheel of Lunch project that wlil give you about 60 seconds of amusement.
The effectiveness of magic is greatly reduced when tricks are performed more than once — so try to resist the temptation to view the trick twice. Instead, share it with a friend!

You may notice in the blog articles below, a little “W” icon next to some of the Wikipedia links, and a little film-strip icon next to some YouTube links. Those are placed by Apture, a blog-annotation service I’m beta-testing that allows you to preview that content without leaving the blog.
I kind of like [...]

The Computer History Museum in San Francisco has some very cool video of a pristine reproduction of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2 in operation, which you can see on their website.
Although Babbage never completed one of these machines, former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold has had one built for his private collection, and it goes [...]