The lapse of living memory beatifies the brutal. Hovering between applauded tyrants like Napoleon or Bismark and reviled monsters like Hitler or Stalin, what to make of the communist revolutionary? Whatever his legacy, the Russians just can't let go of the twentieth century's best-dressed dictator. John Brownlee in Table of Malcontents.
Also over at the Table is a steampunk keyboard. Polish your brass and get tapping.
Wired News's new blog, Danger Room, focuses on defense. Here at Gadget Lab, we get the occasional perpetual motion machine or zero-point energy engine, but it's the military cranks that really go crazy. Today's award in the category for Death Ray or Teleportation Devicegoes to Dr. Young Bae. Sharon Weinberger takes a closer look.
Are you a British mac user up to date on your television tax? You might want to make sure the BBC doesn't go and forget about you when it upgrades its website's embedded media player. Pete Mortensen has a petition for you to sign. In Cult of Mac.
Dick Cheney, it turns out, isn't happy with the Chinese using missiles to decomission its own satellites, describing their tests as "not consistent" with the awakening power's stated goal to rise peacefully. Luke O' Brien reports at 27B Stroke 6.
Calculations so complicated that western mathematicians didn't master them until the 1970s have been found hidden in medieval Islamic tiling. Intricate patterns, called Girih, circumvent Qur'anic prohibitions on the creation of graven images: one such pattern just happens to use Penrose tiling. Roger Penrose has sued people for using his tiles—therefore, this might then be the most spectacular example of finding "prior art" in history. Greta Lorge in Wired Science.
